"Museums must create a mood of excitement and anticipation, of mystery," says China-born U.S. Architect Ieoh Ming Pei. "Fatigue is not just in the feet, it's in the mood." Seldom has an architect done more to enhance the sense of expectation for the visitor than did Pei in his Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y., which opens to the public this week. It is only the most recent in a series of exciting new buildings that add up to a museum explosion in 1968 (see color pages).
Pei's new structure (cost: $3,500,000) is indeed a dramatic addition to Syracuse's downtown Community Plaza. Its four main galleries loom theatrically over the concrete-paved concourse. Inside, visitors pass through a spacious 35-ft.-high central court, then climb to the galleries on a swirling, circular stairway. They can promenade from one gallery to the next without descending, thanks to glass-curtained, connecting bridges that overlook both court and outdoor plaza. Pei believes that such bridges give a "change of pace" between exhibition rooms. "Besides," he adds, "in a museum your eyes need a rest."
Running Scared Modern. Building today's museums is an expensive process, and few institutions can afford to start over again from scratch. Such is the case in Des Moines, where Pei was faced with another set of problems: primarily, how to add a wing to the existing building, in this case the Des Moines Art Center built by Eliel Saarinen in 1948. Pei's solution was to build a two-story structure behind the original, U-shaped building, thus totally surrounding a shallow reflecting pool that had lain between the two wings of the U. To further unify the two, he used rough-textured concrete to match the limestone facade of the Saarinen building. The result is so harmonious that Washington's National Gallery of Art has commissioned Pei to design a major wing to house its new Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.
In Atlanta, faced with the cost of separately housing a symphony hall, theater, museum, ballet studio and art school, culture-loving Georgians decided to pool their efforts and put them all under one roof in the new, $13 million Memorial Arts Center, the work of two local architectural firms. Dedicated to the memory of 122 Atlanta arts patrons who were killed in a Paris plane crash in 1962, the center opened last month with a splendid exhibition of 59 paintings and drawings loaned by Paris museums. Alas for good intentions, the building itself has a cold, pretentious look and is, in effect, a massive box with a portico of sticklike, white concrete columns tacked on to suggest the Parthenon—or a Southern plantation mansion. "The result is Caricature Classicism," wrote the New York Times critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, "or Running Scared Modern."