The art's on the outside

As American museums branch out in ever-bolder strokes, photographer Paul Rocheleau details the exuberance.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

December 12, 2004
One day two years ago, photographer Paul Rocheleau found himself in Iowa with time to kill and a newspaper article about artist Andy Goldsworthy in his pocket. He'd finished his day's work early, taking pictures of one-room schoolhouses, so Rocheleau spent the afternoon at the Des Moines Art Center. There he stumbled onto the inspiration for "Architecture for Art: American Art Museums 1938-2008" published in December by Harry N. Abrams.

"Goldsworthy had an exhibit inside the building, so I go in and look around and notice this place is quite interesting," Rocheleau recalls. "Then I pick up this brochure mentioning that the architects were Eliel Saarinen and I.M. Pei and Richard Meier. I'm looking around at this building and going, 'Jeez, I wonder if anybody has done a book on American art museums?' "

The answer, as it turned out, was no — at least not the kind of photo-laden coffee-table book envisioned by Rocheleau. His collaborator on the project, Scott Tilden, says, "There's been a significant number of books on international museums, but we felt the museums in the U.S. reflecting the Modernist tradition are outstanding and hadn't been given their due."

Tilden organized commentary by architects and directors for each of the 28 museums featured in the book. New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum are included, as are Los Angeles' J. Paul Getty Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art. But Tilden and Rocheleau also scoured the heartland for Modernist treasures. "We didn't want to just do blue state museums on the coasts," Tilden says. "We were thrilled with the prospect of showing museums in more rural settings as well as major urban centers." Citing the University of Wyoming's monumental tepee-shaped museum, Tilden says, "For the regents of a state university to bring in Antoine Predock to build such an unusual-looking structure in Laramie, that, to me, is a wonderful statement about the confidence and willingness to accept a new vision of what a museum should be."

To document some of those visions, Rocheleau crisscrossed the United States in his Ford van. Toting a tripod-mounted, 1969 large-format Sinar camera with accordion-style bellows, he began his journey in Texas, where he encountered a sextet of hangar-shaped spaces designed by Louis I. Kahn for Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum. "The closer you got, the more awe-inspiring they were," he notes. Rocheleau also got the chills on the shores of Lake Michigan, witnessing Santiago Calatrava's wing-like skylights unfolding on the roof of the Milwaukee Art Museum. And he experienced a transcendent moment in Houston as he captured the quality of light in François de Menil's Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum. "That's one of the most breathtaking spaces I have ever seen," Rocheleau says.

A design evolution

Once Rocheleau began sending photographs from his treks, Abrams Editor in Chief Eric Himmel upgraded the book's specs by doubling the word count, increasing the page size and expanding the number of photographs from 150 to 220.

While Rocheleau roamed the continent, Tilden edited the contributors' essays and recruited Wim de Wit, special collections director at the Getty Research Institute, to consult on the project. "We picked architects who've done the best job of creating a building that has character of its own but does not overrule the art," De Wit says. "The way we think about the functioning of art in space is very much determined by what we've learned about how a Modernist space can serve as a neutral background. In the book, we wanted to explore this relationship between art and architecture."

The museums represented in "Architecture for Art" illustrate just how radically that relationship has evolved in recent years. The sleek International Style that dominated museum design over the last half-century seems to be giving way to a more flamboyant aesthetic. The book's "Works in Progress" section offers sketches by Gio Ponti and Daniel Libeskind for a Denver museum and others for an Atlanta project from Meier and Renzo Piano that point to a new "building type," as De Wit describes it. Like Frank Gehry's landmark Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, the 21st century museum, De Wit and Tilden agree, needs to function as a tourist magnet cum community center that folds in revenue-generating restaurants and gift shops in addition to the traditional gallery exhibition function.