Architecture Enthusiasts Storm Manchester

How oppressed we all are by the bad buildings all around us! So it is hardly surprising that, when given half a chance, we storm the Bastille by the thousands to express our outrage and show the authorities that we demand architecture that honors rather than demeans us.

“We” in this instance are the good people of Manchester, New Hampshire and environs. And “storm the Bastille” is, perhaps, a slightly exaggerated way of describing the behavior of the hoards that took advantage of the free admission to check out the newly expanded Currier Museum of Art during its opening week.

In they streamed – the art mavens in their pearls and bow ties, the developmentally disabled in their wheelchairs, the old, the young, the in-between, the bored and the curious. They saw what $21.4 million buys, in the form of a sleek addition of glass, terra cotta and metal that adds 33,000 square feet to what is now a museum of nearly 90,000 square feet.

They checked out the New Hampshire variation on a well-established, coast-to-coast cultural trend of cities ‘starchitects’ to build dazzling art museums as a means of making the municipality a true cultural destination. Denver has its brand new, jagged and ragged (and much maligned) gallery by Daniel Libeskind. Steven Holl (famous in these parts for creating a dorm at MIT that is both visually and conceptually a giant sponge) designed a luminescent art museum addition in Kansas City. Even East Lansing, Michigan – a town presently dominated by a campus consisting of a vast athletic complex and a few academic out-buildings – is getting into the act, having lured Zaha Hadid to bring her other-worldly design sensibility to an art museum for the university in question.

Is the Currier addition truly starchitecture? Well, yes and no.

The design is by Ann Beha Architects of Boston. Beha is in the second tier of the celestial hierarchy – not quite a Libeskind or Hadid, but an architect with a national practice whose recent New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut earned much critical acclaim last year. Indeed, when you have a firm that you name after yourself, you’ve embraced starchitecture.

However Beha herself was not on her firm’s project team for the Currier. Pamela Hawkes, another principal in the firm, led the project, working with her colleague Scott Aquilina. He considers Beha a starchitect, as he recently told New Hampshire Public Radio.

More importantly, the Currier addition doesn’t resemble a piece of sculpture, in the fashion of Frank Gehry’s titanium-clad, blob-like Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, which is credited with launching the current museum building craze in the U.S. The Manchester design is restrained to a fault, yielding to a Bilbao backlash that insists the building not upstage the art.

Thus we have the project’s only truly disappointing feature. The Currier used to have an entrance; now it just has a door, in the middle of a glass curtain wall obviously intended to defer, or even hide behind, a gi-normous, bold, newly acquired sculpture by Mark diSuvero, called “Origins.”

Behind “Origins,” the museum’s original, 1929 building, designed to resemble an Italian Renaissance palazzo, has now been all but swallowed by the current addition and a prior one, added in 1984 and designed by 1980s starchitect Hugh Hardy. The museum’s original, south-facing, grand entrance, with a pair of Ionic columns and captivating mosaics that literally embraced visitors, is now on display in the new ‘winter garden’ that is the heart of the addition.

The result is an ironic commentary on the state of museum architecture today. While the contemporary building strives for invisibility in deference to the collection on display, the museum’s original design is now part of the art collection, having fully relinquished its role as actual architecture. One of these days, we will recapture the idea that a building can be both art and architecture – at the same time!

If this annoys you when you visit, seek relief by relieving yourself. Walk from the winter garden downstairs to the lower level and visit the bathrooms, then look down. Concrete artist Thomas Schultz, whose sensitive approach to color adds warmth and dignity to the floor of the lobby and winter garden spaces, was instructed to go wild on the lower level. The wildness reaches its apotheosis in the bathrooms and just outside them, where he has whimsically and colorfully blown up and reproduced bits of the 1929 mosaics from upstairs.

Nearby are the museum’s new offices, amply and pleasantly opened to sunlight via a continuous band of wide clerestory windows. Most contemporary art museums either accord staff a kind of high priesthood by giving offices a penthouse view (see, e.g., Yoshio Taniguchi’s Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan) or, worse, reduce them to insignificant moles by placing them in a sub-basement (as at the otherwise spectacular American Museum of Folk Art by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, right next door to the MoMA). The Currier gets it just right re the employees: From the outside, the continuous band of glass at the base of the addition testifies that the museum is supported and held up by the folks who work there.

These details, tangential to the process of actually displaying art, are what prove the crucial difference between a building that cares about its users and one that is indifferent to them. Everybody goes to the bathroom at the museum. If the Staff is poorly treated, the museum suffers.

That the Currier, and its architects, gave a damn about these things is what makes the new museum worth visiting as a building. Yes, the Currier has a wonderful collection that should be savored by all. But we live in an era when the public sphere has shriveled like neglected fruit, so averse have we become to investing in facilities we own as a community. An exception to that trend requires celebration.

Within the warm but expansive and sunny confines of the Currier’s winter garden, there will be parties and gatherings, pleasant snacking and even, perhaps, romantic assignations, all while the wretched New England winter rages outside. It is, I think, those possibilities that the opening week crowds were really celebrating. The art made a fine backdrop for such festivities.


p.s. It would be irresponsible to write about the Currier Museum and architecture without noting that the biggest object in the collection of the Museum is the Zimmerman House by Frank Lloyd Wright. Tours of the Zimmerman House depart from the Currier (to keep crowds from clogging the streets in the house's quiet neighborhood). The hassle is worth it.