Bruce Springsteen Didn’t Want a Museum. So Architects Built a Memorial

Honoring Bruce Springsteen with a box would seem like a contradictory endeavor. How could you catch music, let alone the kind made by that rebellious maker, in a rectangular volume?

Most memorial venues dedicated to showing off the importance of a performer’s work through paraphernalia and archives are either highly expressive, as is the case in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or the (formerly Jimi Hendrix) Music Experience, or they are bland boxes whose interiors are themed.

The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music, which opened this month on the campus of Monmouth University near the sites both of his birth (Long Branch) and his first beyond-a-bar performances (on campus), does just enough to evoke the Boss without trying to build frozen music.

Building Without Hero Worship

Designed by Rick Cook, the eponymous founder of what is now, after its merger with skyscraper firm Fox & Fowle, CookFox, the building gives just enough character to its volume and shape to evoke, without imitating or picturing, what the music at hand is all about.

It is a (relatively) modest building, in keeping with the equally relative modesty of a rock and roll star billionaire who has never had any problem being called not just a, but The Boss, but who also emphasizes his roots in American folk, blues, and rock traditions, and who reverts periodically to the making of earnest protest songs in the tradition of troubadours such as Woody Guthrie (whose guitar, though not the one with the label “this machine kills fascists,” is on display here).

Springsteen apparently resisted the building of a shrine to himself and thus insisted on the name and broader emphasis. He also approved the design of the 30,000-square-foot, Corten steel-clad structure.

Blue Jeans and Rust

‘The exterior is as close to a weathered and weathering pair of work blue jeans as architecture comes. The steel, the architect claims, also evokes New Jersey’s industrial heritage of fading factories and rusting bridges and, if you squint, you can find such a robust legacy in this exhibition warehouse.

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Springsteen insisted that the ground floor be devoted to the tradition in which he works, but the top floor is a home for his jackets, scribblings, lyrics, and all the other stuff you might expect from an attempt to make a musician’s work tangible.

There are also listening stations and gimmicks like a place where you can sort-of-pretend to mix your own version of one of his songs, but overall the theming (by exhibition designers C&G Partners) is light, letting the artifacts evoke the songs in your head more than trying to hit you over the head with a virtual guitar.

Turning Down the Volume

The same is true for the ground floor, where you can admire not only Guthrie’s killing machine, but also one of Frank Sinatra’s tuxedos and one of Prince’s outfits. The architecture here is almost invisible.

It is only in the double-height lobby, where the space opens to highlight the CLT structure and there is some sense of public gathering, and in the equally modest auditorium, whose big move is to have a wall of glass facing the main Monmouth campus, that you sense the designers making something out of this black box.

Beyond these interiors, the other design elements are an entrance boardwalk made from Ipe wood that is meant to evoke the famous original in Asbury Park, and native grasses that surround the building. The Springsteen Center is, in other words, an understated and refined container that uses roughness and readiness to purpose to its full advantage.

Waiting for Clarence’s Sax

The problem, but also the advantage the Center has, is that it is not Thunder Road or Born to Run as a building. CookFox is too refined and largely corporate a firm to make anything that exuberant and anguished at the same time.

As I moved around and through the building, I kept looking for someplace where the designers had kicked out the jams, raised the level on the amps, and let Clarence’s sax scream. That moment never comes and, once I had experienced the exhibits, I understood why.

A Monument to Memory

This is a memorial to what Springsteen and American folk-based music has achieved, and as such seeks to fix his legacy in time and place—not either the built version of a Springsteen concert or a house museum.

Yes, the Center is collecting artifacts and yes, there have been and will be live performances in the auditorium, which, after all, takes up almost half the structure’s volume. But ultimately this is the equivalent of a memorial or grave site, even if the subject and, I hope, American music, are still alive.

As such, it makes memory into a form that is convincing.

The Jersey That Built The Boss

My only wish would have been that the Center had taken the next logical step and not constructed such a suburban object, but reused and opened part of the scene that produced Bruce Springsteen: those factories, piers, boardwalks, honkytonks, bars, and commercial strips that are the reality of everyday life The Boss managed to make worth looking at and, in however anguished a form, honoring.

Credits list for the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music

Owner: Monmouth University

Architect: COOKFOX Architects

Client: Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music

General Contractor: Torcon

Owner’s Project Manager: Pure Project Management

Weathering steel: Dissimilar Metal Design

Mass Timber: Timberlab

Mechanical Engineer: Dagher Engineering

Structural Engineer & Facade Consultant: DeSimone Consulting Engineering

Civil Engineer: Langan

Geo-Technical Engineer: French & Parrello Associates

Landscape Architect: LaGuardia Design Group

Exhibition & Signage Designer: C&G

Lighting Consultant: ONELux

Code Consultant: Design2147

Acoustic Consultant: Longman Lindsey now Trinity Consultants

Security Consultant: Dagher Engineering

Theater Consultant: Harvey Marshall Berling Associates

Specification Consultant: Long Green Specs

Accessibility Consultant: KMA Architecture + Accessibility

COOKFOX Architects Team:

Rick Cook, Founding Partner and Partner in Charge; Zach Craun, Associate Partner;

Charlene Chai, Senior Associate, Interior; Remon Alberts, Senior Associate, Exterior;

Dan Brammer; Miha Brezavšček; Darin Reynolds; Caroline Kraska; Jeffrey Shiozaki; Jacob

Swaim.

The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.

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