When I began teaching at the University of Oregon, I found that one of my colleagues, Bill Kleinsasser, was fairly obsessed with Henry Mercer.  Mercer was an archaeologist, collector and amateur architect, who built three buildings and started the Moravian Tileworks in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  I dragged two of my sisters to see Mercer’s house about 20 years ago, and Laurie’s response was great.  First room:  That’s pretty cool!  Second room:  Cool.  A lot like the first.  Third room:  I get the idea.

But Bill Kleinsasser was right – it’s just that the Mercer Museum is the building to see.  Mercer collected a comprehensive assortment of technological artifacts from pre-industrial America.  Then he built a museum to house and display them.  Concerned with fire destroying the artifacts, the museum was built of reinforced concrete, which is apparent on the outside, a strangely flat medievalist fantasia.It’s adorable, but a bit twee, with vernacular forms in a strange material.  The roofscape looks like a giant birdhouse, but somehow I love it.

You enter through a new lobby wing, go up some winding stairs, and step out into this:a four-story atrium crammed with more stuff than seems possible.  It’s feverishly hallucinogenic.  Every surface is covered with stuff, even the ceiling

and then the really big stuff is hung out in space. 

It is so far from our current model of what a museum should be like that it’s hard to process.  Where are the blank white walls?  Where are the wide open spaces across which we can contemplate an isolated, perfect object?  The Mercer Museum shows that a museum can work extremely well while not meeting our aesthetic preferences for abstract minimalism.  The central atrium is surrounded by vaulted side aisles, on the the outside of which there are niches, almost chapels, each of which explains and shows many artifacts pertaining to a specific technology, such as lighting:

or a cabinetmaker’s shop, with its molding planes:

The sidewalls are heavily glazed, and the light filters through the niches and side aisles into the atrium.

and there are other random artifacts scattered around.

as in a separate two-story space where there are perhaps thousands of panels from cast-iron wood stoves, along with firebacks, each which is highly wrought and decorative.  But the space itself grabs your attention, with its Orientalist detailing and complex spatial moves.

The exhibits are extremely clear – I now know a good amount about the practices of 18th century technologies – such as tinsmithing – which were just vague ideas to me before.  The layout of the building also supports this pedagogical approach – you may be looking at the small tools and labels in a niche exhibit, and the the label says, turn around and look behind you for a big artifact – like a whaleboat or a stagecoach – which is the product of this technology.

It’s a museum which can be approached from many directions and found to be satisfying.  Kids love it, both the artifacts and exploring the space, with surprises around every corner.  Grown-ups just stare, not ever having been in a place like this before.  And some architects wonder why everything we do now has to be within such narrow parameters.  Or whether there can’t be a closer fit between the architecture and the contents.  Mercer’s buildings on their own are quirky and interesting, but not all that good.  But when you fill one up with amazing stuff, there is synergy, and the experience is fantastic.

I thought the main capital-A Architecture focus of this trip was going to be out-of-the-way buildings by Lou Kahn, but then Renzo Piano hijacked our agenda.  We’ve only seen one recent museum that wasn’t by Piano, and I think the MFA addition is really Norman Foster in Piano drag.

The new Whitney is superb.  Anchoring the High Line at Gansevoort St., it consolidates Chelsea’s status as the new zone for hip galleries, since Soho became a shopping mall and the East Village seems to have gone back to being the East Village.  Tectonically, the building picks up on the High Line and other buildings in the area – it stands out as an institution, but it complements the older technologies beautifully.

The superstructure at the top of the picture is the key to how the building fits into the context.  Every other museum in New York is a solid box which you enter to view the treasures within.  (The Met has some views of the city from the large atrium areas in the new wings by Roche Dinkeloo, but that is all.)  In a museum of American art – which necessarily means lots of art in and about New York – the Whitney pulls in the City as an essential part of the experience.  Being in Chelsea, surrounded by low buildings, the views of midtown and downtown are unobstructed, and going back and forth from the galleries to the city is exhilarating.  

I am a big fan of museums which allow easy access to large open areas where you can shift the focus of your eyes to a distance, get some spatial relief from the necessary introversion of galleries, and let your mind wander a bit;  the Whitney does this better than any museum I’ve ever seen.  The large space isn’t just a relief from the galleries, it is a complement which intensifies the experience while providing a change.

The parti is classic Piano – simple, legible and appropriate.  Each level has a big east-west bar of galleries, with a fairly solid wall to the south, and filtered openings to the east and west.  The staff spaces are mainly on the north side, accessible from the gallery levels, but tucked away behind the circulation core.

These filtered ends are tunable –  allowing for a directly daylit space at the end for sculpture,  while using a series of screening elements to block direct light from reaching the galleries within.  This layering strategy is being employed in many museums now, but this makes more sense to me than Foster’s MFA – it is both more flexible and less extravagant.

Movement through this building is directed, but not constrained.  The staff suggests that you take the elevator to the top, and then walk down.  Interestingly, this is the same processional as was suggested at the old Breuer Whitney.  That building had gigantic elevators, which were also used as freight elevators after hours, and one notable interior stair, which was a sculptural and spatial experience, despite having only one window;  Piano seems to pay homage to that.  The elevators are the coolest glass elevators this side of Lloyds of London, and there is a central stair that is perfectly located and visible,  a pleasure to use, again despite being completely internal.  

Every floor has an entry space at the top of the elevators and stair, orienting you and facilitating the introduction to the exhibit.

You can us this stair, but why wouldn’t you head outside?  The steel structure relates to the High Line below, and contrasts with the slick envelope of the gallery volumes. 

The view to the north

and to the south

Museums can be disorienting rabbit warrens (Pelli’s remodel of MOMA was one of the worst, thankfully now somewhat mitigated.)  This museum not only allows you to be oriented within the museum, but within the whole city.  For a city with great views, it is remarkable how few of them are immediately accessible to the public.  I took views for granted when I worked in the Empire State Building for seven years, but now returning as a tourist, I am annoyed at how I’m always in a canyon, only able to get the big view by standing in line for an hour and paying a lot of money.  The Whitney offers a view of the City that is actually better (though less spectacular) than from the tower decks, and reflective of real life in the City, not the prospect of a master of the universe.  

The various spaces are all commodious and comfortable. The ground floor lobby is transparent and open to the street.  The scale is wonderful, as opposed to the lobby at MOMA, which has the proportions of a parking garage.  

As in all Piano buildings, you can grasp the layout without looking at a plan, the main elements being visible from each other. 

The top floor galleries have Piano’s usual attention to daylighting, in this case a nice balancing of high-tech systems and traditional gallery room design.  

I left with the same feeling I get from many Piano museums – a wonderful museum experience, where the architecture didn’t scream for attention, but supported the art without being at all neutral.

All of Boston’s venerable museums have had major renovations since I lived there – the Museum of Fine Arts by Foster + Partners, and the Gardner and Harvard’s Fogg, by Renzo Piano.  I couldn’t get to the Gardner, but I was able to see the other two in some depth.  As I ended up as an art history major in college, I knew both of these museums down to the smallest detail, and so have a good baseline for comparison.

The most impressive thing about the Foster remodel of the MFA is that they didn’t mess up the original Beaux Arts building.  In fact, they significantly improved the overall organization.  IM Pei’s addition from the early 1980s had confused the plan, shifting the main entry to the southern side facing a parking lot, and demoting the Huntington Avenue entry on the central axis.  The current state opens up this axis from Huntington back to the Fenway, and once again the building makes sense.

Pei’s addition is looking a little dated.  There are some commodious spaces and good galleries, but the detailing seems overlay flat and gypsum-boardy.  Mark Rylander just pointed out that the Pei buildings that are on the interface between late modernism and brutalism have worn better, with strong tectonic qualities (I had recently seen a good example of this at the Columbus Indiana library).  The MFA wing is hiding all of its guts, covering all with a pure white surface.

As the wing has been repurposed, it now includes an innovation that should become standard in museums:  inside the high-end restaurant, there is a bar, where I repaired for a little pick-me-up after a long, intense afternoon looking at art.  Refreshed by the best Manhattan I’d had in six weeks, I spent the rest of the evening checking in with all the galleries.  

Foster’s addition includes administrative offices and a new wing for American art, which grow off the north end of the existing building.  The exterior is an exercise in the current style – random variations within a grid.  It’s very tight and crisp, with the solid/void relationships handled well.

The big move is a large glazed court/atrium set between two wings of the original building.  It’s a huge space, with a scale that seems more like an exterior courtyard.  There is a cafeteria set up, which was whisked away in the afternoon so the space could be used for an evening event.  It connects the central axis of the museum with the entry to the new American wing, but is otherwise not accessible from the two flanking wings.  It supplies a necessary function within the museum – a place of relief from the intensity of galleries, with light, space, and a way to let your focus wander.  

It reminded me of a modernist version the courtyard at the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City.

The big stair at the end of the atrium organizes the whole new wing.  From some hallways on the sides you can see the clear differentiation between the old and the new.

The new galleries are excellent – some are in the normal modernist vernacular of paintings floating on blank walls, but some are hung salon style, similar to 19th century practice.  The light is controlled very well (the only mistake being the hanging of Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Boit facing the atrium stair, where the glare makes it hard to see the dark painting).  

The gallery building is wrapped by a double-envelope / walkway on three sides.  I’m not sure of the purpose of this – it has a few sculptures that can sit in the sunlight, but it seems like a lot of trouble for what it provides.  

The top floor galleries are skylit, working very well for the large modernist work there.

Overall, it’s a very successful, sensitive and simple remodel. It seems more like a Piano building than a Foster.

Which brings us to the Piano building at Harvard.  It is more than an addition to the Fogg.  The Fogg used to house galleries, classrooms, the art history department (which they call Fine Arts, just to confuse people), and the art history library.  Now the departmental spaces have moved over to the Stirling building across the street, and the collections from the Sackler and the Busch Reisinger have been consolidated, so it is now called the Harvard Art Museums, and is a much larger museum with an art study center.

From the street, the juxtaposition is striking, and not bad at all.  Let’s face it, the large flat wall of the Fogg went beyond the limits to which Georgian should be pushed, and the addition provides a much higher degree of articulation which reads well.

The reveal between the two is clear, while the big new roof ties them together.  

The Prescott St. corner is massive but pleasing.  A wood(!) screen wall above a stone base.  Robert Campbell thinks the base is clunky and not necessary, and I’m inclined to agree with him.  

The big move is the central atrium.  The Fogg had two levels of a Renaissance palazzo court, with a third attic story with small windows on a hallway.  Piano always seems to respect these Beaux Arts schemes (such as at the California Academy of Sciences) and he does so here.  The big question is how do you keep this parti, while doubling the height of the building, without making it a dark shaft.   The masonry at the third level was removed, and that becomes the start  of a glass curtain wall addition, exquisitely detailed.  

The third floor gallery circulation had been one of my favorite spaces – you got glimpses into the  court through the small windows, as you were surrounded by pre-Raphaelite paintings on your way to class.  It was fine, but I like the new corridors much better.  Similar to the double envelope at the MFA, sculpture that can be in strong light is located here, with paintings set back in shielded galleries.  

The galleries are less spectacular, just plain rooms with track lighting.  I think this quality is due more to the layout of the original Fogg – the footprint is not big, and these rooms are simply fit in.  The circulation scheme relieves any possible claustrophobia – you’re not caught in an endless warren of galleries (as sometimes happens at MOMA), but can readily jump back to the atrium for light and space.

There are new galleries which pop through the solid wall of the museum and engage the streetscape.  These also house sculpture, and the contrast with the painting galleries is strong.   

These also provide an excuse for the massively articulated, movable shading devices on the exterior.  I’m not sure all of this was necessary;  perhaps as with Foster’s double envelope, the alleged function just provides an excuse for doing something which looks really cool.  

On the fourth and fifth floors there is the conservation space and an art study center, with rooms which van be reserved so items in storage can be retrieved and examined.

There are quite a few big rooms like this, only one of which I saw being used.  I asked about excessive daylighting, with its attendant glare and damage to art work, and was told that there are multiple levels of automatic and controllable shading devices in place.  The rooms are beautiful, with great views of the city, but again I’m not convinced that this over-the-top high tech approach couldn’t have been accomplished with simpler and more passive techniques.  

The relationship to th Carpenter Center is great.  I’m not sure, but I think the whole Gwathmey Siegel remodel must have just been throw away.  

The ramp now plugs into the rear entrance to the museum.

The top floor is an homage to Piano-tech (not to be confused with Pinakothek).  The curtain wall starts at the third level, in a fairly simple manner, but it seems to accumulate more and more little metal pieces as it ascends, and the top is a high-tech apotheosis.  At this point I don’t care if it is at all necessary – the dematerialization of structure, the play of light, the modularity and repetition, the transparency, it is all just gorgeous.  No one can detail like Piano, and it’s nice when he’s able to just run amok.

But I did find one embarrassing detail:  I asked the brick what it wanted to be, and it said, an infill panel on an access door!

i’ve liked every Piano museum addition I’ve seen, mainly for their good sense, simple partis, contextual sensitivity, attention to the demands of the art and exquisite detailing, but in this museum, the architectural experience of the atrium is the dominant element.  I found myself returning to it again and again, just to enjoy the light and the tectonics.  It’s a very different museum from the one I knew, but the sensual and intellectual pleasure of the space more than made up for my displaced nostalgia.