Sketch Artist 
Art
Edifice Complex
Communities across Texas are out to buy themselves a masterpiece—not a painting or a sculpture but an exquisite museum by a big-name architect.
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Texas has long boasted some of the most architecturally significant museums in the country: The list of architects whose museums already dot the state’s landscape—Louis Kahn (the Kimbell), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (the Houston Museum of Fine Arts), Philip Johnson (the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi and the Amon Carter Museum), Renzo Piano (the Menil Collection and Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston)—fairly glistens with stars. And in the affluent Texas of the nineties, communities across the state are out to buy themselves a masterpiece. The Art Center of Waco plans to build “a world-class building” in the next few years, says director Joseph Kagle, Jr., of its $4 million to $5 million project. Accordingly, his search committee sent more than two hundred RFQs (requests for qualifications) to architects worldwide and received nearly fifty responses. The shortlist included William McDonough, the dean of the architecture school at the University of Virginia; the venerable New York architect Philip Johnson; and Rick Sundberg, whose Seattle firm, Olson Sundberg, won kudos for its redesign of that city’s Frye Art Museum. The committee chose the Seattle firm.
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth will begin construction this fall on a new concrete-and-glass edifice to replace its current building. Designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando with a respectful nod to the Kimbell across the street, it will appear to float on a shallow reflecting pool. Meanwhile, in Dallas, the Meadows Museum on the Southern Methodist University campus hired the Chicago architecture firm Hammond, Beeby, and Babka to design a freestanding building four times larger than its current space in the SMU arts center. The new building is expected to open in the fall of 2000.
This apparent sudden flurry of activity actually started years ago. In Houston the spring 2000 completion of the Museum of Fine Arts’ monolithic Audrey Jones Beck Building—which was designed by prizewinning Spanish architect Rafael Moneo and doubles the museum’s exhibition space—will mark the end of a fifteen-year expansion project.
Other Texas museums were held back by the state’s economic downturn in the mid-eighties. For example, in 1982 the Austin Museum of Art (known then as the Laguna Gloria Art Museum) selected renowned Philadelphia postmodernist architect Robert Venturi to design a new building. The city voted to approve the sale of bonds to finance the project, but soon afterward Austin’s economy ground to a halt, and so did the new museum’s progress. When the AMOA recovered sufficient momentum to appoint a new architecture committee in the mid-nineties, it recommended scrapping the Venturi plans. Why? Museum technology had changed, the original downtown warehouse district site had been expanded, and the AMOA’s mission had broadened to embrace the interests of a multicultural audience. Beyond that, says committee chairman Stephen Becker, few of the current board members had a “sense of ownership” of the Venturi design. “The only thing that’s the same [about the new project and the eighties plan] is the zip code,” he says.
The AMOA’s nineties finalists included Richard Gluckman of Gluckman Mayner Architects in New York; Moshe Safdie and Associates of Boston, Toronto, and Jerusalem; and Christian de Portzamparc of Paris—but not the state’s hottest architecture firm, Lake/Flato, which was also in the running for the Waco and San Angelo projects. “It’s more exotic to have a name from Europe than Texas,” says David Lake, adding that Texans seem to prefer architects who live more than one thousand miles away.
Becker counters that his committee was not looking for yet another marquee name like Venturi but rather for “experience with designing spaces for art”—a common refrain among museum directors and search committees. Richard Gluckman landed the job, and the challenge he faces is twofold. First, he must design a museum that will be located near where Austin plans to build a new city hall and plaza and where Computer Sciences Corporation plans to move its corporate headquarters. But none of these buildings, which will provide a visual context for the museum, has been finalized. Second, because the AMOA does not own a significant art collection, the galleries must be designed to accommodate the museum’s shifting curatorial dreams.
The early eighties also saw the genesis of another Austin museum project that is now moving forward. Last December the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art (formerly the Archer M. Huntington Gallery) at the University of Texas at Austin announced the selection of Herzog and de Meuron, a Swiss firm that had designed a highly praised private museum for the Goetz Collection in Munich, Germany. The Blanton Museum will be located at one of the main entrances to the UT campus and across the street from the future Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. Herzog and de Meuron’s challenge is quite different from Gluckman’s. The Blanton has an ample collection and a campus on which noted twentieth-century architects Cass Gilbert, Paul Cret, and Cesar Pelli and Associates have all left their mark. How will Herzog and de Meuron respond to the setting? Preliminary conceptual drawings portraying an elegant, low-slung building that could be constructed in phases were presented to the UT Board of Regents Facilities Committee in July. They received a cool response. Led by Tony Sanchez and Rita Clements, the regents reportedly expressed concern about the museum’s compatibility with other campus buildings. “I have a flat roof on my house,” Clements said. “I wouldn’t want a flat roof.” The regents asked to see alternative solutions in October.
Angelo State University regents, on the other hand, readily approved Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer’s design for the San Angelo museum. The university contributed to the project $2,715,000 it had received from the state to develop an educational center and museum for fine arts. In return, SAMFA, which raised the rest of the money and will operate the museum, constructed a ceramics studio and classrooms for ASU students at one end of its building. Angelo State will also be able to program the museum’s galleries from time to time. On September 26 SAMFA will open with exhibits that include a show of work by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, featuring drawings and architectural models for the San Angelo project. In other words, people will flock to the museum to see . . . the museum.
The building’s lean, rectangular form stretches down toward the bank of the Concho River and nestles among a park, an outdoor stage, and a row of empty, run-down buildings. From its petal-shaped rooftop sculpture garden, visitors can gaze across the river into the heart of San Angelo’s business district. From almost any street downtown, it is possible to see the museum’s distinctive copper Conestoga-shaped roofline curving against the sky.
How did this new museum, with its imposing limestone exterior, lime-green window frames, distinctive roof, and quirky personality, come to be designed by a prestigious New York architecture firm? Malcolm Holzman, who served as the principal architect on the project, says he was impressed by the museum’s query, which declared: “A small museum in Texas wants to make great architecture.” When his firm was placed on the museum’s shortlist, Holzman traveled to San Angelo twice to make a presentation to the search committee. He remembers telling the committee, “No matter how many buildings I design in New York City, none will have the impact that this museum will have on San Angelo.”
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