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Pavilions terminate to east with
Y-shaped column supporting
roofs’ shading projections. Left is
curve of café roof.
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BOXING WITH LIGHT
Tadao Ando’s new museum at Fort Worth both learns from Kahn’s great
Kimbell and copes with the scale and nature of contemporary art.
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Building next to an internationally recognized masterpiece is
inevitably a daunting task, but to create a building of similar type to
the great work is a challenge that few can rise to. Tadao Ando won
the competition for the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum in 1997
(AR February 1998). It is part of the city’s cultural complex, set in a
park in a low-density suburb of the city, just across the road from
Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, one of the greatest gallery
buildings of the last century.
The big site is flat and featureless, so Ando has transformed it by
dextrous tree planting (partly to mask the car park), walls against the
busiest roads, lawns and a shallow pool, or rather young lake, over
which the city’s downtown makes a dramatic skyline. But as Ando
remarked when he got the commission, even if the site was dull ‘the
Kimbell is a mountain’. Ando’s strategy for organizing the new
building is partly based on the Kimbell, with calm parallel gallery
spaces, lit as far as possible by daylight and opening on to nature (in
the Kahn building exquisitely planted courts, but in the Ando the
much larger new park). To some extent, Ando turns his back (or at
least west side) on Kahn, with a dull elevation, car park and (at
ground level) service spaces. Perhaps it was impossible to address the
earlier building directly, and when the planting round the car park
grows the juxtaposition of the two will seem more gentle.
For all the similarities, there are very significant differences
between the two buildings. Kahn’s galleries are reminiscent of
Cistercian vaults in their awesome simplicity. Ando’s exhibition
spaces are concrete boxes within glass ones. The heavy inner boxes
are the main containers for the artworks, while the glass ones
provide intermediate spaces between galleries and the lake and lawns.
The other major difference between Ando and Kahn is that
Ando (for all the size of his site) found it necessary to put his galleries
on two levels. One of the reasons for this must surely be the
difference in scale between much contemporary work and the
paintings in the Kimbell, which contains a fundamentally private
collection of works of easel and domestic scale. Fort Worth’s
Modern needed larger spaces, some of double height, to
accommodate really big pieces. Ando has exploited the
possibilities of his two levels of galleries with sudden surprising
juxtapositions of volume and scale, but the arrangement means that
lower, single-height galleries must inevitably seem slightly second
class because they cannot receive daylight. Upstairs galleries are top
lit as in the Kimbell, either through diffusing fabric ceilings (such as
the one over the stair hall) or from clerestories, which project light
onto inclined cornices and then down into the spaces. In both cases,
daylight is supplemented by artificial sources, but arrangements seem
rather clumsy compared to the apparently effortless combination of
concrete vaults and botanically curved metal reflectors of Kahn’s
building.
Routes through the galleries are arranged to encourage wandering,
with some openings arranged enfilade, but with occasional departures
from axiality. The major public space is the double-height entrance
hall which, as you go in, offers fine views over the lake, the semi-
private garden beyond and the glass boxes of the gallery spaces
poking out into the water to receive the Hockney-like constantly
changing dappled reflections of the water surface. To the right of the
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A Fort Worth Modern Art Museum
B imbell Art Museum
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Modern Art Museum car park
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Looking out from the intermediate
space between glass and concrete
boxes over lake to skyline of Fort
Worth.
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From north, towards entrance hall.
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site plan
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entrance hall
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information desk
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museum shop
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café restaurant
first floor
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terrace
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auditorium
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gallery
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art workshop
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loading dock
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storage
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offices
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art classrooms
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sculpture terrace
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mechanical plant
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parking
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Richard Serra’s rusty landmark
from south-west.
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The semi Neo-Classical entrance.
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Entrance hall.
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Intermediate space between
concrete gallery box (left) and glass.
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Special oval gallery with Anselm
Kiefer’s
Book with Wings
.
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Ando exploits changes in scale of
two-storey building.
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ground floor (scale approx 1:1250)
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Double-height gallery to house scale
of contemporary artworks.
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First-floor gallery with clerestorey
light reflected off inclined cornice.
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The great stair, under diffusing fabric
ceiling.
entrance is the auditorium and a cafeteria that has a terrace poking
out into the lake. To the left is the information desk, from which you
are directed to either the entrance of the ground floor galleries, or
the stairs, where you are cleverly deflected upwards by the curve of a
special ground floor gallery.
All this is very thoughtful, and the building is pleasant and
sometimes exciting to be in, while providing unassertive spaces in the
concrete boxes that never overwhelm the works on display in the
first hang. But it must inevitably be compared to the Kimbell, both
because of its sighting and its parti. Differences are quite profound.
While the Kimbell, for all its monumental qualities, is welcoming with
a generous embrace, the double height of the Ando building is partly
responsible for a much more formal, almost scraped Neo-Classical
entrance. The entrance hall itself, for all its fine volume and views
(and its dramatic bridge, which leads staff over the volume at first
floor level) is both austere and rather daunting. The insistent rhythm
of glazing bars dominates perception.
To me, from both inside and out, the bars seem heavy, and the
proportions they describe elongated and overstretched. While not
advocating planar glazing, I wonder if there couldn’t have been a less
strident approach to making the glass walls, which themselves are
causing some problems of insolation and glare. The relative
coarseness of the glazing contrasts with the really excellent quality of
the fairfaced concrete, which rivals Zumthor’s at Bregenz (AR
December 1997), most unusual in the US. As in the Austrian building,
the soft grey walls are an excellent backdrop to all visual art – surely
the most important attribute of any gallery. Undoubtedly, Ando has
made a fine museum – but on that site, it is inevitably subject to tough
appraisal.
ROGER MORANT
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F
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M
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M
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, T
EXAS
, USA
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RCHITECT
T
ADAO
A
NDO
south-north section through galleries
Architect
Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Tokyo
Project team
Tadao Ando, Masataka Yano, Kulapat
Yantrasast, Peter Arendt, Larry Burns, Rollie
Childers, Nobuhiko Shoga, Jory Alexander
Lighting consultant
George Sexton Associates
Photographs
All photographs by John E. Linden apart from
1 by Mitsuo Matsuoka and 2 by Tadao Ando
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dull west elevation (facing Kimbell) in which aluminium panels are sometimes substituted for glass to reduce insolation
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