Washington, D.C., a spacious, open-skied city, whose central landscape is dominated by monuments and monumental museums, has added a gigantic new one. Yet it fails to even peep above the horizon. An enormous structure occupying more than four acres and housing two vast and important collections of Asian and African art, this latest museum complex of the Smithsonian Institution has been built almost entirely underground.
”From the very beginning, I was very concerned about taking people down,” said the project`s chief architect, Jean-Paul Carlhian. ”You take people down to hell, down to a department store`s bargain basement, down to the toilet. You go up to heaven. You go up to the altar. The notion that you bring people down to great works of art was, in my mind, absolutely a unique challenge.”
Whether he and the Smithsonian have succeeded remains to be decided by the judgment of scholars and by a touring public that votes with its feet. But it`s apparent they have made an impressive addition to the Washington institutional firmament and to the national culture, and have created a facility as unique, innovative and controversial in its way as the superhigh- tech Pompidou Center art museum in Paris.
Opening Monday this extraordinary new complex adjoins the Smithsonian`s venerable ”Castle,” the Freer Gallery and the institution`s Arts and Industries Building at the middle of the Capital Mall. It was four years in its excavation and construction and has reached completion nearly 20 years after a government study first concluded the idea was feasible. Occupying 360,000 square feet, its three spacious stories reach 60 feet underground, a depth 18 feet below the Washington water table.
This cultural cavern cost $73.2 million, of which half was paid by the taxpayers and half came from outside contributors, including such eclectic sources as the Korean and Japanese governments, IBM and Coca-Cola, the Brooks and Hope McCormick Foundation and the Yale Class of 1936. More than $800,000 was spent just to protect, during construction, a century-old linden tree standing near the site.
As envisioned by its chief creator, longtime (1964 to 1984) Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley, the new museum complex had to serve one essential purpose: to broaden the scope of a Smithsonian establishment that, despite its sprawling immensity, was fixated on Western culture.
Specifically, Ripley wanted a prominent place at the center of things for a major facility displaying Eastern art, and also a more public and prestigious location for the National Museum of African Art, which for years had been stuck away in obscure lodgings in a predominantly black neighborhood east of the Capitol.
There was also a serious need for expanded office space and a Smithsonian research and education center.
But there was an inherent limitation. The magnificent greensward of the mall, which sweeps west from the Capitol past the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial to the Potomac, already had seven Smithsonian museums along it, with adjoining phalanxes of government buildings further consuming the skyline. As Ripley observed, every preservationist protest group imaginable would object strongly to another structure or two in the remaining open space, and it was doubtful that Congress would yield additional land on the mall.
However, the Smithsonian already owned 4.2 acres of open space hard by its Castle, the Arts and Industries Building and the small Freer Gallery. Known as the ”South Yard,” this plot had been used through the years as a 19th Century celestial observatory, as animal housing for the now defunct Department of Living Animals (predecessor to the National Zoo), as the site of a greenhouse for the Division of Radiation and Organisms, as a World War I aircraft engine repair facility and ultimately as a parking lot.
Given the realities, the yard was ideal, though not for big surface structures. Preservationists still would have howled over the esthetic intrusion on the wonderfully Victorian Castle. So the decision was made to go underground.
According to the Smithsonian, a woman at one of the planning hearings urged that the proposed subsurface facility have nothing more above ground than a ”glass-walled entrance with an elevator and some stairs and a guard.” Carlhian, of Boston`s Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott architectural firm, replied: ”Madame, you have just described the entrance to the subway. This is not the Washington Metro. It is one of the great museums of the world.”
Although 96 percent of the new complex is underground, what remains above is much more than a subway entrance. It is serene, yet breathtaking; simple, yet striking; suggestive of the nature of the art treasures that lie beneath but not a blatant advertisement for them. There is nothing that conflicts with the stately Victorian architecture of the Castle.
There are no stone lions.
In the right-hand corner of the yard as one faces the Castle is the triple-domed entrance pavilion of the African Art Museum, its rectangular structure softened not only by its six rooftop cupolas but also by six tall windows-three on each of the longer two sides-with circular tops.
In symmetrical balance at the left-hand corner of the yard is the entrance pavilion of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Asian art. Its rectangular structure is topped by three pyramids reminiscent both of Oriental pagodas and the burial tombs of Egypt. Its six windows have triangular tops.
Behind the Sackler pavilion is the kiosk entrance to the office section of the complex-an unadorned but cheerful round-topped structure that might look at home in any turn-of-the-century city park.
The rest of the surface space is given over to the Haupt Garden, named for New York philanthropist Enid Annenberg Haupt, who donated the $3 million required to create it. Approximately four acres, it covers the roof of the complex with its topsoil ranging from 2 to 8 feet in depth. It has Victorian iron entrance gates and wooden benches along immaculate gravel paths that circle a central parterre ornamental flower bed.
The Haupt incorporates two special gardens within its space: one an Oriental inspiration, featuring pool and stonework reminiscent of Beijing`s Altar of Heaven and located behind the Sackler entrance pavilion; the other a fountain and rippling pool surrounded by small trees evocative of an African landscape, behind the National Museum of African Art pavilion.
In the middle of tourist hordes, the capital`s endless traffic and a massive federal architectural presence, the garden succeeds wonderfully as an oasis of tranquility, and may one day become as favored a pausing place as the historic LaFayette Park across from the White House, where financier and presidential mentor Bernard Baruch used to hold court on a bench.
Descending into the underground depths of the museum complex, however, one experiences a feeling somewhat less soothing. Carlhian has done wonders with lighting and space, with spectacularly designed staircases, unfolding corridors and all manner of architectual inventiveness that works successfully to fend off claustrophobia. The subterranean interior of the complex is more than elegant; it is majestic. One does not have the feeling of going down to a toilet, bargain basement or hell.
But, especially as the art treasures come into view, it seems almost that one has descended into a modern-day version of King Tut`s tomb or the fantastic underground netherworld of Alexander Korda`s classic 1930s movie
”The Shape of Things to Come.” One senses the weight of the earth above-feels a separation from the bustling city just 20 or 40 vertical feet away that one does not experience in Washington`s above-ground National Gallery or Hirshhorn Museum.
Still, that may prove one of the new complex`s chief attractions.
Underground Levels 1 and 2 are devoted exclusively to the two museums, which divide the space almost evenly-the Sackler occupying 110,000 square feet and the African Art Museum taking up 108,000 square feet, including pavilions. The third and bottom-most level houses the research center, the numerous offices, an international exhibition gallery and the machinery and support services needed to operate the complex. But its chief feature is one of the new facility`s most fascinating architectural attractions-a 28-foot-wide public concourse stretching 285 feet (just 15 short of the length of a football field) and illuminated by skylights three-stories above.
At the end of this super-corridor is a trompe l`oeil mural by artist Richard Haas. The painting, 40 feet wide and 45 feet high, depicts a classical fairyland that manages to include an upward view of the Smithsonian Castle.
Carlhian was displeased by Smithsonian vetoes of his plans for extended use of mirrors to create a greater feeling of spaciousness and his proposed schemes to mask surface views of an ugly federal office building across the street from the project`s entrance. His call for arched ceilings with hidden light sources was rejected in favor of conventional ceilings and lights.
But he was pleased enough with the final creation to participate in the institution`s elaborate previews earlier this month and to make this comment- partly in reference to creations like New York`s Guggenheim Museum, where the architecture so greatly dominates the exhibits:
”Something that has happened in the museum world is `Blockbuster Shock,` ” he said. ”And I feel personally that this notion is quite different from that of a museum. A museum is a place where people should come back to, a place of discovery, of learning, of trying to build a relationship between the object and the visitor. It has a degree of refinement and order entirely different from the `Blockbuster,` where you line up for five hours and you never go back. We are subjected to shock culture, and I don`t think it is at all what a museum is about. I think that the environment provided for these objects should have enough quality in it to convey to visitors that what they are going to see is precious.”
At all events, Ripley`s dream has come true. Asian and African art are now a major presence on the mall.
The Smithsonian`s involvement in Eastern art had been largely confined to the Freer collection, a relatively small assemblage of Chinese, Japanese and Middle Eastern works acquired by the late Charles Freer (1856 to 1919), a railroad industrialist and esthete protege of painter James Whistler. In giving his collection to the Smithsonian, and thus the nation, Freer imposed severe restrictions-forbidding that it be changed or added to, and insisting that his gallery never loan or borrow pieces.
Though its opening exhibit will consist entirely of Near and Far Eastern artworks collected by Arthur M. Sackler, a wealthy Brooklyn-born doctor and medical writer, the Sackler Gallery will suffer under no such restrictions and will loan, borrow and display pieces as the institution and gallery director Thomas Lawton see fit.
Sackler, who died just four months before the gallery was to open this year, donated about 1,000 pieces of Oriental art and $4 million toward construction of the facility. The works include ancient Chinese bronzes, jades, paintings and lacquerware, as well as numerous representations of Near Eastern silver, gold, bronze, ceramic and mineral work, and stone and bronze sculpture from South and Southeast Asia.
The National Museum of African Art was originally opened in 1964 by Warren Robbins, a schoolteacher and diplomat of relatively modest means. He operated it in a string of rowhouses and garages centering on the historic Frederic Douglass House east of the Capitol. The museum became a branch of the Smithsonian in 1979, but because of its inconvenient location and lack of parking and public transportation, it still attracted fewer than 50,000 visitors a year.
In its new home, it should do spectacularly better. Under museum director Sylvia Williams, its permanent collection has expanded far beyond Robbins`
original acquisitions to 6,000 objects, including sculptures, textiles, African household objects, architectural elements and decorative arts. This is the only museum in the country devoted exclusively to the collection, study and exhibition of artistic and other cultural artifacts of sub-Saharan Africa. Ripley is considered the most visionary and by far most powerful of the nine secretaries the Smithsonian has had in its long history. He added six museums to its holdings-including the National Air and Space Museum, the world`s most popular. He developed the institution`s now-worldwide membership program and founded the Smithsonian magazine. He was sometimes irreverently referred to as ”the Sun King.” A famous ornithologist as well, he has been obsessed with birds and has written books about them.
With his last dream now come true, he has been given an ironic memorial. His name has been given to the basement of the new complex, which will be called the S. Dillon Ripley Center.
