Williams and Tsien are well known within the design world, but their profile will rise with this project–the first new art museum built from the ground up in New York City since the ’60s, according to the American Folk Art folks. Much acclaimed for their Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and their addition to the Phoenix Art Museum, the architects have also had a long relationship with the Folk Art’s neighbor, MoMA. Their work has been exhibited there, and they were among the 10 international firms invited to compete to design the MoMA expansion, ultimately won by Yoshio Taniguchi of Japan. They also designed a town house for real-estate developer Jerry Speyer, an art collector and MoMA trustee. With his house, they created a wall of privacy on the street yet flooded the interior with natural light, despite the dense urban setting–strategies they’ve used again in the Folk Art Museum.
The architects regarded the museum in domestic terms. Folk art was mostly made for the home–Shaker boxes, painted chairs, family portraits–and the museum is now showcasing the remarkable collection of Ralph Esmerian (as well as the powerful, weird work of outsider artist Henry Darger). You might even ask why the museum hired such determinedly modern architects in the first place (hats off that they did), instead of a designer who would have come up with something that looked, well, cuter. Besides the clean lines, one of the hallmarks of Williams and Tsien’s work is the varied materials, “the common and the magical,” as Tsien puts it–lots of tough stuff like concrete and fiberglass.
Yet the most successful moments inside the dazzling museum, with daylight spilling down five stories from a skylight, are where the architecture and the art most closely meet–where the life-size “Tigress” by Felipe Benito Archuleta prowls by a stairway or a dozen weather vanes of angels, locomotives and Indian chiefs cast stark shadows on a rough concrete wall. “There’s a resonance with folk art” in the materials, says Williams, in the way they have a crafted feel. The pockmarked metal panels on the exterior (the alloy, called tombasil, is used for things like fire-hose nozzles) were cast at a foundry famous for its work with artists.
In their book “Work/Life,” Tsien credits her husband with the way physical movement is expressed in their buildings, while Williams writes of his wife: “Without her, our idea of an architecture of serenity would remain frozen as an idea.” Both these notions are embodied in the American Folk Art Museum, a dynamic place where stairways seem to float, and everything is animated by forms in concrete and stone, metal and wood. And it’s also a space for the peaceful reflection of art. Collaboration is inherently a mystery, but however theirs works, Williams and Tsien have given New York a beautiful place to be.
