Jane and Arthur Stieren Center for exhibitions

Jean-Paul Viguier’s expansion to the McNay Art Museum gives the Spanish Colonial Revival building a Modernist companion

By Charles Linn, FAIA

Marion Koogler McNay gave San Antonians their first taste of Modern art when she opened her private collection to the public in the 1940s. Her collection, developed over the preceding decades, included work by Cézanne, Van Gogh, and other European Modern masters, as well as Americans, including Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast. The venue was the oil-fortune heiress and painter’s Spanish Colonial Revival mansion, which overlooks magnificently landscaped gardens. Built in 1928, the house is considered one of the finest examples of its type in the city and is a favorite field trip for schoolchildren and their art teachers. Thanks to McNay’s estate, and the largess of many other donors, thousands of additional works have been added to the collection since her death in 1950.

Program

It is not easy to make a house a home, and that is particularly true if it is a home for art. As a place for viewing the McNay’s collection of Native American art, the mansion’s stenciled wood-beam ceilings; extravagant, hand-painted ceramic tile; and wrought-iron grillework could hardly be more fitting. But Modern and postwar works from the collection — particularly the smaller paintings and sculpture­ — are easily overwhelmed by the abundant detailing and the building’s heavily textured stucco walls.

At 45,000 square feet, the existing McNay is modestly sized. To do its collection justice, a lot more space appropriate for work of varying scales was needed. The mansion’s small rooms and wandering floor plan also made organizing exhibitions into coherent sequences difficult.

Daylight, humidity, and heat are three things in plentiful supply in central Texas, and they are the enemy of most art and its conservators. Back in the 1920s, when the museum was a home, architects simply blocked them out, and this is again one of the difficulties of making the mansion into a museum. The problem of climate control was solved long ago when the building was air-conditioned, but lighting was another matter. As a means of drawing out subtleties of color in their purest forms, daylight is unrivaled. Its use also typically reduces the amount of energy required for electric lighting, which in museums is generally second only to the amount used for air-conditioning. If the technical problems of introducing natural light into a space can be overcome, it provides a huge advantage as far as energy-efficiency and aesthetics are concerned. But it would be very difficult to bring daylight into the McNay mansion without sacrificing wood ceilings and dramatically altering the Spanish-tile roof.

Solution

The Jean and Arthur Stieren Center for Exhibitions, designed by French architect Jean-Paul Viguier, is for all practical purposes an entirely separate building. Tucked quietly behind a gently sloping berm east of the McNay mansion, it doubles the size of the original museum. The steel-framed building is simple: A pair of honed, gray-green stone walls bookend what is, for most of its length, a three-story, south-facing glass facade. Two narrow galleries stacked on top of each other sit immediately behind this window wall and look out to four sculpture gardens. The gardens, separated from each other by additional stone walls, lie perpendicular to the facade, itself shaded by deep overhangs. One enters the lobby at the west end of the extension, where it joins the existing building. An 8,000-square-foot gallery on the opposite side of the lobby satisfies the museum’s need for a large, flexible display space for the collection and traveling exhibitions.

The gallery’s overhead daylighting system is its most noteworthy feature. The daylights are made from fritted, laminated glass capable of supporting the weight of a person and equipment, necessary during cleaning and maintenance. Located above the daylights are a pair of horizontally mounted roller shades. One is a light-colored, perforated fabric that can be moved when more light is needed. A second, made from blackout cloth, can darken the gallery if required. Steel gables support the exterior glazing, and the whole assemblage is shaded by metal louvers.

Commentary

The program presented to Jean-Paul Viguier was the same as that proposed by museums to many architects: Expand what we have. After that, things got slightly more complicated. Depending on the ambitions of a given museum’s director and the ideals of its major patrons, a designer’s approach to an existing structure may land anywhere between disciplined, cerebral restraint (think Renzo Piano’s Morgan Library in New York) and a spectacular kiss-off (Steven Holl’s expansion of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City comes to mind). The decision to make a clean break of it in San Antonio, which is not quite as far to the right as Crawford, Texas, but is still very conservative, was surely not an easy one. The safe thing would have been to weld a giant Taco Bell onto the hacienda and call it a day.

But taking the easy way out would not in any way have honored the legacy of Marion Koogler McNay. She assembled an enviable collection of contemporary art at a time when even New York collectors were intimidated by some of the work she acquired. Viguier’s straightforward and spare solution suits this forward-looking spirit, and integrated into the earth as it is, the addition avoids the sense of weightlessness that many recent U.S. museum projects have turned into a cliché. It is also tightly detailed. The system of louvers and shades fills the main gallery with perfect white, shadow-free daylight. The most difficult part of any extension is the transition between new and old. Here, you cross a threshold just off the Stieren’s lobby to find yourself in a minor back gallery deep inside the old mansion. Although a map could tell you where you are, it will not tell you why you are there. This awkward rear entrance does not live up to the design’s overall logic. Admittedly, McNay was independent; maybe she would have approved such an abrupt, albeit surprising, transition.

Gross square footage: Extension: 4000 m2 / Auditorium: 225 seats

Completion Date: June 2008

Total construction cost: $22,000,000

Owner: McNay Museum

Architect:
Jean-Paul Viguier SA d’Architecture
16 rue du Champ de l’Alouette
75013 Paris FRANCE
Phone : + 33 1 44 08 62 00
FAX : +33 1 44 08 62 02

share: more »

resources | editorial calendar | submit work | contact us | about us | call for entries | site map | back issues | advertise | terms of use | privacy notice | my account
© The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved