Designing a Contemporary Art Museum While Honoring the Past
Provincetown museum becomes first LEED®-certified art museum in the country

by Cynthia Young
Contributing Editor

How do you . . . integrate a contemporary, highly sustainable art museum into a quaint little New England town?

Summary: To showcase and preserve its distinctive collection of art, Massachusetts’ Provincetown Art Association & Museum (PAAM), housed for years in a 19th-century sea captain’s home and in a hodgepodge of additions, needed desperately to expand. Boston-based Machado and Silvetti Associates designed a contemporary structure that incorporates the architectural elements and textures of the pitched-roof, wood-shingle, Federal-style houses in this longtime art colony to create a competitive art museum that can partner with big-city museums while nurturing the work of esteemed Provincetown artists. In additional to earning several prestigious design awards, PAAM is the first LEED® certified art museum in the country.

Before Machado and Silvetti Associates renovated and expanded the 11,000-square-foot art museum in 2006, people would stroll by the white, two-story clapboard house, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, thinking it was simply a historic home. Now, through the new contemporary addition’s ground-level, full-length windows, the gallery’s art—and people mingling inside—are visible from the street. People feel drawn and invited to the gallery inside.

“People can see things happening inside the museum,” says Christine McCarthy, PAAM executive director, of the Patrons and Ned Jalbert Gallery, one of five galleries in the museum. “They can see the artwork; it looks like a museum. We now have a Federal-style house coupled with a contemporary structure—the museum has solved its identity crisis.”

Unique context
The project team sought to reflect the vernacular of the town in the addition. “The challenge was finding a way to give them the space they needed,” says Project Architect Andrew Cruse, AIA, LEED-AP, “while at the same time being sensitive to Provincetown’s unique context; to create an identity for the museum that was sympathetic to that architecture, but at the same time that expressed the cultural aspect of the museum.”

Rather than compose the new addition in a single volume, the team designed the exterior in three horizontal bands to break it down and reduce the appearance of scale. The lowest band, at street-level, consists of a framework of board-formed concrete, imprinted with the grain of wood in the material. Above, a second horizontal band of oversized shingles overhangs the first level, linking it upward to the third band of horizontal louvers, which wraps around the second story. Both shingles and louvers are made of Spanish Cedar, which has weathered to gray. On the second story, two large windows project out from the roofline, much like widow’s walks on the town’s historic rooftops. Situated above the main entrance and the side entrance to the art school, the glass lanterns illuminate the doors for the museum’s two principal functions.

“The architectural language of the addition was in a way trying to play with the residential language that existed, particularly with the oversized shingles,” Cruse explains. “It helped the museum fit within the visual palette of the area.”

Winning over the public
During its construction, the museum exterior became the focus of a public debate. "When it was wrapped in plastic, people were saying ‘the building is out of scale with the neighborhood.’” But as the skin was constructed, the shingles and louvers broke down the larger volume by giving it a texture that recalled the town’s wooden buildings. “Especially when the cedar started to weather, a lot of people changed their minds about the building,” Cruse says. “They recognized that it did fit into Provincetown’s urban context while at the same time expressing the building’s role as a cultural institution. No one could just walk by without realizing that this was a museum.”

The team’s requirements were to increase gallery and storage space, give a sense of continuity and flow among the galleries, allow individual and collective art exhibits, and provide climate control for humidity, cooling, and heating. To allow the association to keep exhibits open, construction was phased in over two years, starting with the complete renovation of the older building in 2004, then the demolition of three buildings, and construction of the new addition in 2005–2006.

Inside, five galleries feature 6,000 square feet of interior space. The team created a sense of continuity among the galleries, so they could be used individually or collectively, and carried the same floor surface of long leaf pine through the old and new galleries. Two new galleries feature folding wall panels to give a sense that the walls are changing along with the art. The wall panels can be moved to open or break up the space into smaller rooms.

Windows were carefully placed to align with openings into galleries or exterior views that afford a strong connection to the natural elements and the sea. Skylights infuse the older galleries with natural light, and north-facing skylights illuminate the second-story studio classrooms. “Whether it is a gray or a sunny day, the light is beautiful,” says McCarthy. A daylight dimming system in the galleries also saves energy and supplements natural light when needed.

The museum is also the first certified LEED® Silver art museum in the country. Its energy efficiency is expected to save the museum $12,000 annually in energy costs. The team designed a tight building with a thermally efficient skin containing added insulation and high-performance windows. Thus, the building can resist the variations of temperature and humidity in a coastal environment. Photovoltaic panels on the roof’s south side capture solar energy. The team used recycled, natural, and local materials wherever possible throughout the project. The building also has a natural ventilation system that, when exterior conditions and the curators permit, pulls in 100 percent outside air to condition the building.

Now the museum is establishing relationships with large, nationally known art museums in Boston, New York, and Washington, D. C., including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Modern Art, and Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art. The museum also is keeping the works of Provincetown artists alive, McCarthy says, and they can show more of the 3,000 artworks in their collection. “We are preserving a major legacy here. Provincetown art is hot,” she notes. Before, the museum would loan their works to major exhibitions around the country, yet lacked the space to exhibit their own works. “We are seen as a much more competitive institution,” McCarthy says. “We are bringing the work that was created in Provincetown back to Provincetown. Whereas collections were leaving Provincetown, they are now staying here.”

And art-lovers are responding. The museum is receiving more gifts to their collection, more partnerships with museums, and a strong interest in downloading exhibition podcasts. “It is better than we could have imagined,” McCarthy says. “I still get goose bumps when I walk in. It has come full circle—it is a beautiful space.”