Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum

A new museum respects its older neighbor while making its own stance for the present.

By Jennifer Richter

Contrasting with its predecessor but also paying homage to it, the new Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, provides a modern response to the colonnaded building that had previously housed the museum. Although built in 1967, the original museum was modeled after an antebellum plantation home. The new building designed by Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, expands the amount of exhibition and administrative spaces from roughly 4,000 square feet to 33,000 square feet and adds a new sculpture garden between it and the old museum structure. ³We decided to approach the project as a freestanding building set 30 feet behind the original museum,² explains Steve Dumez, design director of Eskew+Dumez+Ripple.

The new building is a steel-frame structure with precast-concrete walls on three sides and a glass curtain wall on the fourth side facing the old museum.  Depending on the hour of day and/or viewing angle, the glass alternates between being reflective and being transparent.  Speaking to the past, the reflection of the former museum is sometimes revealed in the new building’s curtain wall while the ensemble of old and new offers a contemporary statement in architectural design from an innovative perspective. The second story of the new building features coated glass and extends ten feet beyond the more transparent glass of the first floor.  As a result, the lower portion of the building “essentially disappears,” while the upper half  “seems to float above,” says Dumez.

As Dumez explains, the new building can “be read in opposition to the original.”  When visitors look back at the old building they see a structure that appears heavier than the new one and “rooted to the ground” while the new building appears to almost levitate.  Working with PHA Lighting Design, the architects created a lighting scheme that cast the building, every evening, in a deep blue light coming from cold cathode tubes set within a perforated metal ceiling.  In contrast, they cast the exterior of the original building in a traditional, clean, white light.

On the first floor, changing exhibit galleries sit on either side of a two-story, skylit atrium gallery, which itself does not display art but connects visitors from the lobby to the adjoining galleries.  The gallery to the left rises two stories; on the right, the architects stacked single-story galleries with the one on top looking onto the first floor and all of them borrowing daylight from the atrium.  Dumez explains that when standing in any  “exhibition gallery [visitors can] look out into the atrium gallery, where natural light is entering the building.”  From the public space on the second floor, they can see the entire sculpture garden, including the figure of the original museum building.

Formal name of project: Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum

Location: Lafayette, Louisiana

Gross square footage: 25,850 sq.ft.

Total construction cost: $6.7 Million

Completion Date: October 2003

Owner: University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Architect:
Eskew+Dumez+Ripple
365 Canal Street, Suite 3150
New Orleans, LA 70130
P: 504.561.8686
F: 504.522.2253

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