(rshsdepot) San Diego, CA

[I95BERNIEW_@_aol.com]

From Saturday's Los Angeles Times.
 
Bernie Wagenblast
 
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
 
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW
Museum lays tracks all across the city
By Christopher Hawthorne
Times  Staff Writer

January 20, 2007

SAN DIEGO — It's official: With a  new building by Richard Gluckman opening 
this weekend, the Museum of  Contemporary Art San Diego now has an 
architectural pedigree even longer than  its mouthful of a name.

The museum has been anchored for more than six  decades in a converted 1916 
residence, overlooking the ocean, by Irving Gill. It  began leasing a small 
space in downtown San Diego in 1986, then seven years  later opened a slightly 
larger downtown outpost — designed by artists Robert  Irwin and Richard 
Fleischner and architect David Raphael Singer — inside Helmut  Jahn's America Plaza.

That's only half the story. The museum next asked  Robert Venturi and Denise 
Scott Brown to renovate the La Jolla location, a  project that was finished in 
1996. It then turned its attention back downtown,  acquiring about one-half 
of the Santa Fe train depot, a 1915 Mission-style  building by the San 
Francisco firm Bakewell & Brown (which designed Pasadena  City Hall) located up the 
street from the other downtown MCASD. It hired  Gluckman and preservation 
architect Wayne Donaldson to renovate the depot, in a  $25-million project that 
makes its debut Sunday.

The new facility, which  adds a modest 10,675 square feet of gallery space, 
suggests that the museum is  on track to become the art world equivalent of a 
tapas restaurant. Hugh Davies,  who has been director since 1983, has assembled 
an impressive list of bite-sized  venues by architects with wildly divergent 
styles. With a car (and a lot of  energy), you could take in the whole 
architectural menu in a day: Start out with  a taste of Gill and Venturi in La Jolla, 
then head downtown to sample the very  different flavors of Irwin, Gluckman 
and Bakewell & Brown.

Davies  would tell you that the museum's growth pattern over the years — 
carving out a  little bit of extra room here, a little bit there — is the result 
of a  complicated real-estate market, opposition from neighbors in La Jolla to 
an  expansion there and a desire to serve different kinds of visitors and 
different  kinds of art. Certainly the new galleries downtown will allow more 
commissions,  large-scale pieces and site-specific work than the La Jolla 
building, which has  a more residential, contemplative feel.

But maybe the director, who  clearly relishes working with architects, is 
better described as a serial  expansionist: a Thomas Krens who wants to dominate 
a single county instead of,  you know, the planet. Interestingly enough, he 
may be ahead of the curve in that  regard. Museums have been building local 
satellites for some time, of course:  Frank Gehry's 1983 Geffen Contemporary for 
MOCA is the most successful Southern  California example. But the trend has 
been accelerating lately, with mid-sized  museums looking to create annexes in 
their home cities even as the Guggenheim  and Louvre continue to plant their 
flags around the world.

This weekend  the Seattle Art Museum will open a new sculpture garden 
straddling the freeway  along the waterfront, just down the hill from its own Venturi 
building (which is  now being extended by Brad Cloepfil's Allied Works 
Architecture). And the  Whitney Museum made waves in New York last November by 
announcing it was  abandoning a planned Renzo Piano addition to its Marcel Breuer 
building in favor  of a satellite space downtown, at the entrance to the High 
Line, that was once  slotted as a new outpost for the Dia Center. Along with 
the Andy Warhol Museum  in Pittsburgh and a number of Manhattan galleries, 
Gluckman is perhaps best  known for designing the 1987 Dia on West 22nd Street, 
which brings us full  circle.

The San Diego commission, with its combination of preservation,  renovation 
and ground-up construction, intrigued him from the start, he said.  While the 
train depot's soaring main hall is still in use by commuters, the  museum was 
able to acquire its old baggage-handling facility, which occupies the  depot's 
northern half and sits under the same red-tile roof. Soon after, it  added the 
adjacent property to the north. 

Designed primarily for  large-scale installation and new-media works, the 
galleries include one very  large room — the 4,600-square foot Farrell Gallery — 
along with another big  space for video, two smaller rooms and an 
artist-in-residence studio. They are  airy and serene without seeming precious. Adding 
white walls and concrete floors  while keeping intact the building's original 
arched and clerestory windows, they  show off the Bakewell & Brown architecture 
to terrific effect. They make  especially fine use of San Diego's seemingly 
limitless supply of  sunlight.

Next door to the depot, Gluckman and his firm, Gluckman Mayner  Architects, 
have added a sleek, three-story building wrapped in red corrugated  metal 
panels — a visual reference to boxcars — as well as channel glass and  concrete. 
It holds offices, rooms for public events and a storage area for  Amtrak. If it 
tries a little too hard to look industrial, the proportions of its  facades 
and the interplay between the materials immediately give it away as the  
product of an experienced architect's office. 

Tucked inside the new  building is the design's most impressive surprise: an 
installation by Roman de  Salvo, a San Diego artist, on each landing of 
Gluckman's starkly utilitarian  concrete staircase. The piece, called "Utility 
Filigree," twists electrical  conduits into a decorative pattern and holds a number 
of bare light bulbs that  illuminate the stairs. De Salvo also has a similar 
if less functional piece out  in the hallway. But the twisting, whimsical 
staircase fixtures are an especially  good complement to Gluckman's architecture, 
which in this case is entirely  whimsy-free: every line straight, nearly every 
color neutral.

On the back  side of the train building, along the tracks, the museum has 
turned the old  concourse into the backdrop for a piece by Richard Serra. There 
is also a modest  lobby with walls and ceiling lined in cement-board panels. It 
spills into a  high-ceilinged atrium space that can be used for receptions as 
well as  displaying art.

Still, even with that atrium doing double duty, the space  for art in the new 
facility seems limited. Given that the largest exhibition  spaces in the old 
depot are now given over to works by single artists, the  building is opening 
with an almost absurdly small total of artworks on view,  perhaps just two 
dozen in all. (There is also a Jenny Holzer piece attached to  the Gluckman 
facade.) As I said: bite-sized.

And in the end, I couldn't  shake the feeling that Gluckman's design would 
have benefited from a little less  quiet assurance. In the last decade, San 
Diego has put up dozens of  matchstick-thin condo towers, on the Vancouver model, 
few of which have anything  meaningful to say architecturally. Helping to draw 
suburbanites and  empty-nesters back into the city, the towers have only 
deepened the sense that  much of San Diego's urbanism is of the stage-set variety. 
For that reason alone  it would have been fascinating to see Davies give this 
latest commission to an  architect, particularly a young one, who might have 
offered a critique of that  sterility — or at the very least tried to shake it 
up a bit with some ornament,  color, unexpected material or a sense of unruly 
energy. Instead we get a classic  Gluckman solution: a museum that is 
impeccably designed and highly friendly to  the art, but given its context rather too 
hushed and  well-behaved.


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End of RSHSDepot Digest V1 #1487
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The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org