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The Arthur M. Sackler museum
The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship (19X6), 5, 319-336
The Arthur M. Sackler Museum
I. James Stirling’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum PETER
CANNON-BROOKES
Cognoscenti of modern museum designs always look forward to the completion of a new museum building by James Stirling, even if it is with mixed feelings. The new Arthur M. Sackler Museum does not disappoint and the personal stamp of the architect is strongly evident in every detail. His designs for the additional accommodation for the Fogg Art Museum were discussed in this Journal in 1982l and the building as executed follows those designs closely, with the exception of the bridge across Broadway Street which was not included in the designs published then. The major fund-raising campaign mounted in 1982 was brought to a triumphantly successful conclusion, not least due to the challenge grant offered by Dr Arthur M. Sackler, and ground for the new building was broken in October 1982. Harvard University, in June 1983, officially named the new building the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, in honour of its principal benefactor, and indeed his is the
James Stirling, architect Sackle ‘r Museul m. 0260-4779/86/040319-18$03.00 0 1986Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd
of the Arthur
m.
320
I. James
Stirling’s
Arthur
M. Sackler
Museum
Main entrance of the Arthur M Museum on Broad way I. Harva rd. by James Stirling.
largest single contribution ever made to Harvard for its art museums. Nonetheless, Philip Johnson, in a lecture given in the autumn of 1984, placed a strong emphasis on the problems with which James Stirling had to contend, including not enough money and not enough room. No architect ever has enough of either, but the awkward L-shaped site, bounded on three sides by Cambridge, Quincy and Broadway Streets, did present a special challenge. The success with which Stirling solved the planning problems posed by the multiple uses demanded and the constraints imposed by planning controls and Harvard conservatism, together with the vastly differing services specified for the areas containing exhibits against those intended for teaching and offices, is undoubted.* One may question a number of details, but the overall achievement is impressive, particularly in respect of the planning. Constructed of load-bearing concrete blocks with brick cladding on the exterior, the basic concept of the building is a block of three floors of galleries occupying almost all the inside of the L-plan, with five floors of offices, seminar rooms, etc., wrapped around the outside, and the whole sitting on a common basement. The two structures/functions are separated/reconciled by the spectacular staircase which slashes through the full height of the building, and the rationale is exploited by the baroque planning device of carrying the external articulation of the building into the dominant internal space. The exterior of the Museum facing onto Cambridge and Quincy Streets is articulated horizontally by twelve alternating bands of warm umber and cold blue-grey bricks - a witty gesture to the Memorial Hall opposite - corresponding to the floor levels within. This was not the colour scheme originally intended, but pink and moss-green bricks, sufficiently weather resistant as to satisfy the University, where not to be found. Apart from creating a very striking exterior, which is nevertheless within the building traditions of Cambridge, the
PETER CANNON-BROOKES
321
banding imposes a limited discipline on the medieval distribution of the windows. To the observer in the street these seem to be random in their spacing, but their organization is entirely dictated by the rooms which they light, thus avoiding the brutal and chaotic interior spaces all too often encountered in the non-public rooms of modern museum buildings. Each office, seminar room, etc., is different in size and has a central window, and furthermore, the load-bearing exterior walls obviate the other common problem hide-and-seek around the columns and useless spaces between them and the outside envelope. The articulation of the exterior facing onto Cambridge and Quincy Streets is abandoned entirely for the narrow facade facing across Broadway Street towards the dignified brick Fogg Art Museum (completed 1927). Here a plain wall of umber brick acts as the foil for a great window and glazed lobby structure of vaguely Cycladic or Mycenean shape and proportions. The plain white slabs which frame it take the form of giant coigns, and although something of the spirit of the horizontal articulation on Cambridge and Quincy Streets is retained, a new discipline is established which is carried into the Entrance Hall. Thus the Cambridge and Quincy Street faGades share the same articulation as the Staircase, and that of the entrance fasade is shared with the Entrance Hall, with a very curious and not entirely happy moment of transition at the foot of the stairs. This is sufficiently muted that the visitor has to look twice to understand the reason for the unease, but such a quirky use and deliberate misuse of baroque planning is
Interior of the Entrance Hall of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University. Access to the Lecture Theatre in the basement is by the stairs behind the pair of pillars.
Staircase of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum looking down towards the second-level landing and the ground-floor Entrance Hall. The halfcolumn on the second-level landing is painted burnt orange and is a pivotal element in the composition, contrasting with the bands of lavender and peach.
322
I. James Stirling’s
Arthur
M. Sackler
Museum
Interior of the Ancient Art Gallery of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University.
entirely characteristic of James Stirling. However, the strongest elements in the fasade composition are the pair of monumental air intake columns with bright green louvres. These are ostensibly functional and, made of heavy panelled concrete, they are also intended to support the northern end of the Bridge Gallery which is now planned to join the top-floor level of the Sackler Museum to the second floor of the Fogg Art Museum which, following revisions to the scheme, is at the same level.3 This bridge is intended to have in the centre of each side large ‘bug-eye’ windows facing up and down the axis established by Broadway Street which runs at 30 degrees to the plane of the faGade. A feature which has not received universal acclaim in Cambridge, the bridge remains on the drawing board, but, on the insistence of the architect, each column is crowned by four steel ‘fingers’ pointing emphatically upwards (not included in the 1982 drawings). In order that the floor levels of the two museums should be aligned, the Sackler Museum had to be constructed approximately two feet lower on its foundations, and consequently the visitor descends a few steps from street level before reaching the level of the Entrance Hall. Bright-green rails add strong local colour, whilst a ramp is provided for disabled access. Closer inspection of the faGade brickwork reveals grooving which extends the bottom line of alternate coigns, except on the ground floor, and shallow grooves corresponding with each coign are carried through into the plain plastering of the Entrance Hall, with the creation of large horizontal panels. This floor is paved at 45 and with the simple natural wood of the fixed degrees with grey-green flagstones, benches and the low-key treatment of the Enquiry Desk and entrance to the Temporary Exhibitions Galleries, the atmosphere is entirely appropriate to an area of bustle and sudden floods of activity as students enter and leave the Lecture Theatre below. The access stairs are located on each side, screened by the pairs of slender square pillars. Functional and almost stark, this area is in complete contrast to the more extravert space articulated by qualities of the Staircase opening up from it, a canyon-like horizontal bands of lavender and peach, with a half-column of burnt orange on the middle landing.
PETER CANNON-BROOKES
323
Enfilade of top-floor galleries in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, looking from the Roman Gallery towards the Oriental Sculpture Galleries.
With echoes of Soane (heightened by the fragments of architectural carvings set into the galleries side of the building, thereby identifying its function) and Mycenean structures, the triumphal Staircase leads up in four flights to the top level of galleries, entered through a glazed doorway which repeats the general forms of the Main Entrance. On the offices side plain rectangular apertures act as windows and provide inviting whilst daylight floods down from the continuous glimpses in each direction, double-pitched glazing. This area, like the offices, is separated from those containing works of art by glazed doors which act as air-locks, thus limiting the problems of solar gain. The half-column painted burnt orange functions as a trumeau for the entrance into the second-level galleries, and the startling colour (cf. James Stirling’s ties) is justified by its pivotal role in the organization of this space if the visitor is not to risk passing by without realizing the significance of this entrance. On the galleries side, plain steel handrails, painted brown, are provided, but on the offices side these are of polished brass and contain concealed strip-lighting for the Staircase after dark. Unfortunately, they become so hot they can cause alarm, and this could prove a source of future problems. The top-floor galleries4 have white painted plaster walls and ceiling structures, and the daylight is of excellent quality even if the stepped ceiling structure is unnecessarily complicated and consequently has too strong a personality. Furthermore the texture of the plastered walls tends to be surprisingly coarse and erratic, and lighting at such an oblique angle has the effect of drawing more attention to it. Another strong textural element is provided by the narrow strip floors and composite half-column door jambs in Tennessee Red Oak. These add a note of warmth but the excessive richness of the patterning from the pronounced figuring is further emphasized by the strips being laid at 45 degrees in the doorways, which creates a note of confusion rather than establishing the integrity of each room space. The plinths, unfortunately, do not entirely succeed in
324
a
FIRST
Ground
FLOOR
plans of (a) First, (b) Second and, opposite,
(c) Top Floors of the Arthur
M. Sackler Museum.
b
0 0
SECOND
FLOOR
325
(Above) Section through the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard, parallel to Quincy Street, through the main gallery spaces. (Right) Section through the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard, across Quincy Street and the central Staircase.
C
TOP FLOOR
326
I. James
Stirling’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum
isolating the larger exhibits from spiritually alien surroundings, and many of the smaller exhibits do not respond well to being exhibited directly against textured plaster. Small design elements can become extremely irritating when repeated room after room, and surely the little black rectangular electrical sockets above the skirtings could have been moulded in a toning colour ? The much larger round holes through the skirtings, which form part of the air circulation system and have affectionately been christened by the museum staff ‘badger holes’, are at their best an architectural jeu d’esprit. Unnecessarily insistent for a gallery interior, they have the additional disadvantage of establishing an unintended visual counterpoint with the circular black holes over the doorways. The flickering red and yellow pea lamps within some of the latter are marginally less irritating than the empty spaces which, when seen from a distance, completely negate the ostensible function and integrity of those lintels. Minor design problems in these galleries can be ameliorated without great expense, but the (admittedly limited) penetration of direct sunlight into the Classical Art Gallery is more intractable, and its bevelled window embrasure is an architectural nonsense. Presumably the outside size was dictated by the standard exterior size, though this is over the undistinguished goods entrance. However, although it is one thing to have a love affair with round apertures of all sizes, it is quite another to tolerate poor-quality execution of them. The poor finish to the plasterwork is all too well revealed by the large port-holes in the biggest Oriental Gallery, which are not round. This gallery is intended to be the entry-point for the bridge to the Fogg Art Museum, and pro tern the huge double-glazed temporary window over the Main Entrance has been fitted with an external blind of black mesh in an attempt to reduce the solar gain problems to manageable proportions. Unfortunately, the blind itself is re-radiating a very considerable amount of heat into the gallery, although the light levels have been greatly reduced, and further work is being undertaken in order to reduce the load on the air-conditioning plant. The second-level Oriental Galleries5 follow closely the patterns established on the floor above, except that daylight is almost entirely excluded and the ceiling structure is of the same stepped design, minus the daylight entry slots. A particular feature is the natural rock group from the mountains of the Yunnan province, and the display is intended to recreate a small corner of an urban garden in which a couple of choice ‘peaks’ This receives diffuse daylight from above, being suggest a landscape in microcosm. housed in a box-like construction which projects from the wall over the goods entry ramp. Full height wall-cases are provided for the display of Japanese screens and hanging scrolls, and the sound insulation is excellent; so good, indeed, that the personal radios of the security staff become the most significant distraction, On the other hand, the ground-floor Temporary Exhibitions Galleries (2687ft2) are both the most simple interiors and the least satisfactory from the point of view of the display environment. This is disappointing and parallels the experience in Stuttgart, while the 281 -seat Lecture Theatre in the basement reveals all James Stirling’s flair. The seating, from the old lecture room in the building formerly occupying part of the site, has been imaginatively renovated and installed in the stepped structure carried by five dumpy columns, D-shaped in section. Harvard restrained his use of colour, but the white walls and columns provide a contrast to the pink ceiling.6 Stirling’s work in Cambridge, Massachusetts, confirms his stature as one of the leading museum architects in the world, but the close links between it and the virtually coeval Clore Gallery of the Tate Gallery, London, encourage speculation as to the direction of his future development.
PETER CANNON-BROOKES
327
Acknowledgements Photographs and drawings are reproduced by kind permission of the following holders: pp. 319 and 324-325, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum: pp. 320-323, Hursley.
copyright Timothy
Notes to Expand the Fogg Museum’, in International 1, 1982, pp. 237-242; but omitted by John Coolidge in the bibliography appended to his essay in The Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge (Mass), 1985, p. 21. This useful publication also includes an introductory note by Seymour Slive on the historical background and the vast increase in size of the Fogg Art Museum collections, whilst John Coolidge (‘The Sackler Museum’) provides a thoughtful but uncritical account of the building, and John Rosenfield (‘Architect and Client’) tackles the identification of ‘the design elements of the new building that grew out of the stated needs of the Harvard University Art Museums and those that may be attributed to James Stirling himself’. The brief was prepared by Suzannah Doering (now Fabing), Deputy Director of the Fogg, and Ed J. Stellingsma, Planning Officer at the Harvard University Planning Office. Dated April 1979, this document (235 pages of typescript) specified the functional needs and artistic aspirations of the curators and art history faculty. John Rosenfield (op.cit. Note 1) summarizes the problems posed by the Bridge, and the design for this element is illustrated by John Coolidge (op.cit. Note 1) p. 13. The third- or top-floor galleries provide display space for: Early Chinese (1125 ft’) Chinese Cave Art (629 ft’) Buddhist Art (643 ft2) Indian and South-East Asian Sculpture (585 ft’) Roman (870 ft2) Greek (1064 ft2) Egyptian and Near Eastern (452 ft’) The display areas on this level provide accommodation for: Islamic and Later Indian (760ft2) Chinese and Japanese (864 ft2) Oriental Paintings (928 ft2) Japanese Prints (617ft2) Chinese Garden (niche only) An infra-red sensor at the entrance to the Japanese prints controls all the lighting with the exception of the central case and operates with a 20 minute time-switch to minimize the light dosage. On the other hand, none of the display cases has silica gel or similar buffering in case of plant failure. The final cost of the building was $9 million, as against the lowest bid of $7.8 million, for a total of 60 000 square feet, of which the new gallery space accounts for 11000 square feet. However, a refit of the collection storage facilities, for conservation reasons, is in hand and, with their associated study areas, they will be the subject of a later note in this Journal.
1. Peter Cannon-Brookes, Jownal
2.
3. 4.
5.
6.
of Museum
‘James Stirling’s
Management
and
Design
Curatorship,
The Arthur M. Sackler Museum
I. James Stirling’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum PETER
CANNON-BROOKES
Cognoscenti of modern museum designs always look forward to the completion of a new museum building by James Stirling, even if it is with mixed feelings. The new Arthur M. Sackler Museum does not disappoint and the personal stamp of the architect is strongly evident in every detail. His designs for the additional accommodation for the Fogg Art Museum were discussed in this Journal in 1982l and the building as executed follows those designs closely, with the exception of the bridge across Broadway Street which was not included in the designs published then. The major fund-raising campaign mounted in 1982 was brought to a triumphantly successful conclusion, not least due to the challenge grant offered by Dr Arthur M. Sackler, and ground for the new building was broken in October 1982. Harvard University, in June 1983, officially named the new building the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, in honour of its principal benefactor, and indeed his is the
James Stirling, architect Sackle ‘r Museul m. 0260-4779/86/040319-18$03.00 0 1986Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd
of the Arthur
m.
320
I. James
Stirling’s
Arthur
M. Sackler
Museum
Main entrance of the Arthur M Museum on Broad way I. Harva rd. by James Stirling.
largest single contribution ever made to Harvard for its art museums. Nonetheless, Philip Johnson, in a lecture given in the autumn of 1984, placed a strong emphasis on the problems with which James Stirling had to contend, including not enough money and not enough room. No architect ever has enough of either, but the awkward L-shaped site, bounded on three sides by Cambridge, Quincy and Broadway Streets, did present a special challenge. The success with which Stirling solved the planning problems posed by the multiple uses demanded and the constraints imposed by planning controls and Harvard conservatism, together with the vastly differing services specified for the areas containing exhibits against those intended for teaching and offices, is undoubted.* One may question a number of details, but the overall achievement is impressive, particularly in respect of the planning. Constructed of load-bearing concrete blocks with brick cladding on the exterior, the basic concept of the building is a block of three floors of galleries occupying almost all the inside of the L-plan, with five floors of offices, seminar rooms, etc., wrapped around the outside, and the whole sitting on a common basement. The two structures/functions are separated/reconciled by the spectacular staircase which slashes through the full height of the building, and the rationale is exploited by the baroque planning device of carrying the external articulation of the building into the dominant internal space. The exterior of the Museum facing onto Cambridge and Quincy Streets is articulated horizontally by twelve alternating bands of warm umber and cold blue-grey bricks - a witty gesture to the Memorial Hall opposite - corresponding to the floor levels within. This was not the colour scheme originally intended, but pink and moss-green bricks, sufficiently weather resistant as to satisfy the University, where not to be found. Apart from creating a very striking exterior, which is nevertheless within the building traditions of Cambridge, the
PETER CANNON-BROOKES
321
banding imposes a limited discipline on the medieval distribution of the windows. To the observer in the street these seem to be random in their spacing, but their organization is entirely dictated by the rooms which they light, thus avoiding the brutal and chaotic interior spaces all too often encountered in the non-public rooms of modern museum buildings. Each office, seminar room, etc., is different in size and has a central window, and furthermore, the load-bearing exterior walls obviate the other common problem hide-and-seek around the columns and useless spaces between them and the outside envelope. The articulation of the exterior facing onto Cambridge and Quincy Streets is abandoned entirely for the narrow facade facing across Broadway Street towards the dignified brick Fogg Art Museum (completed 1927). Here a plain wall of umber brick acts as the foil for a great window and glazed lobby structure of vaguely Cycladic or Mycenean shape and proportions. The plain white slabs which frame it take the form of giant coigns, and although something of the spirit of the horizontal articulation on Cambridge and Quincy Streets is retained, a new discipline is established which is carried into the Entrance Hall. Thus the Cambridge and Quincy Street faGades share the same articulation as the Staircase, and that of the entrance fasade is shared with the Entrance Hall, with a very curious and not entirely happy moment of transition at the foot of the stairs. This is sufficiently muted that the visitor has to look twice to understand the reason for the unease, but such a quirky use and deliberate misuse of baroque planning is
Interior of the Entrance Hall of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University. Access to the Lecture Theatre in the basement is by the stairs behind the pair of pillars.
Staircase of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum looking down towards the second-level landing and the ground-floor Entrance Hall. The halfcolumn on the second-level landing is painted burnt orange and is a pivotal element in the composition, contrasting with the bands of lavender and peach.
322
I. James Stirling’s
Arthur
M. Sackler
Museum
Interior of the Ancient Art Gallery of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University.
entirely characteristic of James Stirling. However, the strongest elements in the fasade composition are the pair of monumental air intake columns with bright green louvres. These are ostensibly functional and, made of heavy panelled concrete, they are also intended to support the northern end of the Bridge Gallery which is now planned to join the top-floor level of the Sackler Museum to the second floor of the Fogg Art Museum which, following revisions to the scheme, is at the same level.3 This bridge is intended to have in the centre of each side large ‘bug-eye’ windows facing up and down the axis established by Broadway Street which runs at 30 degrees to the plane of the faGade. A feature which has not received universal acclaim in Cambridge, the bridge remains on the drawing board, but, on the insistence of the architect, each column is crowned by four steel ‘fingers’ pointing emphatically upwards (not included in the 1982 drawings). In order that the floor levels of the two museums should be aligned, the Sackler Museum had to be constructed approximately two feet lower on its foundations, and consequently the visitor descends a few steps from street level before reaching the level of the Entrance Hall. Bright-green rails add strong local colour, whilst a ramp is provided for disabled access. Closer inspection of the faGade brickwork reveals grooving which extends the bottom line of alternate coigns, except on the ground floor, and shallow grooves corresponding with each coign are carried through into the plain plastering of the Entrance Hall, with the creation of large horizontal panels. This floor is paved at 45 and with the simple natural wood of the fixed degrees with grey-green flagstones, benches and the low-key treatment of the Enquiry Desk and entrance to the Temporary Exhibitions Galleries, the atmosphere is entirely appropriate to an area of bustle and sudden floods of activity as students enter and leave the Lecture Theatre below. The access stairs are located on each side, screened by the pairs of slender square pillars. Functional and almost stark, this area is in complete contrast to the more extravert space articulated by qualities of the Staircase opening up from it, a canyon-like horizontal bands of lavender and peach, with a half-column of burnt orange on the middle landing.
PETER CANNON-BROOKES
323
Enfilade of top-floor galleries in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, looking from the Roman Gallery towards the Oriental Sculpture Galleries.
With echoes of Soane (heightened by the fragments of architectural carvings set into the galleries side of the building, thereby identifying its function) and Mycenean structures, the triumphal Staircase leads up in four flights to the top level of galleries, entered through a glazed doorway which repeats the general forms of the Main Entrance. On the offices side plain rectangular apertures act as windows and provide inviting whilst daylight floods down from the continuous glimpses in each direction, double-pitched glazing. This area, like the offices, is separated from those containing works of art by glazed doors which act as air-locks, thus limiting the problems of solar gain. The half-column painted burnt orange functions as a trumeau for the entrance into the second-level galleries, and the startling colour (cf. James Stirling’s ties) is justified by its pivotal role in the organization of this space if the visitor is not to risk passing by without realizing the significance of this entrance. On the galleries side, plain steel handrails, painted brown, are provided, but on the offices side these are of polished brass and contain concealed strip-lighting for the Staircase after dark. Unfortunately, they become so hot they can cause alarm, and this could prove a source of future problems. The top-floor galleries4 have white painted plaster walls and ceiling structures, and the daylight is of excellent quality even if the stepped ceiling structure is unnecessarily complicated and consequently has too strong a personality. Furthermore the texture of the plastered walls tends to be surprisingly coarse and erratic, and lighting at such an oblique angle has the effect of drawing more attention to it. Another strong textural element is provided by the narrow strip floors and composite half-column door jambs in Tennessee Red Oak. These add a note of warmth but the excessive richness of the patterning from the pronounced figuring is further emphasized by the strips being laid at 45 degrees in the doorways, which creates a note of confusion rather than establishing the integrity of each room space. The plinths, unfortunately, do not entirely succeed in
324
a
FIRST
Ground
FLOOR
plans of (a) First, (b) Second and, opposite,
(c) Top Floors of the Arthur
M. Sackler Museum.
b
0 0
SECOND
FLOOR
325
(Above) Section through the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard, parallel to Quincy Street, through the main gallery spaces. (Right) Section through the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard, across Quincy Street and the central Staircase.
C
TOP FLOOR
326
I. James
Stirling’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum
isolating the larger exhibits from spiritually alien surroundings, and many of the smaller exhibits do not respond well to being exhibited directly against textured plaster. Small design elements can become extremely irritating when repeated room after room, and surely the little black rectangular electrical sockets above the skirtings could have been moulded in a toning colour ? The much larger round holes through the skirtings, which form part of the air circulation system and have affectionately been christened by the museum staff ‘badger holes’, are at their best an architectural jeu d’esprit. Unnecessarily insistent for a gallery interior, they have the additional disadvantage of establishing an unintended visual counterpoint with the circular black holes over the doorways. The flickering red and yellow pea lamps within some of the latter are marginally less irritating than the empty spaces which, when seen from a distance, completely negate the ostensible function and integrity of those lintels. Minor design problems in these galleries can be ameliorated without great expense, but the (admittedly limited) penetration of direct sunlight into the Classical Art Gallery is more intractable, and its bevelled window embrasure is an architectural nonsense. Presumably the outside size was dictated by the standard exterior size, though this is over the undistinguished goods entrance. However, although it is one thing to have a love affair with round apertures of all sizes, it is quite another to tolerate poor-quality execution of them. The poor finish to the plasterwork is all too well revealed by the large port-holes in the biggest Oriental Gallery, which are not round. This gallery is intended to be the entry-point for the bridge to the Fogg Art Museum, and pro tern the huge double-glazed temporary window over the Main Entrance has been fitted with an external blind of black mesh in an attempt to reduce the solar gain problems to manageable proportions. Unfortunately, the blind itself is re-radiating a very considerable amount of heat into the gallery, although the light levels have been greatly reduced, and further work is being undertaken in order to reduce the load on the air-conditioning plant. The second-level Oriental Galleries5 follow closely the patterns established on the floor above, except that daylight is almost entirely excluded and the ceiling structure is of the same stepped design, minus the daylight entry slots. A particular feature is the natural rock group from the mountains of the Yunnan province, and the display is intended to recreate a small corner of an urban garden in which a couple of choice ‘peaks’ This receives diffuse daylight from above, being suggest a landscape in microcosm. housed in a box-like construction which projects from the wall over the goods entry ramp. Full height wall-cases are provided for the display of Japanese screens and hanging scrolls, and the sound insulation is excellent; so good, indeed, that the personal radios of the security staff become the most significant distraction, On the other hand, the ground-floor Temporary Exhibitions Galleries (2687ft2) are both the most simple interiors and the least satisfactory from the point of view of the display environment. This is disappointing and parallels the experience in Stuttgart, while the 281 -seat Lecture Theatre in the basement reveals all James Stirling’s flair. The seating, from the old lecture room in the building formerly occupying part of the site, has been imaginatively renovated and installed in the stepped structure carried by five dumpy columns, D-shaped in section. Harvard restrained his use of colour, but the white walls and columns provide a contrast to the pink ceiling.6 Stirling’s work in Cambridge, Massachusetts, confirms his stature as one of the leading museum architects in the world, but the close links between it and the virtually coeval Clore Gallery of the Tate Gallery, London, encourage speculation as to the direction of his future development.
PETER CANNON-BROOKES
327
Acknowledgements Photographs and drawings are reproduced by kind permission of the following holders: pp. 319 and 324-325, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum: pp. 320-323, Hursley.
copyright Timothy
Notes to Expand the Fogg Museum’, in International 1, 1982, pp. 237-242; but omitted by John Coolidge in the bibliography appended to his essay in The Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge (Mass), 1985, p. 21. This useful publication also includes an introductory note by Seymour Slive on the historical background and the vast increase in size of the Fogg Art Museum collections, whilst John Coolidge (‘The Sackler Museum’) provides a thoughtful but uncritical account of the building, and John Rosenfield (‘Architect and Client’) tackles the identification of ‘the design elements of the new building that grew out of the stated needs of the Harvard University Art Museums and those that may be attributed to James Stirling himself’. The brief was prepared by Suzannah Doering (now Fabing), Deputy Director of the Fogg, and Ed J. Stellingsma, Planning Officer at the Harvard University Planning Office. Dated April 1979, this document (235 pages of typescript) specified the functional needs and artistic aspirations of the curators and art history faculty. John Rosenfield (op.cit. Note 1) summarizes the problems posed by the Bridge, and the design for this element is illustrated by John Coolidge (op.cit. Note 1) p. 13. The third- or top-floor galleries provide display space for: Early Chinese (1125 ft’) Chinese Cave Art (629 ft’) Buddhist Art (643 ft2) Indian and South-East Asian Sculpture (585 ft’) Roman (870 ft2) Greek (1064 ft2) Egyptian and Near Eastern (452 ft’) The display areas on this level provide accommodation for: Islamic and Later Indian (760ft2) Chinese and Japanese (864 ft2) Oriental Paintings (928 ft2) Japanese Prints (617ft2) Chinese Garden (niche only) An infra-red sensor at the entrance to the Japanese prints controls all the lighting with the exception of the central case and operates with a 20 minute time-switch to minimize the light dosage. On the other hand, none of the display cases has silica gel or similar buffering in case of plant failure. The final cost of the building was $9 million, as against the lowest bid of $7.8 million, for a total of 60 000 square feet, of which the new gallery space accounts for 11000 square feet. However, a refit of the collection storage facilities, for conservation reasons, is in hand and, with their associated study areas, they will be the subject of a later note in this Journal.
1. Peter Cannon-Brookes, Jownal
2.
3. 4.
5.
6.
of Museum
‘James Stirling’s
Management
and
Design
Curatorship,