The new SAM: the architecture

Touring the Seattle Art Museum's new addition with architect Brad Cloepfil, it is easy to see why he and his firm Allied Works have recently become the design darlings of American gallery directors. Freckled, curly-haired and earnestly Oregonian, he lacks the diffident and airy bohemianism — the Teutonic eyewear, the priestly drapings of black — shared by most of his colleagues who design art museums for a living.

What's best about Cloepfil's architecture is that he is more interested in showcasing art than showcasing the heroic form-making found at Frank Gehry's EMP, or Daniel Libeskind's controversial addition to the Denver Art Museum. Unlike these, the new SAM is all about exhibition over exhibitionism.

But Cloepfil's deference is also the reason for the building's greatest failing — SAM's hospital-like public spaces. Particularly unfortunate is the nearly block-long main lobby along First Avenue, a boxy, awkwardly disposed space that is about to lose its main virtue — a fine view out over Elliott Bay — thanks to the Four Seasons Hotel rising across the street. With little in compelling detail or texture of its own, the new SAM lobby seems a hulking leftover, the one big void that remains after design attentions and budget were lavished on frenetic stainless-steel wall panels outside (questionable) and placid art-rooms inside (not questionable at all).

These architectural weaknesses are amplified by Cai Guo-Qiang's large sculpture "Inopportune: Stage One" — nine white Fords suspended from the lobby's ceiling at crazy angles, bursting out in fireworks of LED lights. The white paint and metallic textures of the automobiles accentuate the weakest elements of Cloepfil's steely and bare architectural palette, while the flashing lights serve as tacky counterpoints to his resolutely unflashy design sense.

Parallels can be drawn with the airportlike entrance and lobby of LMN Architect's McCaw Hall, where Leni Schwendinger's over-scaled light sculpture is the equivalent to Guo-Qiang's huge car crash. While both concert hall interior and Cloepfil's actual galleries are warm and effective spaces, these two lobbies demonstrate how far Seattle has to go in bringing artfulness to public gathering places, not just to stage and gallery.

To his credit, Cloepfil shapes beguilingly simple and effective rooms for showing art, and his addition is deferential to Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi's 1991 SAM. The Allied Works layouts make for seamless links in plan between old and new buildings, the only giveaways being oak door-surrounds in the old wing, with acid-etched metal bulkheads in the new. "With its very small rooms and oak details, the Venturi/Scott-Brown building has a kind of domestic scale," says Cloepfil, "so we treated it as an artifact."

In my view, the 1991 SAM has never looked better, transformed into a rounded brown gemstone set onto a ribbed steel band striped with blue glass. But the Neo-Modern voids that are Cloepfil's main public spaces amplify the somewhat dotty Post-Modern character of Venturi/Scott-Brown's original wing. To anthropomorphize a bit, the new SAM building is hard-bodied, decked out in metallic spandex and more than a little mute, while in contrast, the Venturi/Scott-Brown creation has been revealed as a charmingly opinionated East Coast granny coming into her own in late middle age, going on about Chagall and socialism.

SAM was designed with room to grow; its upper floors are being temporarily rented by Washington Mutual. Cloepfil describes his initial design efforts as a "struggle to figure out the perimeter." His breakthrough came with a sketch of four discrete L-shapes pushed upward (see sketch above) to form frames, slightly displaced to admit sunlight in and views out along First Avenue and Union.

SAM's exterior architectural detail evolved naturally out of the "4-L" decision: "Most of my concern was about tectonics — first the curtain wall and the cuts in plan, [resulting in] light reflected and tamed." Some of the exterior detail is questionable, notably the movable steel shutters that checkerboard the elevations facing Elliott Bay. What some of us thought would be automatic solar shutters diffusing late-day sunlight actually need to be manually moved, one-by-one, by staff wearing safety harnesses on narrow ledges above the street. Unless SAM hires Spider-Man, what might have been mechanized diurnal changes will now take place seasonally, if at all.

Alas, the public will not be able to experience the new SAM's most dramatic space and view — on its roof. Built for the exclusive use of WaMu staff and the occasional corporate rental, the roof garden design is as warm and textured as Cloepfil's is chilly and reserved. Designed by Vancouver's Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg, the SAM roof garden has already received a national award from the American Society of Landscape Architects. As SAM grows into the remainder of its building, I hope it also arranges with ever-generous WaMu to take over this stunning space for public use as a café, sculpture court or both.

Cloepfil does not think like most architects doing museum commissions, locating himself in what he chooses to call the "second wave" of museum specialists, a more temperate group whose works are gaining respect in the wake of a prior group's form-obsessed, mock-sculptural buildings. Without doubt, initially impressive works by Gehry, Libeskind, Peter Eisenman and Will Alsop are now receiving sober second regards about their long-term usefulness, long after opening-day success as pilgrimage points for architectural thrill-seekers.

"There has been a maturing of museum design," says Cloepfil. In explaining how his plans defer to exhibition over exhibitionism, the architect argues that Japanese master Tadao Ando and recent New York Morgan Library addition designer Renzo Piano share his "second wave" sensibility, resulting in art galleries with "a more profound and integrated approach, rich in dialogue with context," whether art collection or urban setting.

As the work of this young architect matures, he may yet shape public spaces and public faces to match his rooms for art.

Trevor Boddy is a Vancouver-based architecture critic and urbanist: tboddy@globeandmail.com.