We live once again in the twilight of idols and icons. The architecture firms that have defined so much of the discipline for the last three or four decades—from single-person shops like those run by Frank Gehry, FAIA, Tadao Ando, Hon. FAIA, Jean Nouvel, Hon. FAIA, Daniel Libeskind, FAIA, or Wolf Prix, Hon. FAIA, to collaboratives such as Herzog & de Meuron, Foster + Partners, and what is now RSHP (formerly Richard Roger’s outfit)—are in those end-of-career years, doomed to repeat rather tired formulas as they design by now familiar building types over and over again with little restraint from clients or users. The same can be said of Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture, but that firm’s salvation might be that its standard mode of operation has been to tweak types, break formulas, and make things that do not answer to expectations. It has been making deliberately odd and sometimes even ugly buildings since the 1980s and, though the results are not always brilliant, at least they often contribute to a rethinking not only of architecture, but also of the institutions for which the firm builds.
A case in point is the renovations of and additions to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y. Now rebranded as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (the “G” is for Jeffrey Gundlach, the major funder of the operation; the State of New York was the other major source of the budget), the result of OMA’s efforts is a combination of deliberately awkward forms in strange positions and an equally purposeful set of almost invisible design acts that never quite add up to the kind of statement we have come to expect from our cultural monuments. There is no soaring atrium, no grand staircase, no progression through the lines of skylit galleries. Instead, there are distended and deformed fragments and echoes of all those elements dispersed around the site.
The first act by Shohei Shigematsu, the OMA partner in charge of the project, after the firm’s initial (and, truth be told, rather more conventional) master plan was rejected due to community input was to clear the field, quite literally, by taking the cars that had long occupied the forecourt to the Neoclassical 1905 original building (referred to as the Albright now) and placing them in a single parking level underground. This let OMA restore the grass lawn that had once fronted the museum building that was built at the edge of a large, Frederick Law Olmsted–designed municipal park. The firm then set about meticulously restoring both the temple-fronted set of galleries and the humble addition (the Knox) designed by native son Gordon Bunshaft in 1962. Walking through the existing rooms, you would be hard-pressed to find anything other than a few carefully executed details to evidence OMA’s work.
The first hint of something new is a low dome you can see from that lawn peaking over the top of the Modernist addition. It is, in fact, a new covering over what had been a garden courtyard. Here is indeed one of the cliches of modern museum architecture, a combination party space where the trustees can congratulate themselves on their beneficence, a rental facility for the usual weddings and corporate events, a seating area for the restaurant, and an access point to the gift shop. You can use it without paying a ticket, so the museum can also claim it as part of its community outreach effort.
The dome is, however, not a design by OMA, though the firm helped detail its computer-generated pattern of continually twisting diamond-patterned glass in a steel frame. It is a work of art by Sebastian Behmann and Olafur Eliasson, who has been specializing in these kind of light-refracting objects for a while now. Here the dome drips down into an off-center column canting down to provide structural support and enliven the atrium space. Thus there is no architecture here, only art that has escaped from the gallery to engage a wider public.
Where OMA finally makes its statement is the roughly 50,000-square-foot pavilion named for Gundlach, formally known as The Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building. It is here that the firm’s play with expectations finally reaches monumental proportions. The building is an independent object that, like the Albright, faces the resodded lawn, though at a right angle. It is symmetrical, at least seen from the front, where it presents itself as a large, rectangular glass plane framed in stone. You could see it as an abstraction of the grand, though long unused central entrance of the Albright’s Greek temple. The new building also indicates its “piano nobile” or main (second) floor, which lines up with the old one, with another stone line. If you squint, you could even think of the canted, curving glass that covers the top two levels of the pavilion as a new version of the Albright’s pediment kitty corner from it.
The deformations of the Gundlach pavilion’s shape, which continue all the way around the building, frustrate your sense of this as a monument that sits within a recognizable tradition, though. It is an object that refuses to follow the rules of front, side, and back, or bottom, middle, and top, or a hierarchy of more important and luxurious materials played off against more humble infill. It has all those elements, but then breaks the rules: a bottom, but no top; a front, but then no sides and back; marble, but only in thin strips overwhelmed by glass.
The new structure also connects to its older counterpart through an umbilical cord raised on oddly placed concrete columns. This passageway allows for movement at that main floor level between the buildings, while affording visitors some nice views of the buildings, the park, and the street, but it also has a practical purpose: The Gundlach wing contains new art receiving and handling spaces the complex had lacked, and the slightly sloped connector lets the museum’s staff move the crates back and forth.
OMA continues the plays with expectations inside the Gundlach Building. Yes, you enter through double sliding doors in the middle of the front façade, and you can see a two-story atrium in front of you. But then you have to turn to reach the reception and ticket desk and the grand stair, which is a spiral tucked into the building’s corner. What you thought was the main space is actually just a double-height gallery that leads to one other display space.
On the levels above, the remaining new galleries are perfectly serviceable, white-walled rooms; the top floor ones even have skylights, which most curators these days seem to eschew. The circulation is not through these rooms, however, but occupies a kind of terrace completely surrounding the display spaces and enclosed by a continually changing glass curtain draped from the corners of the top floor and held at the corners of the lower level. There is seating here, and small café, but this is no grand atrium, only a glorified set of corridors.
In what has by now become another hallmark of OMA’s purposeful perversity, the most sensual and luxurious spaces are in the basement: a curving room lined by copper lockers and the adjacent bathrooms, marked by tile-clad swoops and scallops defining stalls and walls.
Does it all work? Is it beautiful? I am not sure. The relationships between the old, new, and renovated buildings seem awkward, but in a way that is also fun (coursing through that connector), functional, and affords a variety of experiences to see both art and people. The Buffalo AKG now provides all the elements that go into most museum experiences, even if they are in places and forms that sometimes seem, albeit purposefully, off. The Gundlach Building is grand, but it would be difficult to think of it as beautiful, let alone embodying a sense of civic aspiration in the manner of the original structure.
It is the very fact that I think that these questions are unanswerable that gives me hope that OMA, under Shigematsu’s and his cohort’s leadership, might still have a few tricks up its sleeve that argue for the firm’s relevance in architecture. Whether that might be of importance beyond our field is another question that might also not have an answer, though the Buffalo AKG’s popularity in the first months since its opening, with more than 80,000 visitors streaming through its doors, is promising.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes looks at LUMA Arles in France, Assemble's Baltic Street Adventure Playground, and new books by critics Catherine Ingraham and Todd Gannon.
