Southern Utah Museum of Art

Constraints give rise to formal and material creativity in this new art museum for Southern Utah University.

There’s a certain architectural quality to the bright red sandstone mountains, sharp canyons, and curving rock formations of Southwest Utah’s high desert. For Los Angeles–based Brooks + Scarpa’s design of the Southern Utah Museum of Art, a new 28,000-square-foot museum and gallery associated with Southern Utah University in Cedar City, the monumental topography of the region was an almost unavoidable influence. “It’s literally a wall that’s the backdrop of the city,” says Lawrence Scarpa, FAIA.

The area’s natural forms inspired what Scarpa calls the museum’s two major design moves: a sloping roof that cantilevers 120 feet over a cavelike 6,000-square-foot open-air event space, and the flowing geometries of the gray-white plaster walls inside. “We put 80 percent of the budget in 20 percent of the space so the rest can be neutral and unoffensive,” Scarpa says.

The museum itself is relatively simple, with one main gallery, a large classroom, offices, and some back-of-house storage. Windows line most of the building’s north and west ends, creating clear views from the surrounding neighborhood into the museum, which is part of the $39 million Beverley Taylor Sorenson Center for the Arts campus, also master planned by Brooks + Scarpa.

“You can see the artwork in the museum from the street,” Scarpa says. “I wanted the gallery to have a presence to the community and onto the street. So to make it all glass, 20 feet high, it really needed a deep overhang.”

The cantilever at the west end provides the necessary shading to protect the artwork within while also defining a programmable outdoor space. The smooth plaster blends from walls into ceilings and moves through the glass into the gallery itself. This geologic fluidity continues on the roof, with a subtle bow tie form directing drainage into two canyons at each end of the building that form tiny waterfalls of runoff on the façade in the wet months. It’s an elegant solution for a snowy region, but not so intuitive for a contractor to build. To translate, the architects relied on Grasshopper and other 3D modeling programs. “We developed a series of scripts where we can pretty easily describe and rationalize the geometry for complex shapes and make them easy to understand and therefore easy to price,” Scarpa says.

The built result is remarkably similar to the 3D design. Though a significant amount of the budget went into the museum’s silky features, the contractors were able to achieve some savings through the use of precast concrete panels to clad the flat façades. The lack of drainage equipment and the maintenance they’d require also helped bring down the costs to about $250 per square foot. “We did a lot of little things that add up to significant dollars,” Scarpa says. “I think you do better work when you have some constraints.”

Project Credits
Project: Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City, Utah
Client: Southern Utah University
Design Architect: Brooks + Scarpa, Los Angeles . Lawrence Scarpa, FAIA (lead designer); Angela Brooks, FAIA (project architect); Emily Hodgdon, Mark Buckland, Chinh Nguyen, Diane Thepkhounphithack, Assoc. AIA, Cesar Delgado, Mario Cipresso, AIA, Brooklyn Short, Royce Scortino, Sheida Roghani, Assoc. AIA, Ryan Bostic, Assoc. AIA (project design team)
Local Architect: Blalock & Partners Architectural Design Studio, Salt Lake City, Utah
Structural Engineer: Reaveley Engineers + Associates
Mechanical Engineer: Van Boerum & Frank Associates
Electrical Engineer/Lighting: BNA Consulting Group
Lighting: Luminescence Design
Civil Engineer: Insite Engineering, Surveying & Landscape Architecture
Landscape: Brooks + Scarpa; Coen + Partners; G. Brown Design
Acoustics: Fisher Dachs Associates
Specifications: Blalock & Partners Architectural Design Studio
Contractor: Big D Construction
Size: 28,000 square feet
Cost: $8 million