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As creatures of habit, we’re wary of changes to our immediate landscape even when we treat the buildings and infrastructure around us as a kind of visual white noise that we pass by without really seeing. But when architectural change looms on our horizon, we often reserve praise, and keep the brickbats at the ready.
This range of response seems to be playing into a mini-controversy that emerged this week after a New York Times article about the proposed $50 million expansion and renovation of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, which is scheduled to reopen in 2019. The museum closed its doors March 13 in preparation for construction, which begins this summer.
The Times story reported on whether the design by the highly regarded architectural husband-and-wife team of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien has done enough to preserve the original concept of the museum designed by Charles Moore, the influential post-modernist American architect.
In an interview and series of emails this week with the Valley News, Kevin Keim, director of the Charles Moore Foundation in Austin, Texas, said the Williams and Tsien plan does not do enough to retain Moore’s concept. There are other ways to renovate and expand than to dismantle or conceal some of the key exterior and interior features of the Hood, said Keim.
“It really is Charles’ most important museum as far as its scale, size and breadth. It really is one of the key works of his life and it simply deserves better treatment — and giving it better treatment will be better for the campus as well,” Keim said in a phone interview from Austin.
John Stomberg, the director of the Hood, respectfully disputes this assessment. “We have great respect for Charles Moore and we are thrilled we have a Charles Moore building,” he said in a phone interview this week.
In his view, however, the Williams/Tsien design does respect the integrity of the Moore building. “Preserve has been the mantra of the team. They have shown so much restraint in putting this together; to say other is to mischaracterize it,” he said.
Stomberg became director of the museum in January after leaving his post as director of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. He replaced previous director Michael Taylor who left the job a year ago and was on the selection committee that chose the Tsien and Williams design.
Of all the plans for the Hood submitted by architects to the college, Stomberg said, the Williams/Tsien design was, in fact, the most deferential to the Moore design, and the most ingenious about working with it — which is partly why it was chosen. Tsien herself was a student of Moore’s at the University of California, Los Angeles.
To Keim, it is not deferential enough.“My plea is to let Williams and Tsien take another pass at this. … Let’s just put on the brakes for a bit and let Tod and Billie reconsider,” he said.
Williams, interviewed by phone from New York, reiterated that “we thought we would do something that was respectful.”
Their intention was not to mimic or channel Moore, he said, but to preserve those elements which worked, and renovate those elements that didn’t, particularly the structural issues that have developed since the Hood opened in 1985. The response to the Times article, he said, “makes us all the more concerned to do the right thing.”
For a lay person, it’s hard to imagine what a building that isn’t yet built is really going to look like when it’s not right there in front of you — even with models and drawings. Just as difficult is imagining what isn’t going to be there, when something is altered or removed.
And there’s a third obstacle: trying to recall or imagine what a space looked like before there were any buildings.
The back-and-forth, public conversation about the Hood redesign speaks to how a society values its architecture, and how to address the preservation of significant public works.
How does an architect work with a pre-existing structure by another architect of renown? How do you carry architecture forward as an art form, while respecting the presence of something already there?
Prior to the opening of the Hood, the college exhibited art and objects in a number of buildings, both extant and since demolished, scattered around the campus, said Scott Meacham, a Dartmouth alumnus who wrote a campus guide to the college (Princeton University Press) and also maintains a website devoted to Dartmouth architecture and its history.
Surprisingly, particularly for an Ivy League institution, there was no central venue in which to show the museum’s collection until 1985, Meacham said in a phone interview from Virginia.
So when the Hood Museum opened its doors, it did so with much fanfare. The artist Frank Stella, who had been an artist-in-residence at the college in the early 1960s gave a talk, as did then-New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger. Critics praised Moore for the ingenious, unshowy way he negotiated a logistically challenging space.
This was part of Moore’s aesthetic, said Keim. It was Moore’s “observation that those buildings that pay attention and contribute and become a part of what’s around them … are the ones that are far more likely to succeed,” Keim said.
Moore, who was born in 1925 in Michigan and died in 1993 in Austin, was considered one of the deans of the post-modern architectural movement in this country, as well as an influential teacher and lively writer. In 1991, the American Institute of Architects awarded him its Gold Medal, considered the most prestigious prize in American architecture.
After Moore’s death, Goldberger wrote that at its best Moore’s architecture embodied the “careful merging of the ordinary and the fantastic. Moore sought not superficial whimsy, but a more profound view of the world as a staggering tapestry.”
Moore is perhaps best known for Sea Ranch, a planned cluster of condominiums in an unincorporated community along the California coast, some 100 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. The wooden buildings at Sea Ranch hug the shoreline like driftwood, with driftwood’s angles and curves and worn grain, and they blend into the low hills and open scrub of the landscape.
Moore also designed the Beverly Hills Civic Center in California, which is a nod to California’s Spanish heritage; the Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, intended as a tribute to the city’s Italian-American population; and the Williams College Museum of Art, which with its red brick exterior speaks to the mill town architecture of New England, as does the Hood.
When it came to the Hood, Moore had a challenge before him.
He had to bridge the physical, chronological and stylistic gap between the sturdy, red brick 1884 Romanesque Wilson Hall, which fronts Wheelock Street, and the Hopkins Center, the college’s center for the performing arts, which opened in 1962. Designed by Wallace Harrison, the Hopkins Center is a precursor to his design for the Metropolitan Opera and the Lincoln Center complex in New York City, the latter of which was severely criticized as being a sterile island that didn’t engage with the West Side neighborhood around it.
Moore accomplished this by putting in a gateway that led to a courtyard, which was framed at the end by a Bridge of Sighs-like span over a throughway, or alley, that brought a pedestrian from the green and Wheelock Street through to Lebanon Street. He tied together disparate architectural and street elements that had been a jumble.
When Moore was given the commission, Keim said, his “attitude was not to go in and dominate the whole thing, or ignore or diminish Hopkins Center, or dominate Wilson. (His design) was a carefully calibrated conversation or negotiation between these two buildings that are quite unalike.”
He also tucked entrances into the museum’s facade, and designed staircases leading to doorways, rather than designing a large, obvious entrance. This decision was noted by the critic Roger Kimball in his largely admiring 1985 essay about the Hood in the New Criterion.
The Hood, Kimball wrote, “possesses a measure of simplicity and forthrightness that sets it apart from many other postmodernist creations,”
He noted, however, that the “gate opens onto the courtyard in a confusing way: I was not the only visitor who had to stop to look around for the front door to the museum after walking through the gate,” he wrote.
That has turned out to be a hurdle for the museum over the years, said Stomberg,
“When you work for a wealthy institution in a Northern New England town you have to go to the distance to make everybody feel welcome. If the architecture says otherwise, that’s problematic. One of the charges to Williams and Tsien was, please give us a front door,” said Stomberg.
(Another door to the Hood has already been opened. The southern end of the museum, facing Lebanon Street, now forms one side of the Maffei Arts Plaza. The 2009 demolition of Brewster Hall revealed a set of barn-like forms flanked by the Hopkins Center and the Black Family Visual Arts Center, which opened in 2012.)
An artist’s rendering of the Williams/Tsien plan shows a new, white structure that in its boxy shape, and one large window, somewhat resembles the Whitney Museum in New York City. The building is kept at more or less the same level as the neighboring Hopkins Center.
The facade will be made from a whitish-gray long brick, said Stomberg, and it will not be as blindingly white as the drawing makes it appear.
“We believe that with the richness of the surface it will be speaking to the green,” said Williams. “It won’t be secondary to the Hop, but a companion piece to the Hop.”
The passageway between the Hood and the Hop takes a visitor, Williams said, to the “Maffei Plaza — and a whole new world to the south.”
The new Hood entranceway, made from glass, is clearly visible. The design also roofs over the current open courtyard, but keeps it as a public space, Stomberg said. The slight slope down from Wheelock Street is eliminated: the grade is elevated so that visitors come in directly from Wheelock Street, Stomberg said. The Tsien and Williams design, in essence, wraps around the present Hood.
“It will feel like two separate structures on the outside but inside it will feel seamless,” Stomberg said. He emphasized that the Moore building is not disappearing: “People will see the bulding will still be there. You can’t hide a building.”
Williams and Tsien were also asked to increase exhibition, teaching and office space. The museum has a collection of more than 65,000 art works and objects, and it has been cramped. “We’re in desperate need for an expansion in a very tight neighborhood,” Stomberg said.
The expansion takes the Hood in total from some 42,000 square feet to 62,000 square feet, Stomberg said. The number of galleries is increasing from 11 to 16. It also adds new classroom space with the Center for Object-Based Inquiry, which is in line with the museum’s role as a teaching institution, not just an exhibitor.
The Center for Object-Based Inquiry, said Stomberg, “puts us in the center of (Dartmouth College) President (J. Philip) Hanlon’s goals for experiential education. … We become a site where you can point and say, that’s where we’re doing experiential education right there.”
Earlier plans to expand into the top floors of Wilson Hall — one of the options Keim prefers — were put aside after it was determined the cost of that construction, renovation and retrofitting would be twice as expensive as a new building, Stomberg said.
The new design should also solve some structural problems with the Hood. Some of the other entrances that Moore designed are closed off in winter because of collecting snow and ice that pose a hazard. There have also been problems with leaks, failing windows and a failing wall.
To which Keim said, “They’d have to figure out a way to fix them. Mankind has achieved much harder challenges.”
Joanne Wise, co-chair of the Upper Valley Arts Alliance, said in a phone interview that she shared concerns about the present Hood’s lack of a clear entrance, and the structural issues. She and her husband Doug Wise, a Dartmouth alumnus, are also donors of a collection of Japanese art to the Hood.
She has confidence in the Tsien and Williams design. As a native Philadelphian, she said, she applauded what Tsien and Williams achieved at the new Barnes Foundation.
“I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the work that they’d done for them,” she said.
Williams and Tsien, both in their 60s, founded their architectural firm, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, in 1986. They have designed for museums and cultural and private institutions throughout the U.S., and, to a lesser extent, overseas.
They have garnered particular praise for their design for the new Barnes Foundation building in Philadelphia, which opened in 2012 and rehoused a significant collection of late 19th and early 20th century French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, as well as turn-of-the-century American art, that for decades had been out on the Main Line.
They also were the architects behind the 2001 overhaul of the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, which had been tucked into a narrow brownstone next to the Museum of Modern Art.
The American Folk Art Museum was dismantled two years ago as part of an expansion by the Museum of Modern Art, a move that generated a great deal of controversy in the art world because of the perceived institutional arrogance of MoMA.
When Keim heard that Tsien and Williams had gotten the commission for the Hood, he was pleased, he said. In an email, he wrote that he admired the work they had done in building a swimming center at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, and was distressed by the fate of the American Folk Art Museum.
“I was confident, simple as that. But as the full scope of what the scheme entailed surfaced, I was dismayed along with many, many other people,” he said.
He is not the only person to, so far, take issue with the design. The Times article reported that Robert A.M. Stern, the architect, critic and dean of the Yale School of Architecture said the Hood was being “unnecessarily violated.”
Paul Goldberger spoke to the controversy over the expansion this week on Twitter: “Truly sad that the much admired WilliamsTsien behind threat to Moore’s Hood Museum.”
A Williams College professor who has written about Moore speculated to the Times that perhaps the Tsien and Williams plan for the Hood was “revenge” for the demolition of the Museum of American Folk Art.
Keim doesn’t go that far, but after seeing the drawings in the last few weeks, Keim said in the interview that he wrote a letter of concern to Hanlon.
According to the Times, Hanlon replied to Keim that the design “respects and preserves the core building and allows us to both repair the problems that exist and expand the museum for future generations of Dartmouth students.”
Because the Hood Museum website has had artist’s renderings of the Williams/Tsien design up for some time, and talk about a redesign has been in the press since 2012, Keim was asked about the timing of his objections. Why so late in the game?
“We maintain that this rendering reveals next to nothing about the true nature of the expansion, as the new building obscures how it connects into the Moore building. Because of this, I waited until the full presentation to study and comment,” he wrote in an email. (After he requested to see the plans, the museum sent them to him in late February via DropBox, he said.)
Keim emphasized that neither he nor the Moore Foundation were dead-set against the renovation or expansion of the Hood; nor are they opposed to reworking or amending architecture in general.
“We, under no circumstances, believe that buildings cannot change. Buildings are often improved when people add to them,” he said.
Asked what he would prefer to see happen, Keim, who last visited Dartmouth 15 years ago, wrote in an email that the museum could repurpose the smoke stack and power plant to the east of the museum: “There are many museums all over the world that have reclaimed such industrial spaces as terrific galleries or administrative spaces.”
Other options, he wrote, would be to expand to the parking lot to the northeast or into the open spaces to the south between Wheelock and Lebanon Streets; or build a grand entrance even closer to the Green.
“There are intricacies and issues with all of these suggestions,” he said. “The point is that there are always alternatives.”
Keim’s next goal, he said, is to solicit other letters of objection to the redesign from prominent people in the art and architecture worlds. They will be sent to Hanlon and to the college’s provost and trustees. Whether this will have an effect, he doesn’t know, he said.
If there are any obvious lessons to be drawn here, before any construction on the Hood has taken place, it is that architectural designs for high-profile projects often draw fierce criticism.
Wallace Harrison’s plan for Lincoln Center still has detractors, although much of the objection has softened over time. Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue in New York City debutedin 1966 to a chorus of boos and thumbs-down because of its brooding hulking quality but is now admired for the way it broke up a fairly undistinguished line of townhouses and brownstones.
The World Trade Center was deemed an uninspired failure: the distinguished, late New York Times and Wall Street Journal architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable presciently wrote in the early ’70s that the buildings could be “the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.” As it turned out, they were both.
We care deeply about architecture, even if we don’t always register or think about it. Does it matter what a building looks like before it’s built? Yes, and no.
We may not always know when something is good, but, most of the time, we know when it’s bad, vulgar, indifferent or merely serviceable. We know that the architecture for your local International House of Pancakes isn’t going to be suitable or practical for a museum, and vice versa.
The point is: how will the new Hood Museum function as a place where people work, visit and learn? At the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, it’s what goes on inside the building that will speak to its success or failure in the end.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.