Adding to a building is no guarantee of adding quality to the cityscape. Just think of the way fast-buck condominium developers are plopping extra floors, covered in cheap synthetic stucco, atop old brick and terra-cotta buildings throughout Chicago. But there are times when more is more, and the new Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art is one of them.
Tucked into the southeastern corner of Northwestern’s Evanston campus, right in the middle of a charmless complex of concrete-clad performing arts theaters, this little building does much more than endow the Block Museum with a lot of extra space. It brings sophisticated style and sensitive planning to an ill-defined campus plaza that utterly lacked panache. In the process, it makes everything around it better. It also is at pains to serve, rather than upstage, the art within it.
Designed by Chicago architect Dirk Lohan, the $8 million fine arts museum is by no means flawless. But it does buttress the notion that a quietly assertive modernism — quite different from the explosively sculptural buildings of Frank Gehry — has a significant role to play in shaping campuses and the art museums that are their treasure houses.
The new museum principally consists of an auditorium, galleries and administrative offices. It greatly expands the “footprint” of its now-demolished predecessor, a one-story, 6,000-square-foot box that occupied the corner of a theater building in Northwestern’s arts complex. The new museum, which has 20,000 square feet, is connected to the same building, but juts outward from it.
True to its name, the museum resembles a pair of children’s blocks — one a short rectangular block laid on its side, the other a long rectangular block placed directly atop of it. The short, lower block fills the space where the Block Museum used to sit. The long, upper block sweeps over it, extending the museum over a ground-level opening beneath its second floor.
Look closely, however, and you’ll see that there’s more to these blocks than simple rectangles. Both the east and west sides of the museum have projecting walls of glass — “glass cheeks,” as Lohan playfully calls them. They give a feeling of lightness and transparency to a structure mostly clad in weighty limestone. They also let light seep into the galleries, a welcome shift from the “black-box” school of design that turns museums into impregnable fortresses.
There was concern at Northwestern that allowing the museum’s eastern “cheek” to extend into the plaza would remove precious open space. But when measured by another yardstick — the quality of public space rather than the quantity — the move represents a gain, not a loss.
The Block Museum is a solid wall that frames the roomlike outdoor space of the plaza. Yet it also serves as an opening that links the Pick Staiger Concert Hall, which sits just to the east, and the rest of the campus to the west. The opening even forms a kind of picture frame through which the pedestrian can glimpse the glassy entrance of the otherwise brutish concert hall.
Still another move that respects the campus can be found on either side of the opening in the exposed, stilt-like columns that support the museum’s second floor. They make a subtle doff of the hat to Northwestern’s nearby library, where rounded concrete walls also stand on stilts.
To be sure, there are problems with the opening. It’s too big for its own good, with an underside ceiling that is painfully plain and has far too few elements to bring things down to a human scale. Benches for sitting would help, as would greenery to soften what remains a harsh hardscape.
Still, on the whole, Lohan has succeeded at bringing civility and urbanity to a plaza where both were much needed. The museum’s architecture pulls off the same trick, not turning its back on its surroundings but improving them.
The museum is similar in scale to nearby Pick Staiger, yet its architecture is far more richly textured than the theater’s. If that building is, in effect, a sculpture, this one resembles a glass screen. And a handsome screen it is, with aluminum fins and decorative horizontal bands sweeping smartly across the front.
The fins and the bands both fight the inherent flatness of a glass wall, giving the facade a strong sense of depth and texture. They also unify the two, very different parts of the facade — the entrance pavilion, which is fully transparent, and the second-floor gallery, where much of the glass wall is opaque in order to shield the works of art from daylight.
A jack-knifing steel and glass stair and an elevator, both visible through the glass wall of the entrance pavilion, further animate the facade. They resemble sculptures in a glass box.
It is to Lohan’s considerable credit that he tried to bring the floating, up-on-stilts modernism of the exterior inside the museum. Yet the interior remains a mixed success, in part because of design problems, but also because of a series of compromises that nullified Lohan’s plans.
As a stand-alone piece, the entrance pavilion is well handled, a 45-foot-tall room that rewards the museumgoers with views of Lake Michigan as they ascend the steel stair.
But the space seems exceedingly grand when compared to the house-like scale of the museum’s galleries. And that split identity is worsened by the presence of stainless steel doors that lead from the pavilion to the first- and second-floor galleries.
The doors resemble one of those Sub Zero refrigerators that are all the rage among yuppies; you practically expect the exhibitions behind them to be titled “Art on Ice.” Lohan didn’t use glass doors, he says, because the Evanston building code doesn’t allow them to seal off a fire stair.
Just inside the stainless steel doors, the first-floor reception area is cramped and unwelcoming. Yet things pick up with an auditorium that features a sleek, all-gray palette and a ledge that cantilevers out over a row of columns, subtly recalling the levitating presence of the exterior.
Upstairs, a thin, rectangular anteroom is handsome enough, but a bit confusing because it fails to point the way to a modest classroom-gallery located around the corner.
That minor failing is more than made up for by the main gallery, which sits in the front of the museum, and by a print and drawing found in the back of the museum. Both feature a “floating wall.” In essence, it is a drywall set flush to the museum’s outer glass wall. Strips of glass at the top and the bottom of the wall bring in natural light.
That’s a nice touch, enabling the museumgoer, who normally makes his way through a hermetically sealed environment, to feel a connection to nature and to sense the rhythms of the day.
Unfortunately, the natural light Lohan desired is doubly muted in the main gallery. First, proposed skylights were eliminated due to budget constraints. Second, the museum lowered screens of synthetic fabric over the striplike windows to protect the prints and drawings it is now displaying.
Still, the basics are well done. The main gallery has good proportions, a flexible plan that allows the creation of rooms within a room, and a ceiling treatment that confines track lighting and other mechanical equipment in the dark openings found between white ceiling panels. Here, architecture does not overwhelm art, but neither is it entirely neutral. It has quiet, gentle presence, striking the right balance between the container and what it contains.
Even better is the print and drawing study center, which is energized by a diagonal outer wall made necessary by a campus road that slices to the west of the building. The room also benefits from the fact that it is not as deep as the main gallery; thus, the light that does enter has a much greater impact.
Clearly, this is a building that has faults, but they are not so great that they undermine the integrity and intelligence of Lohan’s effort. At the Block Museum, the modernism of the millennium engages and ennobles the modernism of mid-century, and Northwestern’s campus is the better for it. Here, adding on definitely was a plus.
