The mistake that still hasn’t been fixed: The National Gallery of Art’s East Building
A 2009 book examined NGA failures surrounding the design I.M. Pei-designed East Building
Published on Modern Art Notes on May 11–12, 2009
Sometime between now and the end of President Obama’s first term, the National Gallery of Art will likely settle upon a renovation plan for its East Building. Perhaps coincidentally, the National Gallery has published a substantial new volume on the East Building: A Modernist Museum in Perspective. The book consists of papers delivered at a 2004 symposium organized by the NGA’s Center for Advanced Study in the
Visual Arts and was edited by University of Texas professor Anthony Alofsin.)
The book is a reminder that 30 years after the East Building opened, the I.M. Pei-designed landmark is still one of the most controversial museum buildings in America. As you might expect from an NGA-organized symposium presented in an NGA-published book (that was distributed by Yale University Press), contributors line up in praise of the East Building — sort of. The topic they mostly don’t address says as much as the topics they do: While scholar after scholar examines the building as civic center, as America’s Lobby, as a product of late-1960s, early-1970’s design, what’s most striking is that none of the book’s 11 contributors has much of anything to say about the building’s galleries. In a book that takes admiration as its jumping-off point, that absence is effectively an acknowledgement that the East Building presents art terribly, that it was a failure.
As the NGA’s administrators and trustees determine the scope of the forthcoming renovation, they’d be wise to learn from their own publication, to take it as a case-study that explains how the East Building happened, what went right and wrong and why, and what the next steps might be.
First: The success. Architect Richard Gluckman has called the East Building “a monumental piece of sculpture,” and he’s right. It is the most significant and beautiful structure on the National Mall. The library, while technologically out-of-date, is a wonderful, inviting place to work and study, and the NGA’s offices provide ideal views of the U.S. Capitol.
As Universite du Quebec a Montreal professor Rejean Legault details in an engaging essay, the materials and craftsmanship in the East Building are top-notch. They should be: The 450,000-square foot building cost $320 million in [2009] dollars. By comparison, Steven Holl’s brilliant 165,000-square-foot Bloch Building for the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City also features superb workmanship and the creative use of materials. It cost $86 million.
(Legault is also one of the few essayists to subtly address the East Building’s failings. He carefully refers to “the contradiction between the building’s formal and functional expressions.”)
The most illuminating essay in the book comes from Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, a lecturer at the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Nitzan-Shiftan examines how the NGA came to be sited as it was, how Pei designed it to aestheticize democratic concepts and to symbolize Americans’ relationship to the capital city and to their government. To be sure, this building-as-microcosm-of-the-republic was a little bit of marketing BS: Nitzan-Shiftan notes that Pei cannily chose Yann Weymouth as his collaborator on the East Building. At the time Weymouth just happened to be the son-in-law of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and a political activist with ties to the Kennedy clan.
Of special interest as the NGA is considering renovation plans is Nitzan-Shiftan’s description of the planning of the building as almost anti-art. She writes that the NGA leadership originally wanted to call the building “The National Art Center” but was steered toward calling it “The National Gallery of Art Educational Services Building” as a way of playing to a national mood that favored education and betterment. Nitzan-Shiftan goes on to detail the concepts that the NGA leadership thought were important to manifest in the building’s design, including that it be a place that would “symbolize the activities of the Gallery and its dissemination of information at every level, from that of the specialist to the first-grade teacher.” Pei himself described his building as being motivated by creating a “very important center for social and artistic life in Washington.”
In other words: As the building was being planned, the display of art was not a motivating concern. The result was the preposterously over-sized atrium which effectively precluded the construction and placement of coherent gallery space.
The University of Pennsylvania’s David B. Brownlee says that’s because the building wasn’t particularly informed by art museums: “Pei’s East Building can be better understood when it is seen as part of this development of a popular American modern architecture, which includes shopping malls and splashy hotels.”
As it turns out there’s a reason that the East Building has come to feel like an expensive Embassy Suites: No fewer than three scholars in “A Modernist Museum” trace the NGA’s atrium less to central interior museo-courtyards (such as the one on the NGA’s John Russell Pope-designed West Building) than to John Portman’s Atlanta Hyatt Regency Hotel in Atlanta (1965–67).
Nitzan-Shiftan also sources the atrium in the NGA administration’s near fear of showing art. She finds that then-NGA-director J. Carter Brown was concerned about giving visitors too much art to look at:
[In 1969]… Carter Brown returned from a museum directors’ conference in Mexico where behavioral scientists discussed the “anxiety syndrome” of museum visitors, who felt, according to researchers, either overloaded with information or frustrated by lack of orientation. Brown further reported on “the ‘erratic exploratory locomotion’ of museum visitors that recalls… a rat in a maze,” wanting one thing only — to get out. The objective was to “captivate but not process the visitor,” they said, claiming that the ideal pre-fatigue museum experience should not exceed forty-five minutes to one hour of walking in roughly ten thousand square feet of space.
No surprise then that scholar after scholar reports that when it came to the East Building, art was always kind of an afterthought. The University of Chicago’s Neil Harris notes that by 1990 this shortcoming became so obvious that Brown claimed he’d asked Pei’s firm to make the exhibition spaces larger and the atrium smaller — and that Pei said no. (Harris seems skeptical that Brown ever actually did so, noting that one reason Brown chose Pei was his interest in big museo-atriums, as demonstrated in Pei’s design for (and Brown’s admiration of) the Everson in Syracuse, NY. Says Harris: “[T]he East Building, in its early stage, was meant primarily to house activities rather than objects.”)
With a renovation of the East Building on the way, the National Gallery has an opportunity to radically shift the East Building from a social space to a museum where more art can be installed and to where the spaces for art are less clunky.
Whether the NGA will choose to go in that direction is another question: That would require performing major surgery on Pei’s building, a potentially controversial step that the traditionally risk-averse NGA may be unwilling to take. Just as problematic: Even though the NGA’s collection has grown substantially since the East Building opened in 1978, it’s not clear that the current NGA administration wants more gallery space. When I spoke with NGA director Rusty Powell last year about the NGA’s space problems he mostly pointed to administrative needs such as offices and programmatic needs such as an education center. Gallery space was at best a distant third on the want-list.
Still: With the forthcoming renovation of the East Building the NGA has a chance to address a 30–40-year old error, an error (very) subtly but plainly made clear throughout “A Modernist Museum in Perspective.” Would fixing the East Building solve all of the NGA’s space issues? No. But it would be a good start.
