Beauty and the Burchfield
How successful is the design of the region’s latest art museum, the Burchfield-Penney Art Center?
A major criticism of the Burchfield- Penney Art Center, where two years of construction finally wrapped up last week, is that it doesn’t look like an art museum.
To drivers and pedestrians catching sight of it from Elmwood Avenue, the building’s 148-foot-long curved wall, clad in rectangular panels of gray zinc, provides no clue to the grandeur of the center’s interior.
The public opening of the building is still more than two months away, but the exterior has already been garnering criticism from local residents, most who are happy to have a new museum in town but disappointed by the building’s gray, windowless facade.
According to the building’s designers, the museum’s imposing exterior was designed more to intrigue than deceive. The sleek, unembellished building serves as an intentional counterpoint to its neo-classical neighbor across the street, said Charles Gwathmey of Gwathmey Siegel and Associates Architects, which designed the art center.
“It’s meant to be the opposite of the Albright-Knox, the classic vernacular, the known language. And this is more in counterpoint, as if the Albright- Knox put a piece of sculpture in their courtyard, it would be this,” said Gwathmey, who visited the center Thursday with his partner Robert Siegel and architect Steve Sudak to deliver a speech to the museum’s staff and major donors.
The new 84,000-square-foot museum, located at the corner of Elmwood Avenue and Rockwell Road on the Buffalo State College campus, is bracketed on the east by the Albright- Knox’s two lauded buildings — E. B. Green’s symmetrically neoclassical 1905 original and Gordon Bunshaft’s strikingly modern 1962 addition — and on the west by the massive, sinister towers of the Richardson Olmsted complex. Gwathmey described the new Burchfield-Penney as an expansion of the pre-existing architectural landscape rather than a reaction to it; an addition meant to inject a new sensibility into a zone that has seen little new construction in the last 50 years.
The architects of Gwathmey Siegel are no strangers to working in the shadow of past greats. The firm designed the restrained and highly praised addition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan as well as the additions to Paul Rudolph’s School of Architecture at Yale University and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, among hundreds of other projects including hotels, university expansions, museums, libraries and office buildings.
A piece of sculpture
Local arts aficionados already know the work of the firm from its design of the $50 million Center for the Arts on the University at Buffalo’s North Campus. That project included one of the firm’s only major performance spaces, which came under criticism for its vertiginous angles and imperfect acoustics.
Gwathmey and Siegel think of the Burchfield-Penney as a piece of sculpture, one that is very much in keeping with the cool, often restrained modernism that has made the pair into so-called “starchitects” over the past half-century.
They approached the building’s design as if it were “an abstract object in a garden,” Gwathmey said. “It has a different connotation than a traditional building.”
And that’s exactly what has ruffled so many feathers in the community.
For Daniel Sack, a longtime Burchfield-Penney member and Elmwood Village resident whose views mirror those of many opponents to the new museum’s design, the building is nothing short of a scar on a stretch of historically significant architecture.
Sack called out Buffalo State College and Gwathmey Siegel for positioning the building with its long, curved backside to the main Elmwood Avenue thoroughfare, a gesture he called offensive.
“Functionally, what’s offensive is that the part of the building that faces the main street that it’s located on has no transparency,” Sack said. “Anything you read on urban design, anything you observe without reading, shows that people like to know where the entrance of the building is when they approach it.”
In planning reports produced by the museum before the building was commissioned, an issue often discussed was the idea of communicating accessibility to the community. But by most measures, the monolithic wall facing Elmwood does the opposite.
“I wonder why they didn’t do that at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art or the Guggenheim or any number of buildings, the Whitney, the Albright-Knox, the Historical Society,” said Sack, who noted he had not yet seen the inside of the structure.
Karl Frizlen, head of Buffalo’s Frizlen Group architecture firm, takes issue with a planning process for the new art center that he says excluded or ignored significant input from the community. The Elmwood Village Association’s design committee, on which he serves, had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to get the Burchfield-Penney to hand over plans for the building in early 2006.
The result of the closed process, he said, is a building that is closed off to the community it is meant to serve.
Community closed out
“The building, functionally, doesn’t do much for the community in terms of transparency, accessibility and openness. It’s more like a campus building than a community building,” Frizlen said, referring to the wall facing Elmwood.
Frizlen’s small firm is headquartered in the Brisbane Building downtown and is responsible for a number of renovations of historic properties and new builds, including the Lu Modern Classics building at 504 Elmwood Ave. and a proposed mixed-use space in the former KFC building at the corner of Elmwood and Bryant.
Frizlen also acknowledged that he had not seen the inside of the building, but that the pictures he’s seen look “phenomenal.” Like many opponents of the building, Frizlen isn’t wholly opposed to the project but views it as a missed opportunity.
“What I’m saying is that it could have been more,” Frizlen said. “They could have also done something for the community, and that’s not the case.”
Buffalo State President Muriel
A. Howard defended the decision to position the center’s entrance toward the college itself, agreeing with Burchfield- Penney Director Ted Pietrzak that an entrance facing Elmwood Avenue was impossible because of concerns about an adequate transportation drop-off.
“I think once we finish the landscaping and do all the other work that has to be done around the exterior of the building, it will look less like a monolith. It will be inviting,” Howard said.
Protecting the art
But, she added, “A museum that’s focused on typically watercolor [paintings] — and any museum — is just not going to have that very open look because you are displaying art, and you do have to protect it as much as possible from the light.”
Gwathmey, who has encountered his share of community opposition to the dozens of buildings his firm has designed, was not surprised that some community members aren’t exactly thrilled with his vision for the new museum.
“It’s always the way,” Gwathmey said. “Time moves on. Change is important. Art continues,” he said. “If you don’t risk, I mean, what’s the point of replicating? Why would you be an artist if you were going to do what’s been done before? You have to be your own inventor.”
