Roanoke Reborn
23. Mar, 2010 
1 Comment
The central atrium draws Roanokians in and offers a new public space to the city beyond.
By Clay Risen
From high atop Mill Mountain, overlooking downtown Roanoke, the first thing one notices about the new Taubman Museum of Art is how unnoticeable it is. This is no mean feat. The $65 million building, designed by Frank Gehry acolyte Randall Stout, has all the markings of the Gehry brand: an undulating steel roof, dramatic glass enclosures, and an asymmetrical parti.
But Stout, a 46-year-old Tennessean based in Los Angeles, said that context, not confabulation, was his primary goal for the design in “nesting the building within the complexities of the site.” Complex is right: wedged between a downtown street grid, a steep viaduct, and an active rail yard (all under the gaze of the Blue Ridge Mountains) the triangular site is at once urban, industrial, and idyllic.
And yet somehow, Stout makes it all work. The building, which houses the former Art Museum of Western Virginia collection, absorbs its surroundings, but it also enhances them. It is undeniably contemporary, and yet it is so perfectly contextual that it’s hard to imagine anything else in its place.
The museum rests against the railroad tracks that define the northern edge of downtown. Image courtesy Randall Stout Architects. Plan courtesy Randall Stout Architects.
The museum has two distinct facades. On its southern side, along Salem Avenue, it sits at the end of a block of three-story brick buildings, the northern edge of Roanoke’s revitalized downtown core. Stout placed a stone wall—an element he continues inside—along the edge of the building, softening the visual transition between brick and steel.
Rather than setting the museum off from the street, Stout brings it right to the sidewalk. The glass-clad first floor, mostly occupied by the gift shop, continues the scale of the street wall and alternately reflects the brick buildings across Salem and invites window shoppers into the building.
Stout's team delivered gallery space for the museum's permanent collection as well as flexible spaces for traveling shows. Tim Hursley, photographer.
The museum’s northern façade, on the other hand, fronts the Norfolk Southern railroad tracks and is almost completely windowless. Here plates of steel and brown-patinaed zinc collide violently, echoing the tectonic forces that created the rugged Roanoke landscape and giving the museum an aggressive, industrial strength wholly absent on the southern side.
Out-of-town visitors, however, will most likely first encounter the museum as they enter downtown along the Williamson Road viaduct, to its immediate east. Here Stout achieves his most heroic moves: a towering glass spike shoots 75 feet above the museum’s lobby, while a dramatic cantilevered terrace juts out beside it.
The lobby itself is equally impressive. Bathed in light despite the 50 percent tinted glass, the vast open space acts as a hub for various activities: the gift shop, an auditorium, a ground-floor gallery, ticketing, and a café, as well as a broad glass-and-maple staircase leading upstairs to the main galleries.
Tim Hursley, photographer.
The mix of materials extends inside. Stone walls are juxtaposed against white drywall, steel, and glass, while zinc plating climbs above the auditorium entrance, just beyond the gift shop. Stout overdoes it slightly by leaving exposed many of the steel structural members that hold up the soaring glass walls, but at least he manages to bring the exterior’s industrial theme inside.
Stout achieves a delicate balance of convention and unorthodoxy with his varied second-floor galleries. Soft, blond maple floors and 16-foot ceilings run throughout the rooms, but there the similarities end.
The galleries along the right-hand side are standard jewel boxes, though exceptionally wrought. The first two, designed for temporary exhibits, are interconnected sets of white walls, underlined by a one-inch black reveal at their base. Appropriately, they feel like blank canvases, equally ready to hold paintings, photography, or video screens.
In contrast, the next two galleries, which house the museum’s permanent collection of 19th and early 20th century American art, have an urbane, National Gallery sensibility. Three-inch maple baseboards and door frames quietly change the floor into a shallow, engulfing pan. The walls are fronted in painted gypsum board (one room in red, the other blue) a few inches smaller on all sides than the walls, a white frame that gives the rooms both structure and delicacy.
At the intersection of two major rail lines and where the highway meets city streets, the museum stands as a beacon for visitors. Tim Hursley, photographer.
The right-hand galleries may be all orthogonal angles, but those on the left are defined by curves. In one gallery, set aside for rotations from the contemporary collection, three different ceiling heights, up to 25 feet, sweep down on visitors; another sports a swooping lintel in its doorframe; and yet another, home to a collection of jeweled handbags, is almost perfectly round.
The hallway itself is a wide thoroughfare—that may be too wide given the expected daily attendance of 500 visitors—terminating in a huge bay window looking out at the museum’s western lawn. It’s a bold gesture with a calming effect: in the midst of swoops and art and curves and undulating ceilings, this view onto lush green space is a moment for pause and reflection.
The best view in the museum, though, is at the other end of the hall, looking out onto the lobby atop the entry stairs. From there you can see a progression of local icons: a neon coffee sign, another for Dr. Pepper, and in the distance the giant star atop Mill Mountain.
Looking out over the city, the museum promises to revitalize a city that has a tradition of being an arts hub. Tim Hursley, photographer.
The museum is not without its shortcomings. Most significantly, the galleries, set above and aside from the lobby, are cast as the museum’s madwoman in the attic; one wonders if, having built a radical structure in a skeptically conservative town, Stout didn’t want to push the envelope too far by forcing the art front and center.
But even if the galleries’ second-fiddle location was a political move, Stout still could have given them more square footage by narrowing the hallway. The current space may be enough for today’s needs, but it doesn’t leave much room for large touring exhibits or future expansion of the collection.
Stout's sketches evoke the hinge point that the museum occupies in a city defined by infrastructure. Image courtesy Randall Stout Architects.
Fortunately, a past crisis in the building’s development presents an opportunity. The plans had originally called for an IMAX theater to occupy much of the southwestern corner of the museum. But by the time it was axed, in 2005, the building was too far along to adjust. The result is an awkward ground-floor flex space, reachable only via a glass-enclosed hallway between the gift shop and Salem Avenue, and a massive steel bulge on the second floor that dominates the eastern end of Salem but is currently unused (it was supposed to house the theater’s projection equipment). A little retrofitting could easily make both these spaces accessible from inside the museum.
Additional space could be carved out of the third floor, too, currently home to the museum’s offices and board room. This is the only way to access the building’s grand cantilevered terrace, and it would be a shame if the museum decided to keep such a visible, impressive feature out of the public’s hands.
Stout, who apparently asked to rework the building after the IMAX cancellation but was rebuffed, seems to have very definite hopes for near-term expansion. At a panel discussion during the opening festivities, he floated the possibility of moving the administrative offices to museum-owned property on the other side of the Williamson Road viaduct and filling the emptied offices with gallery space.
The Taubman Museum of Art is hardly perfect. But, Stout should nevertheless win praise for bringing a massive piece of contemporary design to western Virginia—and even more for making the museum look like it’s always belonged there.
Clay Risen is a staff editor for The New York Times.
Taubman Museum of Art
Architect: Randall Stout Architects (Randall Stout, AIA, principal in charge); Rodriguez Ripley Maddux Motley (Benjamin Motley, AIA, principal in charge; Peter Clapsaddle, AIA, project manager)
Contractor: Balfour Beatty Construction, LLC (David Salzer)
Owner: Taubman Museum of Art (Georgeanne Bingham, museum director)
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Writers love to write, and as long as they’re writing SOMETHING they don’t seem to care much about what they’re actually writing, as long as they’re writing, and especially when they’re getting paid for it. This building fails in all kinds of ways and this piece is little more than a press release.
The building does not, in any conceivable way, look like it’s always belonged there. What it looks like is the outcome of a fight between Thom Mayne and Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind, in which each architect resigned himself to designing one part of the building. This is just a shiny version of Victorian eclecticism at work. It’s a billboard for the museum, easily visible (like all billboards) from the interstate.
The museum doesn’t relate to the city context other than simply being located within the city. Its material and formal qualities have little if anything to do with the mountains, the nearby Norfolk and Southern railyard, the historic fabric of Roanoke, or even the elevated highway that passes mere feet from the building. I don’t know if the architect or the client is more responsible for the final outcome, but it’s truly an eyesore and a missed opportunity to integrate the museum into the downtown context. I know it was a difficult site but the final result is not a considered response to any of the limiting factors that the author of this article brings up.
Somber is often better and I wish that the Taubman, which continues to struggle despite this would-be Bilbao in the Appalachians, would have gone with a more conservative architect. The museum’s board took a risk with trendy architecture, which should be applauded, but they really should have practiced a little restraint. The result is just a pastiche of tired 90s museum cliches. It’s a bland, boring work that could have gone anywhere in the world. It has nothing to do with Roanoke. It’s sad that the Taubman chose starchitecture over substance.