As San Francisco had already used its Renzo Piano coupon on the California Academy of Sciences, and the Herzog & de Meuron retainer on the deYoung, they turned to Snøhetta for the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), perhaps another indication of which firms will be seen as filling in the next generation of high-profile firms as the older generation of starchitects disappears. Snøhetta is an international firm based in Norway, best known for their Oslo Opera House. Tine Hegli, one of their lead architects in Oslo, was the visiting Belluschi Professor at the UO in 2015, where she taught a studio designing net zero houses. She also gave a lecture on their recent work, so I had some idea what the SFMOMA project was about. Perhaps the greatest change is that while the next generation is still obviously concerned with formal and spatial ideas, attitudes about environmental design and sustainability are fundamental to their work – in the DNA of the firm from the beginning – and dictate basic design moves, rather than being a secondary concerns.

Luckily, our timing on this trip was such that we arrived in the Bay Area the week it opened, and we spent a long afternoon exploring it, which turned out to be nowhere near enough time. I have read that SFMOMA is now the largest museum in the country (which in this age of Trumpian hyperbole I will double-check), but it is undoubtedly gigantic. However, given the clarity of the design, it doesn’t feel overwhelming, the way the Met or MOMA often do. Perhaps this is due to the nature of the pieces, and hence the galleries: as a modern art museum, there are many very big pieces, hung with lots of space around them in very big galleries. So although the square footage of the museum may be huge, the number of pieces may not be that large, and that may cut down on the cognitive overload. The other factor which may make it seem smaller is that it is very vertical museum, with seven stories of public space. The Met is basically two stories with some mezzanines, so it sprawls into Central Park, and getting to distant wings is a hike. SFMOMA has a very compact vertical circulation core, so you never have to traverse whole districts full of 18th century decorative arts to get to where you want to be.

The circumstances driving the new addition were remarkably similar to those which drove the addition to the Seattle Art Museum, designed by Allied Works. Previously, both Seattle and San Francisco were cities not noted for the size of their museums or the quality of their collections – I was shocked in 1978 to see how dinky and unimpressive the museums in San Francisco were – I had thought it was a big, culturally-important city. After travelling around the country more in the 1980s, I realized that the quality of a city’s museums was pretty much determined by how early the fortunes of the city had reached a threshold – the great museums were in cities that had acquired serious concentrations of wealth early enough in the 19th century to still buy great European works. I regarded the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City as the most western great museum (disregarding the anomalies of Los Angeles). As economic power shifted to the West Coast, it seemed likely that the cultural capital and philanthropical urges of the wealthy would someday reach that threshold where they would endow new or expanded museums. This then happened in two stages. Both Seattle and San Francisco built new museums in the early 90s, designed by architects who were at the top of their reputations in the 1980s – Venturi Scott Brown, and Mario Botta. Both firms designed museums that were formally a bit precious, and clearly demonstrated their roots in historical architecture and Postmodernism, while reflecting their designers’ particular takes on that tradition. They were also both pretty small; I even taught a design studio looking at an expansion of the SAM the year it opened, as a second phase had certainly been anticipated.

What changed before the next round of expansion was that the wealth and aspirations of the elites in these two cities grew far beyond anyone’s expectations, with the concentration of the computer software industry in these two locations. (I remember driving across the 520 bridge when Greta was small, pointing out a cluster of trees on the shore of Lake Washington, and saying to her, Do you know how lives there? The Richest Man in the World!) West Coasters grew their collections of art, but focussed more upon modern and contemporary works – probably a combination of most of the greatest works from earlier eras already being in museums (or still not affordable with even large fortunes), and the character of the new money – which was much more attuned to the trajectory of the modern world, and not caring to validate their status through the acquisition of Old World trophies.

So as the inadequacies of both museums were addressed, the sizes of he planned additions were able to expand exponentially. The Seattle Art Museum was able to secure the first few floors of most of the block on which it was located (with a commercial tower rising above), rather than just the 60-foot wide slot next door. SFMOMA was a bit more hemmed in – the vacant lot to its southeast had been filled with a new tower – so the expansion had to be deeper into the block. This led to some interesting opportunities for engaging with the neighborhood fabric, but it also dictated the footprint of the expansion – a tall slab perpendicular to the axis of the original museum.

While the cultural circumstances of SFMOMA resemble those of SAM, the site conditions resemble those of the Guggenheim. Both original museums were small, iconic, and with a central cylindrical piece. In both cases, the addition had to be a wall rising behind the original museum; with the Guggenheim, this was famously likened to the tank behind the toilet bowl. At SFMOMA, the front is on a major axis from Yerba Buena Gardens across the street by the convention center, originally forming a composition with the terra cotta (now Pacific Bell) tower behind. The contrast between the red brick and the white tower

is maintained by the wall of the new addition. This façade is mostly flat panels, with a slice at the top left corner which gives a hint of the swoopy rear façade.

There was a great little exhibition of 50 conceptual models which were part of the design process. I photographed all of them, as they show how many different ways a a fairly set parti can be conceived. What I find interesting here, in contrast with the DSR building at Stanford is that the parti models move the design process along, but they don’t have t be explicitly present in the final building.

The biggest change is in the entry hall / atrium. Botta’s compact design had this space at the center, with a massive granite staircase rising into the light from the oculus. It was the most Bottavian feature of the building, taking the strict geometries and symmetries of his house designs to a grand scale. It provided an imageable center to the scheme, to which you always returned after circulating around the galleries, and it encouraged people to take the stairs instead of the elevators.

That stair has now been removed, replaced by an asymmetrical wooden stair which leads you deeper into the building, rather than spiralling you around this point. I have read an interview where they allude to (but never specify) many reasons why the stair had to be removed. I’m sure there was not really a technical reason why it had to be removed, but it seems clear that its retention would have conceptually and experientially divided the museum into two distinct parts, the tiny original and the big addition, with an awkward circulation zone between. The center of gravity of the building has shifted much further back into the block, and this new cascading stair is used to move you back and up into what is now the heart of the museum.

I also like it formally. While we old architects may still appreciate the formality of 1980s Postmodernism, this stair always felt a little bombastic and overwhelming to me. It filled the space, although the tension between the cylindrical space and the square stair was not really resolved. You felt quite compressed being on the stair, with the next run right above you, and the pressure of the crowds around you keeping you from stopping or enjoying the space. It was a powerful move for a tight footprint, but I like the oculus now more as a moment on a processional, rather than the culmination. And from a practical perspective, I bet that the old stair would have been completely inadequate to handle the large crowds coming to the new museum. If you’re going to build the biggest museum in the country, you need a grand stair like the Met’s. This new stair is the first visible move of the addition, putting a finger out into the original space, and drawing you in to the more free-form geometries of the 21st century.

Once you get above the ground level, the atrium now becomes a light-filled space, opening to a new café, and still at the center of the original galleries. The Snøhetta remodel has been incredibly respectful of the original building – the spatial relationships have been preserved, and there is still an integrity to the piece – you can still understand Botta’s building as a whole, not just as some remaining rooms stuck off in a strange corner. The contrast here is with MOMA in New York. I’m old enough to remember when that was just the original Edward Durrell Stone building and the Philip Johnson remodel/addition. Both of the major remodels since (and certainly the one underway now, which has expanded MOMA’s zone of devastation down the street to the Folk Art Museum), have almost obliterated any sign of what came before. I remember coming upon a little stair from the Stone building that remained after the Pelli remodel, but that must be gone now too. MOMA seems to need to rebrand itself with every remodel; it’s nice to see SFMOMA engaging with its past.

The little tight courtyard still exists on the front façade at the fourth level,

as well as the stairs shifting to the perimeter of the oculus, leading to the famous and (seemingly) perilous bridge across the top. This was the iconic, memorable part of the circulation system for most people, and its preservation shows the care that has been taken with the remodel.

Greta spotted two inconspicuous windows in a wall, and came across this – a view inside thewall, showing where the original rear façade of the museum now faces the partition wall of a new gallery. This is not a building which has much tectonic expression, and this little view perfectly illustrates something Bob Stern once said. We were all enamored of the clarity of the exposed systems in Kahn buildings, and Bob asked, do you have any idea how much round stainless steel ductwork costs? His proposal was that the rational way to make a building was to design the spaces you want, enclose them with steel studs and gypsum board, and then leave lots of poche space where the engineers can insert anything they want. So in a building where that is basically the model, it is instructive for Snøhetta to give us a glimpse behind the curtain.

At the top of the kinked stair, you arrive at the big lobby, with ticketing, a main stair up through to the next floor, and lots of room for crowd circulation. To the southeast you can see toward another entry off Howard St.,

which when you approach it becomes an amphitheater filled with a complexly-spiralling Richard Serra piece. It’s a wonderful space, outside the ticketed area, and you can just wander in and sit here any time.

It also begins to establish the dynamic of the museum interacting with the city. Whereas the Botta museum is a centralized, internally focussed building, the new addition brings San Francisco into the mix, in a way similar to other new museums we’ve seen, such as the new Whitney in New York, the Perez in Miami, or the Perot in Dallas. It’s a movement I appreciate – while there are good reasons to make galleries completely-controlled boxes that focus on the artwork, using the non-gallery spaces of a museum to engage with the city outside provides a change in scale, a way to refocus your eyes and attention, and an opportunity to reorient yourself in space and time. Museums are not shopping malls or casinos, there is no need to confuse and trick the patrons into staying. In these new museums I’ve found the opposite to be true – taking a break from the artwork after a couple of hours refreshes you, and allows you to dive back in.

Taking the big stair to the third level, the museum expands out even more. There is a sculpture terrace with a living wall across the rear of the building,

and among other small galleries, a large space devoted to Calders, with sculpture terraces on two sides. It’s a fantastic sequence of spaces, and the collection is extraordinary, with many atypical early pieces. Later in the afternoon, when I was spending too much time looking at architecture, Greta just came back and sat here.

At any point one could just decide to take an elevator, but I prefer to walk everywhere. Going from the third to the fourth floor is the one point where the intuitive circulation/spatial system of the addition gets muddy. In from the street and up the two distinct stairs to the third level feels like a natural progression, with glimpses of spaces and light ahead moving you forward. And the system that links the fourth to seventh level is beautiful. But the third/fourth transition is this hard-to-find stair tucked between walls. It may be due to the need to separate the vertical space of the building into two distinct three-story atriums (1-3 and 4-6) for fire code reasons, but I wish there had been a way to accomplish this that didn’t leave you leave you at a wayfinding dead end. The transition from the original to the addition is so seamless that it makes the bifurcation of the addition feel very abrupt.

But once you get past that, you get to the stair / corridor / double-height system that runs along the rear façade. It reminded me of the stairs at the Alte Pinakotek in Munich, where the central axis take you to a large cross-axis hall at the back, with symmetrically diverging stairs. This linear system is certainly not symmetrical, nor could I probably draw its spatial permutations accurately, but it feels completely intuitive and engaging. There are tall stairs which draw you up to the light.

There are layers with the large corridors that provide glimpses of other zones.

There are views out to the city

and places to sit and rest (or pose for photos).

This whole system is tucked up against the free-form façade, which provides gaps and openings for light and movement.

The galleries themselves are ordered yet flexible. They are two rooms deep off the rear corridor, so you have a choice of an irregular enfilade system or the corridor for circulation. While the walls are on a grid, the way the galleries open to each other is highly varied,

such as here where four galleries open to each other at a corner.

The lighting is a combination of coffered indirect lighting in the galleries, with windows poking through the rear façade into the corridors.

On the seventh floor there is a small balcony where you step outside into a fold in the thick space of the exterior wall. This is where the white wall loses the restraint imposed by backing up Botta’s building, and becomes a blob, floating in the city.

I’ve read that this form is a reference to the rolling topography of San Francisco, or even a fog bank rolling in between the hills. It is white and reflective, so I can imagine that the view of it glowing on a foggy day must be extraordinary.

We were there shortly after the opening reception, and were able to spot the remains of the confetti, collecting in drifts on the rooves.

At the fifth level there is a glass bridge out the blob, which leads across to a restaurant pavilion and much larger sculpture terrace.

This is the one place where you can sense the whole of the addition, which looks like an iceberg that descended into the city. (These Norwegian architects just can’t stop themselves.)

The restaurant is a straightforward glass and steel box, the only problem being you have to walk through the end of the restaurant to get to the terrace.

On the terrace the city forms a backdrop for the art. It’s a secluded little cavern in the middle of the block, and you feel enclosed by the buildings all around you.

We did find some strange moments. A highly ambiguous sign, which I posted on Facebook and immediately received about 25 different likely interpretations. Maybe this is a standard sign in Norway,referring to some common social arrangement which has not yet made it to our shores?

More evidence that European architects and American building code officials do not play well together. Here, where the curving façade slopes in above the top of the stairs to the seventh floor, someone noticed (probably very late in the game) that if you stood right up against the handrail, you could bump your head. So the solution is a lower guardrail which keeps you in the zone where there is legal headroom, perhaps the clumsiest solution to an ADA problem I’ve seen since the Seattle Public Library. If the EU would pass a Europeans with Disabilities Act, we wouldn’t have these problems.

And walking down from the seventh floor, where the most recent conceptual contemporary art is displayed, we came across this assemblage. The relationship between the basalt column and the push-broom, where the similarity in coloration contrasts with the dichotomies of vertical/horizontal and hard/soft, along with the ambiguous negative space between the angles of the handle and the wall, caught our attention, as it provided a subtle critique of the compositional laxity of the conceptual work on the seventh floor. We photographed while the people behind us looked for the label. And this was a few weeks before the high school student from San Jose put his eyeglasses down on the seventh floor and watched visitors photograph the installation.

This has turned into a long post, as it is a very big museum, with many different parts and experiences, some central, some peripheral. I think it is remarkably successful overall – a huge museum which doesn’t intimidate you, an addition which shows great respect for the original building and draws it into a coherent whole, a strong parti which facilitates rather than destroys good spaces, a connection to the surrounding city, a circulation system which is a pleasure to occupy, and a series of galleries which show the collection well. The only serious problem for the visitor is that it would take about a week to do justice to all that is exhibited.

Perhaps the buildings in the center of the Stanford campus are so uniformly mediocre partly because they’re largely science and engineering buildings, built for two groups on campus for whom objective, quantifiable performance measurements are critical; the fuzzier objective of architectural quality probably doesn’t make the top ten list of their criteria. So we moved to the smaller arts-oriented district to see what might be there.

The university museum has recently been remodelled, expanded and renamed after the new primary donors, but it has maintained its older, neoclassical core. The entry hall is the most notable spatial feature, a compact, crisp Renaissance revival court, which resembles the atrium at the Fogg before that was remodelled by Piano. It is a small jewel, but due to its location, it really is just an entry hall, and doesn’t do anything to organize the larger museum, which sprawls away from it.

Beyond the formal entry, there are various wings and rambling later additions, including some of those wonderfully didactic wall decorations.

and a large court full of Rodins, much more than I can take in one visit. Why is it that so many places don’t have a Rodin or two, but seem to be trying to complete the set? Is it because they are multiples, and so a collector focuses on them, and then donates the whole collection to a museum? I feel the opposite way here than I did in Marfa, where seeing a lot of Judds together fostered an understanding of the body of work. Too many Rodins just makes me numb, there’s too much drama in one place; couldn’t he have done a few simple, geometric things?

But the general spaces of the museum are fine, and the collection is very good. We didn’t have a lot of time here, but we saw a fantastic show on Diebenkorn’s notebooks (which are in Stanford’s collection), alongside a great small display of artists who influenced him, such as Hopper and The Eight.

Next door is the new McMurtry Building, by Diller Scofidio Renfro, which comprises spaces for the art and art history departments. From the street, it is fairly innocuous, with a regular, repetitive façade, even using wall panels in the same mustard color which permeates the rest of the campus.

But as you move into or around the building, the regularity breaks down, and the building volumes become differentiated, expressing some distinctions within the program.

These large sloping elements appear on either side, and you can enter beneath them into a central courtyard.

The courtyard is incredibly active, with sloping, crashing, angled pieces, which either contain parts of the program, or have program elements wedged in between them. It is a visually exciting place, and they seem to have found a good strategy for dealing with the Stanford building standards which make the campus so dull – an exterior aspect which is straightforward and respectful, while making an interior court which is a metaphor for the (relative) craziness of the artists at Stanford.

Since so much space is eaten up by the court and the areas beneath the slopes, there is not that much useful space on the ground level. The most visible functions are a large shop/maker space, which opens to the court so you can see Art in Action, and a gallery space for student work. All of this is an obvious homage to Corbu’s Carpenter Center at Harvard, where the exterior ramp through the center of the building is supposed to make visible the work taking place within. There were folding tables scattered around the courtyard while we were there, left over from some event, and it looks like this courtyard would work well for that – with big interior spaces opening to the court, and crowds of people being able to move freely among them – much better than at the Carpenter Center, where the entries are obscure little doors scattered around, and there is no large public space (which would have been an alien idea for an academic building way back then).

In this building the ramps aren’t through the building, but the building itself becomes a couple of ramps. A mustard volume and a brown volume spiral around each other in a double helix geometry (probably a metaphor for something like the duality inherent in the foundations for art or something else profound which I couldn’t discern). Each of these volumes contains an exterior stair which takes you past the second level library, and up to the third level, where the classrooms and studios in the volumes surround a central terrace and garden.

The terrace was quite nice, with plenty of casual places to sit and views across the campus, though pretty hot and bright in May (this may get better if the plants grow and provide some shade).  

The strength of the building is the clarity of this parti / metaphor. The duality of inside and outside addresses the campus planning issues pretty brilliantly, and the intertwined double helix that determines the building shape is probably articulating differences in the programmatic elements. All of this is then expressed though material selection and detailing, very elegantly:

There is a precision to this expression, though there are places where it starts to look pretty fussy to me. You get yourself into a logic where there is a one-to-one correspondence between a concept and its expression (this material means this), and then points occur where all these conceptually differentiated pieces collide together. If you are going to stay true to your parti, you articulate each of these clearly, but it does all get to be a bit too much. It reminded me of the contrast between the detailing of the Kahn building and the Piano building at the Kimbell, where Piano’s obsessive expression and detailing of every tectonic element in the building (whether structure or enclosure) created an almost baroque building when compared to Kahn’s classical, geometric simplicity. But here there is not even any tectonic expression to give some order to this level of development – there are Big Formal Moves that embody the parti, and the technological systems and expression of the building are subservient to the fanatically pure expression of the Big Formal Moves.  It is clear that this articulation is only skin-deep; these formal differentiations have nothing to do with the underlying tectonics of the building.  

Kahn starts with space and light, and uses building systems to support this intention. Piano seems to start with the logic of the building systems, and manipulates them to shape space and light. Diller Scofidio Renfro start with a diagrammatic idea and uses the building technology to express the parti.

But here is the big problem with this approach – it leaves out space and light. I didn’t see one good room in this building. I saw some terrible rooms and spaces, and I saw some conventional rooms and spaces, but I never walked into a room and said, wow, this is a great space. The courtyard is obviously the big spatial move, but it matters mainly in a conceptual way – you can stand there and see all the elements of the parti diagram. It is an intellectually satisfying space (Ah, I get it!), but not a sensually satisfying one. It’s deep and dark, in shade all the time. The second floor library pokes in and constricts the space above you, and you get a glimpse of sky above, beyond a glimpse of the handrails on the third level.

But it gets much worse once you ascend the stairs. The stairways are dark and constricted – you expect the payoff of a big expansion into a great open space. And you get some of that if you go to the third floor terrace.   But if you’re only heading to the library, which occupies the whole second floor, it is a big disappointment. The entries to the library are nasty little alcoves to the sides of the stairs. The doors have 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper taped to the doors by the librarians, the classic sign telling you what you need to know about the library because the building itself is so ambiguous. They really look like the fire exits.

The library space itself doesn’t get better. Conceptually, it is the leftover space in the middle of the helix, and it feels that way. It just happened – no one designed anything. A big low space, with a lot of glare from the central court and the glazed edges of the building. An amorphous floor plan with random furniture scattered around, with a low, 2×4 grid hung ceiling. It really felt like one of those cheap municipal branch libraries that’s been retrofitted into a failed strip mall building.

The sloping spiral elements make their presence felt, to the detriment of the space. I may begin a new photo series, on all the terrible ways architects deal with the space beneath a ramp or stairway, when they want to leave it open for expressive reasons, but can’t because it is a hazard for head-bonking reasons under the ADA. I get tired of lay people who always talk about “wasted space”, which usually means any space which is not purely functional, but this is truly wasted space – not useful, not inhabitable, and not even beautiful. It is a space which happens accidentally, without thought.

The other strategy for these oddly-shaped spaces is to figure out what uses can be shoehorned into them, and that may be even worse. Art history libraries need study carrels for grad students, and here they have been given a location which represents their status in the university’s hierarchy. The entry is a narrow slot cut into the spiral volume, which feels like entering a tomb in a pyramid; I assume the grad students will get the metaphor here.

Then the room itself is stepped, with a couple of carrels at each level. When you sit at your desk, you look at the underside of sloped ceiling directly in front of you. It is truly one of the nastiest spaces in which I’ve ever seen students stashed.

Given the dysfunctional geometry, and the big hole in the middle, this building does not have a lot of usable floor area. So where are all the computer labs, printer rooms, classrooms, and galleries? They’re in the basement. The big stairs of the spiral continue down below grade, where they end with a whimper. (Perhaps it is a reference to the gigantic book stack spiral in Koolhaas’s Seattle Public Library, which ends in a garbage can and some Xeroxed signs which tell you how to backtrack to the exit.)

The basement is disorienting, conventional and banal. All the special effects have been exhausted above grade, and the basement spaces were clearly left to the space planner, who had to figure out how to efficiently house all the necessary functions for which the big concept had no room.

Like all architects, initially I was intrigued with the Big Shiny Object quality of this building – the cool diagrammatic parti expressed so clearly in the building form. I always tell my students that they have to start with an idea for a building – they can’t just start solving the functional problems and then try to insert an idea later. But this is what happens when you start with an idea, stay true to that pure idea, but forget to turn it into a building. An idea is important, but it must at least partially derive from addressing fundamental, inherent issues in the project. I’ve been very disappointed in the few DSR buildings I’ve seen (including the contemporary art museum in Boston). They have this very clear diagrammatic quality, but they don’t have any concern for the quality of spaces.   They may not be as obviously terrible as Zaha Hadid buildings, as they are quieter and less jagged, with simpler spaces which seem modern and spare, until you realize that they are just not interesting or pleasant. I’m sure that if I saw the 1/64″ scale parti model of this building I would be very enthusiastic. I just don’t think they understood what had to be added when they blew it up to full size.

Fortunately there is another art building nearby which is the antithesis of the McMurtry Building in every way. The Anderson Museum houses the contemporary art collection of the Anderson family, and it was designed by Ennead, the successor firm to James Stewart Polshek. The parti is simple, almost boring: a two-story box, with a grand stair in the middle, between which and the perimeter there are galleries (and some support spaces on the first floor). The exterior is a simple, well-proportioned modernist composition, which is so unassuming that I forgot to photograph it, until we returned two years later. With the DSR building, I spent a lot of time wandering around the outside of it, getting different perspectives on the form, trying to figure out what it signified. The Ennead building clearly says that it is a typologically straightforward building, here’s the front door, come on in.

The collection is great, reflecting a family’s continuing relationship with many of the most important postwar American artists, particularly those based in California (Diebenkorn, Thiebaud, Irwin, Guston, etc.) There is a nicely-proportioned lobby, with temporary exhibit galleries behind it, and a small library/lounge, where you can view an introductory video. It is an actual room, where scale and furniture placement were considered, and not a vague space littered with objects.

You move to the center of the plan, where the grand stair leads to the second floor of galleries. It is simple, it is clear, and you can see a large painting on axis at the top and light coming in from the sides.

It is more like Kahn than like Piano (and certainly DSR), with simple abstract surfaces defining spaces and light flooding in. The roof is gentle curve which floats above partition walls, lifted up at the perimeter to let light in from the strip clerestory windows. There is a clear structural order and hierarchy among elements, with transverse bearing walls separating galleries, while longitudinal screen walls filter the light and allow space for hanging paintings.  There is no expression of the tectonics (no exposed structure, no highly articulated skin) but the building doesn’t pretend to be made up of these highly-differentiated parts.  They have designed an abstract space, then used technology to support this vision.  

This wall works perfectly for displaying a Robert Irwin piece – it is obvious that the architects worked closely with the curators to create the setting for such a difficult piece, one where the light and surroundings determine whether it can really be experienced at all.

There is much discussion about contemporary museums, whether they should function primarily as ends in themselves, attracting crowds through their special effects and histrionics, and incidentally showing some art (Bilbao as the apotheosis of this). Then there are the museums that are about exhibiting the art, where the building stays in the background. This museum is obviously of the latter type, but it also illustrates an important point: just because a building is modest and defers to the art displayed doesn’t mean that it can’t be an excellent building. If you removed all the artwork from this museum I would still enjoy being there – the light, the clarity and hierarchy of the space, the experience of moving through a succession of different rooms, the complexity of views from room to room – all of them lead to a rich experience, and a series of spaces where you’re just glad to be.

I think we’ve gotten to a point in our culture where the beauty of simplicity can’t be seen by many, and the hyperactive work of the last generation of starchitects has supposedly reflected the zeitgeist of our age, where we expect diverting new images and vistas to satisfy our fifteen-second attention spans. I’m hoping that there may be a reaction to this growing. This work by Ennead (and other buildings we’ve seen on this trip, such as those by Thomas Phifer) show a real affinity with and development of the underlying ideas modernism, and not just a reference to it as a style. We’ve had fifty years of Less is a Bore, and I hope the pendulum is swinging back.