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Valley
News, September 2003
Donald Maurice Kreis
RENO,
Nevada – Visiting this high desert, university town of 190,000 can
leave the New Englander feeling like the crusty old newspaperman
who called the phone company’s time/temperature hotline every morning
so he knew he had heard something that is true each day. Casinos
dominate here – and a walk down the main drag, Virginia Avenue,
offers all of the neon dazzle and gilded opulence necessary to help
people forget how much money they are gambling and/or spending.
Fortunately,
those with a thirst for the truth need only to walk a few blocks
to Liberty Street, home of the newly opened Nevada Museum of Art
– known locally as the NMA.
Designed
by the renowned Phoenix architect Will Bruder, the Nevada Museum
of Art offers something seldom seen on the casino strip or, for
that matter, anywhere else in America these days: a new public
building that is both beautiful and honest, in the sense that it
is not pretending to be something else – either a historical building
or a flashy fantasyland in the manner of Nevada’s casinos.
The
NMA is hot, both figuratively and literally. Trained as a sculptor
rather than as an architect, Bruder generally takes his cue not
from history but from geology. Thus the NMA resembles no other
building but, rather, a rock formation in the nearby Black Rock
Playa. The west-facing façade forms a graceful curve of between
five and 12 degrees, clad in panels of zinc that weather to a black
patina. It is a variation on what Bruder did at his much-heralded
Phoenix Central Library, whose copper-clad form resembles the mesas
of the Arizona desert. Black zinc panels on a Nevada building
are nearly sizzling to the touch in the afternoon sun, but the NMA
is specially engineered to shed this heat.
The
Arizona architect’s first museum to be built from the ground up
defies conventional building wisdom in other pleasing ways as well.
In America, an art museum is typically an invisible box for viewing
the artwork. Bruder dares to express the curvature of his façade
in the adjoining interior wall of the third floor gallery. It’s
a daring gesture, given that even Frank Lloyd Wright takes posthumous
grief for a similar phenomenon at his Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Above this curved gallery wall at the NMA is a folded ceiling,
literally adding an edge.
Bruder
told the New York Times recently that the atrium of the NMA might
well be the best interior space he’s ever created. It’s an intriguing
suggestion from the guy who designed the main reading room of the
Phoenix Central Library, probably the finest big space in late 20
th Century American architecture to be designed for public enlightenment.
The NMA atrium is smaller and subtler; its pleasures are impossible
to capture photographically. A specially fabricated steel staircase,
gently curved in form, is suspended from above. Bands of windows
offer inviting glimpses of doings throughout the museum. Outside
light streams in via glass slits and tiny skylights. The color
scheme is resolutely and strictly black and white.
To
appreciate why this is so splendid, wander first through the Silver
Legacy Casino a few blocks away. Check out the huge fake silver
mine beneath the giant dome, with bars, a gluttonous buffet and
flashing slot machines arrayed around this looming and admittedly
impressive structure. The contrast between that kind of excess,
and the vastly more dignified, subtle and satisfying sense of rapture
communicated by Bruder’s atrium – well, that’s the difference between
artifice and art. A vacation to a Nevada gaming town is as good
a place to acquire that lesson as any.
Generosity
is another defining feature of Bruder’s architecture. At a time
when most public buildings are designed on the cheap, Bruder manages
to persuade his clients to build spaces that do more than just the
necessary (or, perhaps, he chooses only clients of such mind).
An excellent example of this phenomenon is the NMA’s rooftop gallery.
Covering
nearly the entire roof of the building, this space is more than
just a great place from which to view the Sierra Nevadas and the
colorful casino-hotel skyline. Likewise the public rooftop transcends
its work as a backdrop for some noteworthy sculpture, including
the anthropomorphic “Head,” by the famous Spanish surrealist Joan
Miro (1893-1983). The roof gallery attains landmark status in
its own right, by virtue of the games Bruder plays there with light
and shadow, straight lines and curves. To this end, pieces of
the zinc façade project upward as a railing, which elsewhere becomes
vertigo-inducing clear glass, while a fence-like row of opaque panels
leads to a secret alcove where one can contemplate, shielded from
the city in monastic quietude, the open sky above and, below, the
sculpture “Shadow of the Sun” by the contemporary New York artist
Ilan Averbuch.
One
of Bruder’s talents is knowing what economies to impose on his projects
so as to eke such glories out of clients whose resources are finite.
The $16 million spent by the NMA to build Bruder’s design was
a stretch for an art museum in a community not known as a cultural
hub, yet it is a relatively modest sum for such a project. But
magic seems to happen here, even on the cheap. The museum’s east-facing
elevation is clad in workaday stucco colored black to match the
fancier zinc – but when the afternoon sun hits the windows of the
unexceptional office building next door, the stucco becomes a canvas
for wild bands of circular reflections whose source seems mysterious
to passers-by.
The
opening exhibitions at the NMA featured works by Diego Rivera and
Frida Kahlo, a traveling show of Edward Hopper paintings of Paris,
and a display of Bruder’s other architectural accomplishments, largely
unknown in the East despite his importance to contemporary American
building design. Upcoming displays involve sculptor Dennis Oppenheim
and the touring collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art. Admittedly,
these exhibitions and the building that house them will warrant
a special trip to Reno only by those whose vacation muse is uncommonly
arts-oriented.
But
if you find yourself in Reno, or at nearby Lake Tahoe, or are even
in need of a day trip from San Francisco (just four hours away by
car), the Nevada Museum of Art in its setting amid the casinos will
be refreshing. It is said that Reno, as a lesser cousin to Las
Vegas, can no longer count on gambling as its mainstay because tribal
casinos are divesting Nevada of its supremacy in the gaming business.
Thus Reno struggles to diversify and reinvent itself.
The
new NMA building is the most compelling of several signs that Reno
may succeed. Nearby, landscape architects have transformed the
Truckee River that once flowed through the city unremarkably into
a kind of whitewater garden, complete with little midriver humanoid
rock sculptures and meandering, shaded shoreline walkways. Around
these sights an arts district is springing up.
Yes,
the big fake silver mine is beguiling. The faux Tuscany created
by the new Siena Hotel is elegant and understated (particularly
compared to the pretend Egyptian pyramids, reconstituted Venice
and pigmy Empire State Building in Las Vegas.) But it falls to
the Nevada Museum of Art to prove that a building can induce pleasure
more simply and directly, by being itself. Such a quality is rare
enough, anywhere in America. To a visitor in a gambling town like
Reno, it’s a diamond jewel in a rhinestone crown.
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