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Designing Fabric Structures | |
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Newseum by Polshek | |
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New York New Museum | |
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Stone Hill Center by Tadao Ando | |
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Stone Hill Center by Tadao Ando In 2001 the Clark selected Ando to design a new visitor, exhibition, and conference center as the gateway to its 140-acre (57-hectare) campus, according to a master plan by Cooper, Robertson & Partners. The new gateway facility, slated for completion in 2013, will be built on a site currently occupied by a bunker of a building devoted to mechanical space and, until recently, the home of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center (WACC). Because it was necessary to provide WACC with a new home before the site could be cleared for Ando's gateway building, Stone Hill was constructed first, although Ando actually designed it second. Gensler is the architect of record. Ando's two buildings share a design parti: long bars of interior space that are intersected by walls in the form of the numeral 7, which also define outdoor space. Staff at the Clark refer to them as the "7-walls." Concrete is not a material that springs to mind when one recalls the architecture and building traditions of New England. Stone and brick have been used for centuries, but even these materials take a back seat to wood, which gives the region its architectural character. At Stone Hill, Ando has performed a sleight of hand. Stone Hill Center is actually more of a steel-and-wood building than a concrete one. Nearly all of the enclosing walls, except for those forming the 7-wall, are of steel and wood, but he has rendered these materials in a way that they take on tonal qualities of concrete. More oddly, the concrete is rendered to look like wood. Even the steel structure is concealed, although it appears to be revealed. What you see is actually a carefully detailed, gray-painted sheet-metal shroud that covers the steel, meant to express the structure behind it. Ando's architecture has been a refuge from material ambiguity, but no longer. Stone Hill Center sends mixed messages about what it is made of. The new center is a healthy walk from the Clark's main museum buildings. Visitors are enticed to discover Stone Hill via a necklace of paths laid out by Ando's design collaborators, landscape architects Reed Hilderbrand Associates. One travels through the woods over wooden bridges and gravel paths that lead to a clearing — a shelf of space on a hillside from which Ando's building reaches out to the north, the direction from which one approaches by foot. First impressions are of the 7-wall's concrete prow emerging from the slope, commanding a sea of high meadow grass. The plan is to let the grass grow unkempt around the building, encouraging architecture and landscape to merge. It is here that Ando's building begins to present its riddles and clues — how do you get in, what are those spaces? The building's design was inspired by the site. Art conservation spaces are found to the east, gallery spaces to the west, with a hallway and pass-through to a terrace on the north side. A vacant porch — suggesting a fragment of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House — protrudes from the west side. The main entry faces south, toward the parking lot. Low concrete walls emerge from the site, forming the entry courtyard. Close up, the concrete walls appear to be made of horizontal wood slats, similar to the exterior's red cedar siding, which has been bleached to give it more the appearance of gray concrete. The concrete walls were formed with shiplapped Southern pine boards treated with acid to raise the wood grain, which is imprinted into the concrete. The board width on the concrete walls looks identical to that of the shiplapped cedar that clads the exterior walls. Ando carefully controls the visitor's experience. The low wall opens off-axis to the entry. You turn east to find a beautifully scaled courtyard of Isamu Noguchi sculpture, then turn north to enter the building, but find that you have the option to pass through it, toward an outdoor terrace that beckons you with its somewhat obscured view of the Green Mountains and the Taconic Range, hovering above a concrete wall that defines the terrace. From the terrace, looking back toward the building, you realize that Ando has located two floors of conservation workspace on the north side, with full floor-to-ceiling windows, revealing the conservator's craft to the visitor. A lower courtyard reveals other conservation spaces tucked under the terrace. The gallery spaces, only 2,500 square feet (230 square meters), are elegantly proportioned and naturally lighted. There are strong visual connections to the surrounding landscape. In the north gallery, through a wall of glass, one again discovers the porch that was seen when approaching the building. It's not accessible from inside the gallery and it is not entirely clear that visitors are welcome. You can access the porch from the walkway, or from the north terrace — but there's no pathway to lead you there. Another mystery. Ando has created an elegantly detailed container for art and conservation. It is evocative of the shoji-screen architecture of his native Japan, which carefully guides one's discovery of space, and of views from within to distant landscapes. Ando also offers plenty of puzzles in a building that appears simple, but isn't. >>> Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum... Michael J. Crosbie is editor-in-chief of Faith & Form, the chair of the University of Hartford’s Department of Architecture, and a contributing editor to ArchitectureWeek.
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