McNay Art Museum's Stieren Center:
It's all about the light
June 13, 2008In the McNay Art Museum's new Jane and Arthur Stieren Center for Exhibitions, French architect Jean Paul Viguier has given San Antonio an example of Modernism in its purest, most concentrated form -- and a reminder that purity can be sexy as hell.
Ford, Powell & Carson was Viguier's local collaborator and the architect of record for the project. That's appropriate: The San Antonio firm's patriarch, the late O'Neil Ford, gained international prominence in the mid-20th century as the city's leading Modernist.
The McNay, of course, shows mainly Modern art, from the Impressionists onward. Yet the 1929 hilltop mansion that forms the museum's core and has been its signature image since its 1954 opening is anything but Modern architecture. The old house and the new wing represent entirely different world views, not just different styles.
The McNay house was one of many that San Antonio society architects Atlee B.Ayres and Robert M. Ayres, father and son, designed in their particularly graceful adaptation of Southern California's Spanish Colonial Revival. Like all revival styles, this one was a fantasy, as much a stage set for a costume drama as a place for actual living. The California-Spanish look was especially popular among the silent-film stars in Beverly Hills. John Gilbert lived in such a house when Greta Garbo moved in with him.
Strong plane of roof (top) and stone-clad partitions of sculpture garden (above) are among Stieren Center's carefully chosen few big gestures. Archtect's study model of roof (below) show louvered top layer, glazed shed forms and cantilevered extension beyond glass wall of sculpture gallery.
Filtered natural light floods lobby (top) and main gallery (above) through multilayered translucent roof.
The primary purpose of the Stieren Center is to provide a space for touring exhibits so that a larger slice of the McNay's permanent collection can be kept on display in the older facility. The upper floor comprises a lobby, a shop, restrooms and a large exhibition space fitted with movable partitions. The lower floor, set below grade but partly revealed by sloping sculpture gardens, holds a 225-seat lecture hall, educational facilities, a narrow print gallery and back-of-house functions. The new building attaches to the old at the octagonal lobby of Leeper Auditorium, a 1994 addition that is now hidden behind the Stieren Center.
Light is the most vexing problem for any art museum -- well, next to revenue, anyway. Traditionally, painters have worked under natural light, from the north. But as a rule natural light is anathema in museums because some delicate pigments can't take it. The standard solution: Seal off galleries from all or most natural light and illuminate the art with carefully aimed UV-filtered electric lamps of carefully controlled wattage. The inevitable result is a diminished experience of the art and the conversion of the museum into an alien, insular space.
Roof
overhang protects sculpture gallery from direct sunlight. Fabric
screens can be lowered for additional protection without blocking view
outside.
Detail of glass ceiling panel show complexity
of frit pattern.
The roof is the building's glory. It is an elaborate system, nearly seven feet high. The top level is an array of metal louvers oriented toward the north, so that the most damaging rays aren't admitted. Below the louvers a series of translucent glass sheds serves as the climate-control barrier. Then come translucent and opaque fabric screens that travel horizontally and can be used to vary the amount of natural light, as specific exhibits may require. The ceiling is a grid of triple-glazed panels etched with a complex pattern of frits -- opaque dots and translucent rectangles oriented in both directions. (The pattern is not random, but statistically ordered; if you look carefully, you'll see that the dots, for example, tend to assemble into closely spaced but somewhat ragged lines, like the ones outside the box office before a Spurs game.)
Viguier claims that the frits make the light "vibrate," and without them the light would be "dead." Not being expert in optics, I remain agnostic on that point. But the frit pattern and the way it subtly reveals the shed structure above it make this an amazingly beautiful ceiling. The roof system's complexity compresses the range of the amount and color of illumination, but variation isn't eliminated entirely. On a partly cloudy day, the colors in the art shifted slightly as the clouds rolled by -- not so much as to be distracting, but enough to enhance the experience. The art in the opening exhibit, selections from the museum's permanent collection, looked terrific, with a presence that's hard to match under artificial light.
Metal screens cut in a lacy tree-bark pattern appear in the sculpture gallery as ceiling panels and sliding doors atop stairs to main gallery (left) and as a stairway enclosure (below).
The laser-cut metal screens make several appearances in the sculpture gallery -- as sliding doors atop the steps to the main exhibit space, as substitutes for the fritted-glass ceiling and, most dramatically, flanking the stairway to the lower level. The organic character of the pattern nicely mediates between the abstract linearity of the interior and the trees outside.
The main gallery flooring is a dense tropical wood, merbau, with a coarse straight grain. The ashlar-cut Chinese green stone that clads the sculpture garden walls is also used as exterior paving at the entry, continues into the lobby and appears again in the sculpture gallery. The one false note in the design is that the thinness of the stone cladding is apparent at the corners of the walls. Solid stone walls would have been more costly, but worth the money.
That quibble aside, this is a deeply honest building, modest and virtuous and comely, but also deeply attentive to the senses.
Mike Greenberg
