Maki designs art complex in St. Louis

In 1960, Washington University in St. Louis commissioned a young faculty architect to design Steinberg Hall as a home for the school's highly regarded art collection. The architect, Fumihiko Maki, has more recently won a Pritzker Prize (1993) and the commission to design Tower 4 at the World Trade Center site. Nine years ago Washington University again selected Maki, this time to envision an entire arts campus, which opened on Oct. 25.

Called the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Maki's $56.8-million complex in the long neglected southeast corner of the campus includes newly renovated Beaux-Arts-era halls for fine art and architecture; the new Walker Hall, a high-tech art facility housing studios, classrooms and faculty offices; and Maki's Steinberg Hall, which faces his new 65,000-square-foot Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum--the centerpiece and public face of the complex.

Like many Maki buildings, the Kemper has a modernist sensibility. It is essentially a multilevel grouping of cubes pressed into a rectangular footprint. Clad in limestone block, the building's gridded exterior mirrors that of the rusticated stones of the facing fine art and architecture buildings. Windows and undercuts dramatically punctuate the Kemper's limestone grids. The south facade boasts a three-story curtain wall of glass. In the southeast corner a long horizontal window between the lobby and basement levels allows visitors to look down into the art and architecture library. A broad, multilevel plaza unifies the five-building complex. Through the Kemper's expansive glass entryway and lobby, another outdoor sculpture plaza can be seen on the museum's north side.

From a low entryway, the Kemper's lobby rises two stories. A stairway seems to float up the east lobby wall to the new permanent collection galleries. Operated manually by museum staff, Olafur Eliasson's hanging pendulum piece, Your Imploded View (2001), a 51-inch-in-diameter polished aluminum ball, swings the length of the lobby over visitors' heads.

Featuring 18,000 square feet of total exhibition space, the museum debuted with an installation of the permanent collection--organized by genre (portrait, landscape, still life) rather than in traditional chronological order--and three small temporary shows [all Oct. 25-Dec. 31].Two of the exhibitions related to the architectural process. Organized by museum director and chief curator Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick, a professor at the university, "[Grid< >Matrix]" explored the grid in modern and contemporary art, echoing Maki's design. It included work by 15 artists, among them Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy, Flavin, Warhol, Albert Oehlen and Julius Popp, whose astounding Bit. Fall (2006) involves an "ever-changing waterfall of words" from Internet news sites that drop in a grid formation. Kemper curator Catharina Manchanda organized "Models and Prototypes" with works by such figures as Kandinsky, Le Corbusier, Duchamp, Kosuth, Oldenburg, Holzer and Demand. Drawing from local collections, painter and professor Michael Byron curated a show of 20 sculptures by Washington University alumnus Tom Friedman. The museum's first large-scale loan show will be "Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany" [Feb. 9-Apr. 29], which will travel to the Opelvillen in Russelheim, Germany.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning