NY Times
Art to the People, and Vice Versa, in the Bronx
A new look: The just-completed addition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts includes a pleated facade of aluminum.
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
October 6, 2006
The way I see it, Arquitectonica has owed New York a decent building. That firm built its reputation with a series of projects in its hometown, Miami, that mixed bold forms and alluring surfaces at bargain prices. But in New York it has produced only clunkers. Its Westin Hotel tower on Eighth Avenue defines cheapness: a collage of gaudy colors with a long, illuminated arc scratched across its facade. And the muted plaid pattern that it used to decorate the first of a group of towers currently under construction in Long Island City, Queens, is not an improvement.
But with the completion of the addition to the Bronx Museum of the Arts, all is forgiven. With its pleated aluminum facade and refreshingly unpretentious interiors, the addition is a reminder of how architecture can have a profound public impact when its values are in the right place. And it demonstrates how simple it can be to bridge the divide between art and its audience at a time when much bigger, more high-profile museums and their ultra-rich boards can seem baffled by their cultural roles.
The addition is the centerpiece of a string of building projects that promise to shore up the Bronx’s dicey image as well as help reassert its former identity as a haven for the middle class. Bulldozers have already begun clearing the site for the new Yankee Stadium a few blocks away, a bold new criminal courts complex designed by Rafael Viñoly is nearing completion just down the street, and the Grand Concourse is in the midst of a multimillion-dollar face-lift.
Of these sites the museum is the most steeped in the Bronx’s turbulent social history. Founded in 1971, when the Bronx was still substantially white and middle class, it first made its home in the streamlined Moderne rotunda of the 1930’s-era county building. Curators joke that its audience was mostly defendants being dragged to court, conjuring the image of an art therapy class rather than a serious museum.
The story is only half true, but it hints at the museum’s struggle to form an identity in a borough that was undergoing dramatic social changes. In 1982 the museum moved to its current location, a former synagogue at the corner of Grand Concourse and 165th Street that had been abandoned by its congregation as the neighborhood became increasingly Latino. An awkward 1988 renovation by Castro-Blanco Piscioneri & Associates provided a more formal entry, but its corner lobby and cramped balconies had the feel of a suburban mall.
Arquitectonica’s new addition slips into this messy context with surprising ease. In keeping with their populist agenda, the firm’s principals, Bernardo Fort-Brescia and Laurinda Spear, don’t try to hide the building’s low-budget construction. Instead, the main facade is conceived as an enormous folding screen, its glistening aluminum surface draped over the building’s crude concrete block structure.
The facade gives the building a wonderful lightness. And it brings to mind an updated version of the streamlined Art Deco designs of 1920’s architects like the Los Angeles firm of Morgan, Walls & Clements, which created a populist architecture for the emerging car culture. As in those earlier designs, the glistening vertical folds of Arquitectonica’s facade act as a visual counterpoint both to the horizontal movement of the cars streaming by on the concourse and to the heavy brick buildings that flank the museum.
But the playful exterior forms also reflect a wonderfully nuanced interplay between the inner life of the museum and the public world outside. The vertical bands of windows are set deep inside the facade’s creases, so that from directly across the street you barely notice them. As you approach the museum along the sidewalk, however, you catch diagonal views into the lobby, luring you inside.
That bond — between art and public — continues right up through the building. A single column anchors the vertical lobby, accentuating its height, while a long ramp at the back of the space feeds into a new 2,500-square-foot gallery at the back of the building and the old galleries off to the right.
The creased facade is even more effective from inside. The tall, angled windows offer picturesque views of pedestrians strolling up and down the boulevard. As you step deeper into the building those views disappear, which helps refocus your attention onto the art.
A warning: Don’t expect anything fancy here. The main gallery is a simple white box with raw concrete floors. The standard steel railings and light fixtures have a straightforward institutional quality. And although the old galleries have been given a slick new paint job, they are just as utilitarian. But this only serves to make the museum feel more open and accessible. It reinforces the sense of public ownership that is so crucial to a museum’s success.
It also seems to have liberated the curators, who appear to have eagerly responded to the building’s populist theme. The addition opens with “Tropicália,” a show about the period of experimental Brazilian art that began in the late 1960’s, and the artwork spills into every corner of the museum. A mural commissioned for the opening, by the collaborative group Assume Vivid Astro Focus, covers the back of the lobby in a swirl of Day-Glo. Sculptures by Rodrigo Araújo and Marepe are scattered across the lobby floor, where they will be visible from the street.
The museum’s ambitions don’t end here.
Fund-raising has yet to begin for a second phase of construction that would expand the museum to the south, replacing the old 1988 Castro-Blanco building with new galleries, a performing arts space and a residential tower. The proposal, also designed by Arquitectonica, would erase some of the nice historical tensions embodied in the current museum, but it would give the institution a much-needed coherence, something that it richly deserves. And
revenue from the residential tower could provide some financial stability for one of the city’s most underappreciated art institutions.
But for the time being, the new addition proves what can be accomplished with few resources and a lot of heart. It is a reminder that not all museum expansions are driven by media-savvy self-promoters, that the big, bad corporate machine has not yet penetrated every corner of the culture world. Increasingly in today’s New York, the most humble projects are the most moving.