Museum Unveils Design for New Home, Aims to Reopen in 2024

The projected Art Museum is a mixed blessing. The careful attention on the interior to changes of scale and texture, openness and closure, and variety of materials and lighting is handled with the architect’s customary aplomb. Yet the fateful decision to locate the expanded exhibition space all on one floor, dividing it into pavilions around a large, central atrium/lecture hall/theater, places the design on a collision course with the campus layout by forcing too big a footprint on the site. As Sean Sawyer ’88 and Eric Shullman ’15 have each pointed out (Inbox, January issue), the design violates the two basic planning principles that have governed the historic core of Princeton’s campus: It crowds the outdoor space around Dod and Brown Halls and, we add, along McCosh Walk as well; and it interrupts the long diagonal vistas that are the especial joy and unique pride of the Princeton campus. In other words, it is a great building in the wrong place. 

To mitigate these problems, open the ground-level wall facing Dod to partially restore the vista. And, in place of the massive and scale-less corrugated concrete facades, differentiate the pavilions with varied and smaller-scale features so as to approach the stated goal of making them “follies,” which means diminutive, not bulky, forms. Otherwise, the new Art Museum may bring to mind the popular phrase that this is an example of the “edifice complex.”

Editor’s note: Richard A. Etlin is a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the School of Architecture of the University of Maryland. Beatrice Rehl is publisher and fine arts editor at Cambridge University Press.

I am writing, as an alumnus of the Department of Art and Archaeology and an architectural historian, to express my disappointment at the scant coverage of the plans for the new art museum and departmental complex in the November issue. The proposed project will be the largest, most intrusive construction undertaken at the historic core of campus in the University’s history. I believe that the beauty of Princeton’s campus, particularly the central zone within sight of Nassau Hall, forms an important element of the fond memories and pride that many alumni hold. Yet, aside from PAW’s brief column, there has been no information provided to the alumni as a whole that I am aware of, despite the regular addition of high-production-value booklets that arrive bundled with the PAW. 

I urge all alumni to watch the presentation on the design of the new complex available on the Art Museum’s website. You will find it a master class in sophistry, in which the proposed Brutalist superblock with its massive corrugated concrete facades is paraded as a series of “pavilions,” and even likened to “follies.” I have no particular love for the agglomeration of existing structures, but I do believe that our campus landscape and its sightlines deserve a more sensitive treatment and, to speak plainly, respect.

I have viewed the uninviting façade image of the proposed new Art Museum with concern.

In the image, dark metal panels completely hide the interior. On the other hand, the preceding, recent museum entrance offered a welcoming invitation continuing from the outdoor sculpture plaza into the transparent interior.

Equally successful was the departure experience from the upper landing through the glass façade, with the University campus paths visible. An inviting way to connect the Art Museum to University life!

The new design, with its dark impenetrable metal panels, emphasizes separation and adds gloom to gray winter days.

The Morgan Library Museum in New York also carries a metal panel façade, but with some reason, to reduce the Madison Avenue highway noise, and to keep out the afternoon sun. The Princeton Museum entry faces north, so the sun is not a concern. 

An invitation to pedestrian traffic should be encouraged as part of a teaching museum’s mission.

While I have heard many concerns about the architecture for the new Princeton University Art Museum (On the Campus, November issue), I would like to draw attention to its site plan. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Princeton’s campus is not the architecture of its buildings but its parklike setting, crafted over centuries by carefully positioning each building in relation to its surroundings. This legacy dates back to Nassau Hall, whose expansive front lawn was so impactful that it prompted in 1774 the first recorded use of the word “campus.” The result today is a whole greater than the sum of its parts, elevating separate pieces of architecture to a cohesive composition.

The design for the new museum threatens to break with this tradition and destroy a key part of our historic campus. PAW inaccurately states that the new museum will stand in the footprint of the existing museum. In fact, the museum will expand to take up the entirety of the existing Dod Courtyard, leaving Dod and Brown halls with little breathing room. Most importantly, longer vistas towards other corners of campus will be compromised, disrupting the otherwise contiguous, flowing landscape that knits the campus together.

I admire Sir David Adjaye’s work, and I have no doubt that the building as designed would be superbly executed. However, I implore the University and Adjaye to think like curators and recognize that the benefit of squeezing in one more piece of too-big art is not worth the cost of upending the coherence of an entire gallery.