Subtle in Seattle - renewal of a museum in Seattle, WA

Architectural Review, The, August, 1998 by Alyson Thake

A revitalisation of an old gallery binds a disparate cluster of old buildings - and makes elegant, sympathetic spaces for the artworks they contain.

Seattle exploded in the late nineteenth century as a result of its wonderful harbour, the opening of the Pacific as an American ocean, the great transcontinental railway and the new industry of fish canning. So it is apt that a principal museum, the Frye, should contain a fine collection of nineteenth-century French and German paintings, bought with the proceeds of that boom. It is on First Hill, the original suburb of the busy port, now mostly devoted to hospitals and other rich institutions.

Until recently, the collections were housed in a most unprepossessing mess of buildings designed by four architects over as many decades. Olson Sundberg were asked to bring the whole mess together, make it more approachable and give the galleries modern standards. They flung a simple arcade along the front to unite the bits and give the whole place an urban air (central Seattle is a city in which you can still walk without feeling either foolish or particularly threatened). A new sculpture garden, cafe and pool are generated between arcade and old buildings.

Entrance is signalled by a drum dominating all the composition, and indeed much of the area. You go in through superbly made bronze doors, fine detailed to make you want to touch them. (The architects have a strong feeling for appropriate materials: here, construction is rich and celebratory of entrance, but elsewhere, sensible economy is attained for instance by making the drum out of standardized precast elements, the arcade in tilt-up concrete, and walls of the galleries in plasterboard on steel studs.)

Once inside, it is clear that the building is both serious and tenderly thoughtful. The drum is suffused with gentle light largely from a continuous clerestory under its cupola, which is itself pierced by an eccentric oculus over the circular reception desk. Lighting levels prepare you for the necessarily dimmed galleries beyond, which can be glimpsed through oblique slots cut into the curved walls. Like the bronze doors, wooden built-in furniture is deftly and sensuously detailed, but not ostentatious.

A warm, pale maple floor flows out into the exhibition spaces, drawing you on. In the galleries, the architects have been very careful to allow the paintings to speak for themselves. Pictures are nearly always displayed straightforwardly on simple, calm wall planes, either pale or darkish blue. Illumination is largely artificial, though in some places, baffled lanterns allow carefully controlled daylight to spill down. Here and the outer wall-planes are joggled in plan to allow glimpses out, and a modicum of external luminance to flow sideways over the walls.

At a time when American architecture so often seems to be part of the advertising industry, the architects of the Frye have shown throughout an admirable degree of modesty (not in the least to be confused with timidity). Their restraint stems from a thorough command of space, light, construction and materiality: they have no need to show off. Both externally and internally, their building makes a gentle, creative contribution to the most popular US city: let's hope it's a precedent.

Architect Olson Sundberg Architects

Design team Richard Sundberg, Alan Maskin, Brett Baba, John Kennedy, Les Eerkes, Joshua Brevoort, Kathryn Rogers

Photographs Robert Pisano