San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts

The Building

The following article written by Jon Thompson
is reproduced courtesy of
Voices of Art Magazine
Volume 11
Issue 3
2003

The drive from San Antonio to San Angelo covers 277 miles. The distance is longer when measured in hours and minutes. The road threads through archetypal Texas, rolling across gentle swells of the Central Texas Hill Country before climbing onto the dead level skirt of the Llano Estacado. Boerne has become a bedroom community for San Antonio, and Fredericksburg is a good investment for Houston dentists, but Mason is still a town of its own, a typical Texas county seat organized around the court house square. Beyond that is Brady, the Heart of Texas, and beyond that is Eden. And finally, 45 miles west of Eden, is San Angelo.

The long drive through miles of cattle country and broad fields leads one to expect that San Angelo was built on the wealth of agriculture, and inpart, it was, but the town really developed as a trading center toservice Fort Concho, on the banks of the Concho River. Prosperity came not so much from the hard money of ranching or the easy money of oil but from the smart money of mercantile trade.

Location and wealth must be considered when contemplating the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts. After the long drive through sparse country, the iconoclastic sculptural exuberance of the building is unexpected. This is not a provincial museum in a community anxious to assert its place in the social order of Texas. San Angelo is provincial but in the best Texas tradition of people who make their own way and then make up their own minds.

The San Angelo Museum Board of Trustees set the tone for the newdesign more than a decade before ground was broken. In the mid 1980's they chose Howard Taylor as their new director. On paper, it was not a safe bet. Taylor's primary experience had been as director of a maritime museum in Philadelphia. He cinched the job in San Angelo when, assuming he was out of the running,  he told the interview committee what he really thought; that a museum had to be more than a building, it had to be an active part of the community.

San Angelo had a museum before Taylor arrived, a very polite space in a converted section of old Fort Concho. Reminiscent of a Hill Country barn, it had thick limestone walls and a large interior volume capped by a simple gable roof. A long skylight lit the exhibits from above. With Taylor at the helm, the museum embarked on a campaign to build a new facility that would bring recognition to San Angelo. The new design had to reflect the spirit of the city and its people - the inner reality rather than the preconception of outsiders. Evidence of local support for the project came when the Development Committee launched the campaign to raise the $6.5 million dollar budget, only to exceed their goal by an extra $700,000.

A museum commission is the plum project every architect craves; a chance to design not just a building but a public monument. Thirty-five firms submitted proposals, including several with international reputations, including Renzo Piano, Antoine Predock, Robert Venturi, and Ricardo Legorreta, the designer of the San Antonio Public Library. Eight firms were brought to San Angelo for interviews, including Overland Partners and Lake / Flato, both of San Antonio, and Frank Welch, one of the deans of Texas architecture and a former colleague of O'Neil Ford's.

To the credit of the Steering Committee, the design firms that made the poorest impression in the initial interview were those that came bearing preconceptions. At least one firm presented a preliminary model of the museum design on their first visit, telling the committee what the architect thought the museum should be before ever asking the locals what they wanted of their new project.

The last firm to be interviewed was Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Architects (HHPA), with offices in New York and Los Angeles. The firm has a long history of doing public and other buildings, including a number of award winning museums. The architect's experience was important but it was not the deciding factor. Partner Malcolm Holzman made the pitch. Instead  of presenting sketches that conveyed the firms' idea of how the plan should be organized or how the building might look, Holzman laid out for the committee the design process. He told them how a design comes into being through a trial-and-error dialogue between client and architect, until a shared vision materializes. Holzman presented the process, not the design. In closing, he said, "Together, we will make a building." He got the job and the process began.

The new museum building opened in late1999. Reviews in national architecture journals invariably referred to its distinctive curved roof as being "reminiscent of a saddle or Conestoga wagon." Architectural Record reviewed it with several other buildings that were felt to be brash and/or weird. In a generally positive commentary, respected architectural critic, David Dillon, referred to the new museum design as "quirky, colorful, theatrical, occasionally perverse..."

Perverse.  Having read the reviews, one approaches the outskirts of San Angelo expecting a museum design that is either "deviant from what is right or good," or "corrupt, wicked, and perverted," depending on which definition the critic had in mind.  Parking the car and approaching the building on a mild summer day under a crystal blue sky, the museum is none of that. True, the roof does have a curve, but it is a robust sculptural form, not a shallow one-trick concept.

There is a danger in reading a criticism before seeing the actual work, and it is this: We risk having our personal experience of the piece - a painting, a movie, a building - colored, if not supplanted, by the opinion of the critic. Once the analogy with a saddle had been made for us, we see it, too, and suddenly the building becomes a silly metaphor. Preconception overpowers perception.

Reviews of recent movie releases are often puffery or succinct thumbs-up, thumbs down expressions of the emperor's personal worldview. Reviews of movie classics are more informative and provide a better model for criticism in general. The classic, having been vindicated in the court of history, has already justified itself and given evidence of its popularity. The review then becomes an explanation of how the film was done and why it has proven worthy. The criticism offers an introduction through which the viewer can better appreciate the film. Appreciation implies that something - a film or a piece of real estate - gains value over time. This is a major role that criticism can play. It helps the viewer gain more from the experience of the work itself. Emphasis is on the fundamental nature of the work and the primary experience of the viewer, not the bias of the critic.

Having read that the new San Angelo Museum if Fine Arts looks like a perverse Conestoga wagon, the first time  viewer will see a copper clad roof that obviously was meant to look like the covered wagons of the early European pioneers. Looking for some rationale, it is assumed that this is a reference to the pioneer founding of the city. Likewise, we assume that the saddle metaphor is an allusion to the cowboy and cattle origins of the area. From that moment on, there is a tendency to become complacent about perceiving and understanding the roof and building on its own merits.

San Angelo is not in the middle of nowhere; it simply is blessed with ample elbowroom. The breadth of space is matched by a breadth of vision that one might not associate with a small West Texas town, but a close appreciation of the design of the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts gives proof that this is home to some very thoughtful people.

The swooping vault of the new museum was not meant simply as a shallow allusion to pioneers or cowboys. It evolved over time as several roof designs were tested, beginning with the most obvious. Each in turn was considered, commented on, then adjusted so that it would better suit the site and the shared vision.

In the basement of the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth are a series of dusty models that reveal architect Louis Kahn's similar process of design development. The Kimbell, a beautifully refined icon of modern architecture, seems perfect and totally resolved in its planand form, but it did not start out that way. Rather than thewidely admired vaults of the final design, early sketches show flat cheeked trapezoidal light monitors. These evolved into long cylindrical vaults, which finally became more complicated cycloids. As the roof changed on the Kimbell, so too did its siting and its plan.

A similar series of models are in storage in San Angelo. They show the design process at work. Early schematic models reveal a series of linear and zigzag plans that fit on the elongated site. A subsequent series of more developed models show that the plan has been resolved as a long block, divided into sections, but that the roofline is still in flux. The earliest roof forms are traditional, including hipped, gable, and a cylindrical vault. The first appearance of the curved roof ridge is derived from a simple gable roof. The two ends are at the same height. It includes the upper open deck with scalloped edges. One of the models shows the roofline that was eventually chosen, with the curved ridge, a vaulted section, with one end higher than the other. Because this model does not include the scalloped deck, it might not have been the final option explored but one in a series to which the architect and client later returned. Had the metaphor of the Conestoga wagon or saddle been important to the client or the architect, it is doubtful that it would have appeared so late in design development. Rather, it seems from these many models that the team was looking for a roofline that justified itself due to its own intrinsic visual impact.

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, an advocate for site-specific design, taught that "A house should be of the hill, not on the hill." In a similar vein, several architectural features of the new museum reflect material and conditions specific to the site and the region. One feature that adds a dynamic to the San Angelo roof design is the setting of one end higher than the other. This reflects the slope of the site, which leads up from the banks of the adjacent Concho River, but also breaks the symmetry of the roof. The large limestone slabs that form the facing for the exterior walls came from nearby Garden City. Some were quarried, cut from stone beds below ground, while the darker contrasting bands were taken from the surface, their stains and patina the result of eons of weathering. The horizontal bands of the museum recall the sedimentary layers from which the stones were pried. Some of these slabs show ripples of ancient sandy seabeds, still studded with petrified seashells. The ripple stones give visual strength to the base of the building and provide a serendipitious reference to the mussels found in the nearby river, which caused the Spanish to name it Concho, or shell.

The linearity of the museum plan was forced by the site, which flanks one edge of a paseo, or path, a feature dictated by city planners. This wide promenade leads up from the river, its axis centered on downtown San Angelo on the opposite bank.  The other side of the paseo is flanked by a WPA-era public swimming pool that sees much action in the summer, providing a positive association with the museum for area children. The paseo continues up to Fort Concho, linking the museum to both the urban geography of the site and to its history.

One of the best views of San Angelo is from the museum roof deck. The scalloped edges of the deck were inspired by water lilies that grow in places along the river, which was once known as Rio Des Flores, the river of flowers. Unlike the saddle analogy, the water lily reference was intentional. The scalloped balconies add interest to the long public face of the linear museum and repeat the curve of the roof.

D'Hanis tile, produced in D'Hanis, Texas, is used both inside and out. Its terra cotta hue, like the creamy limestone, comes directly from the Texas soil. It complements the lime green found throughout the interior of the museum, which adds vitality to the lobby and is carried to the exterior with the window trim.  This very electric green, accentuated with neon lights, is one of the features commented on by those museum patrons who expect a more conservative palette. Museum Director Howard Taylor responds that the green, which is the color of growing things, is more classical than some might assume, reflecting, as it does, one of the colors used on the Greek Parthenon before two millennia of wear scrubbed off its original polychrome garb.

Some feel that the central task of an art museum is to provide a "clean well lighted place" for the display of art. Museum architecture is best when it is unobtrusive. This dictum holds little sway with those who frequent - and love - museums. The Louvre is as much a draw as the paintings that hang on its walls, as is the Kimbell, whose sublime light competes with the art that it illuminates. A museum is not simply a repository for art. It is an expression of the people who built it, whether they be the nobility of Florence or the civic-minded of San Angelo. This is why museums are called the cathedrals of our time. It is not the we worship art. It is that we communicate who we are through the design of this public institution, just as the citizens of Charters once communicated their piety in the construction - and funding - of a grand Gothic cathedral.

Too often, the things we build today are bereft of real meaning. Our largest public investment, our grandest edifice, is neither a cathedral nor a museum. It is a mulitlevel highway interchange. What value will these sprawling structures have for the generations that follow? Whether intentional or not, most engineering projects, devoid of compassion, have very little to say to those who follow.

This is why the San Angelo Museum is so important, and why it is such a wonderful piece of architecture. It has meaning, and the meaning was derived from the collaboration of a wise and enthusiastic architect and a group of enlightened citizen clients. The meaning that they brought to the design is evident in the whole and in each of the parts. That meaning is local. It comes from the particulars of the place and from the shared vision of the people. This brave and very personal design is proof that a "sense of place," so valued by architects, is a dynamic, organic process, ever-changing, always growing, not a static picturesque post card.