Building’s Design Fails to ‘Dazzle’

No amount of wishful thinking can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, and that apt adage might appropriately apply here to the new Princeton University Art Museum. The President’s Page (September issue) describes the museum as “dazzling,” yet the word does not readily come to mind at first sight of those somber gray behemoth brutalist boxes.

Admittedly the interior spatial layout, the circulation and procession through the galleries, and the overall program of the building may indeed be stunning and prove brilliantly inviting. But the Normandy Beach Atlantic wall appearance of the building cluster strikes one initially as an abysmal architectural abomination, and a derelict desecration of the once decidedly delightful shaded sylvan campus surroundings.

The role of a designer, of any stripe, is creating beauty and contributing it to the greater world at large. If that isn’t possible architecturally, perhaps the best solution is burying any such subsequent similar campus structures. A building below-grade at least presents the promising potential of a garden over its sight-unseen subterranean situation, and who doesn’t like the suggested paradise of a garden?