Phoenix Art Museum Expansion

Tod Williams Billie Tsien adds another piece to the Phoenix art museum, changing it in the process.

By Clifford A. Pearson
This is an excerpt of an article from the March 2008 edition of Architectural Record.

Growth has been a mantra in Phoenix since the advent of air-conditioning. More people, more sprawl. From a population of 105,000 in 1950 to more than 1.5 million in 2006, from 17.1 square miles to 515 square miles of mostly low-density, commercial-strip-and-ranch-burger developments. Sunshine, cheap land, and a taste of the American frontier—no matter how ersatz or commercialized—have turned Phoenix into the fifth-largest city in the country. But that growth is starting to change. Inventive local architects such as Will Bruder and Studio Ma are designing hip condos, people are moving back downtown, and the city is weaving a new light-rail system into a street grid once dominated by cars. Steady growth has defined the Phoenix Art Museum, as well. Part of a downtown civic center that originally included the city’s main library and the Phoenix Little Theater, the museum opened in 1959, expanded in 1965, then grew again in 1996 when the library moved down the road to a building Bruder created for it. Alden Dow and Blaine Drake, who had both studied with Frank Lloyd Wright, designed all of the pieces of the original civic center, as well as the 1965 museum addition. For its 1996 expansion, though, the museum looked for a new vision and hired the New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Strengthening the museum’s street presence, Williams and Tsien turned their building to Central Avenue, the city’s main artery, and created a new entrance there [record, January 1997, page 84]. Their plan also envisioned future gallery expansion on the southeast corner of the site.

With Phoenix booming in the late 1990s and early 21st century, the museum moved forward with the new gallery addition. But it also wanted to fix some missteps taken in the past. Although well intentioned as an urban gesture, the entrance on Central Avenue never really worked, since most visitors arrived by car, parked on the northeast part of the site, then had to walk past the mechanical plant and enter the building from the back. The museum also wanted to turn its undeveloped central courtyard into a sculpture garden. For the new architecture, the museum went back to Williams and Tsien, while it hired landscape designer Reed Hilderbrand for the sculpture garden. “We wanted to give Tod and Billie the chance to finish what they had started,” explains James Ballinger, the museum’s long-time director. “We also saved about a year by not having to look for new architects and getting them up to speed.”

Williams and Tsien approached both their recent project and the earlier one as steps in a process of organic growth and ways of advancing Phoenix’s cultural infrastructure to catch up with its physical expansion. “Our work wasn’t about making a big statement,” says Williams. “It was about accretion.” Tsien adds, “This is a museum that has grown up with its city, becoming more sophisticated along the way. Phoenix has grown too much at its edges, but that’s all the more reason to emphasize places at its center.” Talking about Ballinger, Williams recalls, “He resisted pressure to build a monument.”

Improving the arrival experience for visitors was the architects’ first task. When the museum acquired a small parcel just north of its building, Williams and Tsien realized they could use this land to create a courtyard and lawn facing a new entry wing. But this meant putting the institution’s new front door next to its mechanical plant (which was too expensive to move). So the architects screened the plant with precast-concrete walls and extended the precast facade of the earlier addition along Central Avenue to form a protected outdoor room. Landscape architect Christine Ten Eyck used palo brea trees and other native species here, and sculptor Dan Euser contributed a “rain curtain” that helps mask the sound of cars rushing along Central Avenue.

Formal name of project: Phoenix Art Museum Expansion

Location: Phoenix, Arizona

Gross square footage: 70,000 sq.ft.

Total construction cost: $21 Million

Completion Date: November 2006

Owner: City Of Phoenix

Architect:
Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects
222 Central Park South,
New York, NY 10019
Tel: 212-582-2385,
Fax: 212-245-1984

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