From the Director

The Art of Architecture and of Making Meaning

This article first appeared in the March–April 2008 issue of Insight, the Museum’s bimonthly magazine.

For many of us at UMMA, architecture is much on our minds. After years of program and design work, we see the character of the Museum’s new Frankel Wing taking shape more and more every day. We understand better the experiential character of our design choices, from the forms and volumes of our future galleries and public spaces to the key building materials such as the limestone cladding that is the defining material for the Frankel Wing’s solid components. We see the interplay of solidity and transparency, in both literal and metaphorical terms, as glass, steel, and limestone come together. The complex glass elements—areas of translucent fritted glass juxtaposed with fully transparent “lenses” providing direct visual access between indoors and out—are shaping views into the Museum and framing new perspectives from the Museum out to neighboring Tappan Hall and the Diag.

As one of our design architects recently said to me, building projects eventually—after years of demanding much from those involved in their creation—enter a new phase in which they feed us. As an advocate of good architecture but obviously not an architect, I was much struck by the truth of this observation—having experienced this recently without framing the thought in these terms. UMMA’s expansion has, indeed, entered such a phase. For the past few months, both the Frankel Wing and our old friend, Alumni Memorial Hall, have been feeding me; I feel privileged to be part of this process of making something new and of bringing back to its full beauty a building with over 100 years of history. With every visit to check in on the construction—including a few hours recently in the company of our lead architect, Brad Cloepfil—the fruits of years of planning, envisioning, and detailed decision-making emerge and feed me, just as I am confident that these wonderful spaces and materials will shape rich experiences, foster life-affirming moments of contemplation and renewal, and ultimately feed all of you when the Museum reopens early next year.

I have often observed that even as we follow on and are part of a huge building boom in art museums worldwide, our goals at UMMA are distinct. We seek to create a building that is at once a work of art, a container for thousands of extraordinary works of art, and a shaper of experience for tens of thousands of visitors in each year to come. This expansion project and the exhibitions, collections, and public programs it will make possible are in their totality both an answer to the question of what a museum of the 21st century can be and a question itself: what must a museum be in this turbulent time to be an essential part of our individual and civic lives? How can the museum building as vessel and container help us understand works of art and ultimately ourselves? How can a piece of museum architecture shape meaning?

Even amid the troubled economics of present-day Michigan, we are blessed to have around us a number of compelling examples of new museum architecture to help us contextualize UMMA’s particular responses to these questions as embodied in the new Frankel Wing. Stephanie Rieke’s article in this Insight draws attention to sister projects in Detroit, Grand Rapids, and, soon, East Lansing and Bloomfield Hills—and there are others (the Flint and Kalamazoo art institutes could also be named). These projects offer testament to the commitment and vision of museum professionals, benefactors, and volunteers all across our region. One of the exhibitions with which we will open our expanded Museum—entitled Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts Projects Buildings—will offer a global context, with some 35 major museum projects around the world suggesting a variety of new directions. The range of these projects helps us consider these and other questions: Do museums best serve the public when they are of everyday life or when they create a special and distinct experience? How can museums link past and present in the service of deepening human understanding and experience? In creating a safe space for inquiry, can museums participate in shaping and enhancing the quality of public discourse and thus in the process of framing good citizenship?

After nearly 20 years in the museum profession, I have come to feel there is no universal answer. Each museum, with its own unique setting and history, must determine a response that is appropriate to its purposes and audiences. We at UMMA are truly excited to participate in this process of inquiry—a process that challenges us to consider the relationship of architecture to experience—at a time when the visual arts, art museums, and architecture are so clearly on center stage.

James Christen Steward
Director

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