Seattle Museum expands

The Seattle Art Museum's downtown location reopened on May 5 with a new building designed by Portland architect Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture. Cloepfil's understated modernist building, which doubles the size of the museum, was designed to seamlessly integrate with SAM's existing 1991 Venturi Scott Brown building. Ample natural light is admitted into the public spaces and select galleries, particularly those at the corners of the building allowing visitors bay views. To manage the natural light, the building is outfitted with a mechanical brise soleil, blackout shades and movable walls.

The main feature of the new 16-story, block-long building is a two-story free public space with windows overlooking the street. To lure visitors, SAM has installed Cai Guo-Qiang's Inopportune: Stage One--a monumental sculpture, first seen at MASS MoCA in 2004-05, featuring nine automobiles, seven of which are suspended from the ceiling and pierced with pulsating rods of light. Clearly visible from the street, the sculpture, intended to evoke a stop-motion explosion, provides a dazzling nighttime spectacle.

The building is the result of an innovative partnership with Washington Mutual Bank. WAMU approached SAM in 2001 looking to enter into a joint venture on a mixed-use building on the undeveloped portion of SAM's downtown site--a one-square-block property--that could house both an expanded museum and a 42-story office tower for WAMU's global headquarters. After careful review by SAM trustees, who were already in the middle of a difficult capital campaign to raise funds for the 9-acre Weiss/Manfredi-designed Olympic Sculpture Park, which opened in January 2007, SAM struck a deal to share the site with WAMU. In the complex arrangement, WAMU purchased a portion of the museum's property for $18 million, and the two partners agreed to simultaneously construct adjacent buildings with two different architects, two different identities and separate entrances.

In one of the most forward-thinking aspects of the plan, the museum has provided for future expansion. It currently occupies the first four stories of the new Cloepfil building. The eight stories above also belong to SAM, and are fully fitted with museum infrastructure, but will be leased for a minimum of 10 years to WAMU, which owns not just its own 42-story tower, but also the top four floors of the SAM building. After 10 years, SAM can claim the additional floors as needed, eventually growing to 450,000 square feet from the 268,000 square feet it now inhabits. Director Mimi Gates hopes SAM will become a repository for the city's growing private art collections; the museum got off to a fine start recently when 40 patrons and collectors donated 1,000 works, worth an estimated $1 billion [see "Artworld," May '07]. Cloepfil's subtle architecture, which intentionally does not compete with the art, is a good match for a general museum whose collection is expanding in many directions at once, but which, despite some clear strengths, has small offerings in certain areas, sometimes just a dozen or so works.

Befitting a museum in Microsoft's home territory, SAM makes clever use of technology, including a video showing African dance footage projected onto a frosted glass wall in a gallery containing a large collection of Nigerian tribal masks. In a gallery of Asian masterpieces, a 72-foot-long, early 17th-century Japanese scroll (only half of which is in the SAM collection) is digitally unfurled and its missing pieces restored; SAM's portion of the actual scroll is on view in a nearby case.

Gates has accessed some of the city's considerable economic clout to raise $179 million of the museum's $180 million goal (for the expansion, Olympic Sculpture Park and renovations to the Seattle Asian Art Museum), plus an additional $24 million for acquisitions, such as Cai's Inopportune and Richard Serra's Wake for the sculpture garden, and various enhancements; this clout is reflected in a donor list that includes two foundations that contributed over $25 million each, and a total of 48 that each gave over $1 million.

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