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The Palmer Museum of Art’s entrance and loggia bring arches, columns and stairs together in a quirky, lively arrangement.
Hidden in plain sight behind Charles Moore’s loggia is the original 1972 museum building.
The entrance hall pits blue glass and red walls against a shades of gray in the floor and the faux stone.
Passageways between galleries run diagonally through the building.
On the second floor, Marisol’s sculpture “Blackfoot Delegation to Washington, 1916” is the focus of one passageway. Marisol was born Marisol Escobar, but used only her first name professionally.
Up close, the sculpture is dynamic. It recreates a 1916 photo of the delegates.
Moore’s Piazza d’Italia, in New Orleans, is an architectural fantasy with fountains you can walk among.
Among glass pieces in the Palmer collection is “Teapot Voyage,” by José Chardiet, a Cuban-American artist.
The Palmer Museum of Art’s entrance and loggia bring arches, columns and stairs together in a quirky, lively arrangement.
Hidden in plain sight behind Charles Moore’s loggia is the original 1972 museum building.
The entrance hall pits blue glass and red walls against a shades of gray in the floor and the faux stone.
Passageways between galleries run diagonally through the building.
On the second floor, Marisol’s sculpture “Blackfoot Delegation to Washington, 1916” is the focus of one passageway. Marisol was born Marisol Escobar, but used only her first name professionally.
Up close, the sculpture is dynamic. It recreates a 1916 photo of the delegates.
Moore’s Piazza d’Italia, in New Orleans, is an architectural fantasy with fountains you can walk among.
Among glass pieces in the Palmer collection is “Teapot Voyage,” by José Chardiet, a Cuban-American artist.
Sometime next year, if all goes according to plan, Penn State will move its Palmer Museum of Art to a big new complex beside the Arboretum. That will leave vacant a 30-year-old building that is an unrivaled pleasure to approach, with its arched loggia reaching out as if it’s trying to embrace the entire plaza before it. And once you’re inside, the building is a three-dimensional delight, with spatial surprises following one on another.
It’s also an increasingly rare example of a playful architectural style known as postmodernism, which sprang up in the late 1970s as a kind of rebellion against the spare steel-and-glass vocabulary of modernism. “Less is more,” the modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe liked to say. Postmodernists, on the other hand, took all manner of details from architecture’s long history — column capitals, buttresses, you name it — and worked them into lively, often supersized design elements.
And as it happens, one of the most notable postmodernists was the lead architect for the project that produced the current Palmer: Charles Moore.
Moore had been an architecture professor at Berkeley, dean of architecture at Yale, then a professor at UCLA and finally at the University of Texas, and taught a generation of prominent design practitioners. He designed museums at Williams and Dartmouth and elsewhere, as well as other campus buildings, houses, and even the Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, a dreamscape of architectural details and splashing waterfalls. He was also, perhaps not surprisingly, a noted toy collector. For the Palmer project, he worked with a Connecticut firm called Arbonies King Vlock; Glenn Arbonies was one of his former students. The Palmer was one of Moore’s last projects: he died in late 1993, only a few months after the museum opened.
Today’s Palmer Museum began as a blocky, three-gallery brick building completed in 1972 near the center of the campus. In 1986, James and Barbara Palmer gave $2.25 million towards expanding the little-known museum and giving it a much higher profile. The overhaul began in 1991.
The loggia was the most striking addition, so energetic that you barely notice the original building behind it. Short concrete columns topped with colored tiles support arches of varying sizes, the curve of each defined by six rows of bricks broken in half and set in place with the broken ends facing out. The broken bricks are a detail Moore’s team copied from a small College of Agriculture building nearby with a remarkable research history: The Armsby Respiration Calorimeter, completed about 1900, was used to measure the energy metabolism of cattle, and studies conducted there until 1960 underlie much of our understanding of animal nutrition. Echoing so important an ag-science building gave the art museum a clever link to Penn State’s history.
Equally clever is the Moore team’s answer to the lion sculptures that guard many museum entrances: A Pittsburgh artist, Paul Bowden, was commissioned to create two bronze paws so large that if there were a lion attached to them, it would be as big as the building itself. The paws are about as perfect a postmodernist touch as you could imagine. The doorway itself introduces a common Moore touch — a recess within a recess, often two.
Inside, the entrance lobby is a kaleidoscope of colored glass and red walls. What appear to be monumental blocks of stone guide you into the first series of galleries. As you go from each gallery to the next, you pass through a brief, confined passageway set in the wall. It’s an architectural trick dating at least as far back as the Renaissance: You walk into a small space and then you’re released into a bigger one — the spatial equivalent of getting a sudden breath of fresh air. Moore and the architects he worked with took the trick one step further, though, putting the passageways on a diagonal alignment through the galleries to create unexpected sight lines. It’s just different enough to delight.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a 1993 work in the Palmer collection that takes particular advantage of the diagonal passageways: “Blackfoot Delegation to Washington, 1916,” which the sculptor Marisol based on a black-and-white photo in the Smithsonian’s collection. Recreated in wood, the stoic five-man delegation watches you approach from the far side of a deep passageway on the second floor. When you reach them, they’re amazing, expressive works of art. Elsewhere in the museum are an exceptional collection of glass works, Asian ceramics, wonderful American paintings and much more.
Why ever leave such a building? Perhaps it’s done its job too well: Since it opened, the university’s art collection has grown to the point that much of it cannot be displayed. The new museum, by Brad Cloepfil’s firm Allied Works, will be significantly larger, and also closer to visitor parking. If the university has decided what to do with the current building, they’ve said nothing.
So go visit while you can. And be sure to look across Curtin Road for the one-story Calorimeter, squeezed between larger buildings. The Palmer is only three blocks from the Creamery, by the way, so you can enjoy ice cream, art and top-notch architecture all in one trip.
Buildings & Grounds appears in The Daily News the first Friday of every month. You can email Lawrence at biemiller@mac.com.
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Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low near 65F. Winds light and variable..
Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low near 65F. Winds light and variable.
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