ARTISTS have long been drawn to this part of the world by the sharp clarity of the light and the saturated colors of the sky. The Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron set out to capture those local qualities of inspiration in their design for a new Parrish Art Museum here on the eastern end of Long Island.
Typically, architects design museums with the art collection in mind; here, the architects also sought to design a museum befitting the artists. The two concepts are in any case intertwined, given that the Parrish’s collection embraces American art from the 19th century to the present day, particularly art created on the island.
In preparing to build from the ground up at a former tree nursery just two miles east of the museum’s current home, an Italianate-style building on Job’s Lane, the architects visited studios of artists both living (Chuck Close, Ross Bleckner) and dead (Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein). In studying their living and working conditions, they gained a sense of how local painters and sculptors became attached to the area. 英语文摘
They observed how artists created their studios in former farm buildings, sheds and shacks and oriented those spaces around the northern light. They noted that those work environments were kept open and spare — with white walls and white floors in many cases — and chatted with artists about the nuances of Long Island light.
“That’s how we start,” said Ascan Mergenthaler, the Herzog & de Meuron partner supervising the project. “The building has to be about the community, how the art is made.”
“Every time we came here, there was a different light and different sky, but always amazing,” he said. “It was important to bring that into the gallery spaces.” The architects also met with about 40 artists from the region.
“We talked about the respect for light,” said Michelle Stuart, a sculptor who attended one of the sessions. “It sounded like they were listening to the artists.”
Construction of the museum is expected to begin this fall, with a tentative opening date of June 2009.
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The museum had outgrown its current building, an 1898 brick structure that lacks sufficient space for major exhibitions, storage and educational activities.
The architects’ response to the 14-acre site in Water Mill was to spread about 30 modest, low-slung buildings over the area, sandwiched between the Montauk Highway and the Long Island Rail Road tracks. With their varying shapes, angular roofs and local vegetation, the buildings look to be growing out of the ground.
The architects sought to strike a balance between honoring the prevailing local aesthetic — wood shingles, brick, farmhouse construction — and creating something strikingly modern. Several different building materials are under consideration, including brick, sand, glass, metal and wood.
The rooftops are slanted along the north ridge to bring the sun into the simple boxy galleries. Large skylights afford open upward views and are made of translucent glass to diffuse the light. The parking, arranged in a loop partly submerged in the ground, avoids the feel of a sprawling lot and leaves sight lines unimpeded by cars. 1604英语
Mr. Mergenthaler said the layout was inspired in part by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art north of Copenhagen, whose buildings are strung out in a verdant park overlooking a sound. “Architecturally, it’s not interesting, but it has a nice feeling because it’s so integrated into the landscape, the way it flows through it,” he said.
The architects started with a bubble diagram, a sketch used to propose an arrangement of spaces for a landscape environment or structure, with each bubble representing a component — for example, administration or exhibition. Eventually the bubble diagram became literal, with the new Parrish conceived as a complex of low buildings that flow into one another. “It’s really a loose collection of houses,” Mr. Mergenthaler said.
Green areas and meandering paths lend a casual and serendipitous air to the visitors’ circulation pattern. “It was very important for us to do something which was very much Long Island, which was very much Southampton,” Mr. Mergenthaler said, “only using indigenous plants, working with the seasons because the seasons change so much.” mmkey.net
Trudy C. Kramer, the museum’s director, said the architects “built this design around the experience of this place.”
Given the scale and prominence of some of Herzog & de Meuron’s previous projects — the Tate Modern in London (2000); the new de Young Museum in San Francisco, which opened last October; and the Walker Art Center expansion in Minneapolis (April 2005) — the Parrish may seem like small potatoes.
“The reason we wanted to do it was because of the location, the people,” Mr. Mergenthaler said, adding, “We’re
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