by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design a museum that expresses the circular continuity of culture and the natural world?

Summary: With the circular ribbon of steel that runs through Edmonton’s Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA) in Canada, Randall Stout, FAIA, has arrived at a powerful symbol of the eternal vitality and continuum of creation of the arts, culture, and the natural world. The museum preserves much of the urbanistically aloof, original concrete facility while adding new galleries and a large glass atrium across which a curving, continuous ribbon of stainless steel moves thought the interior and exterior like a piece of string threaded through the surface tension of a soap bubble, gradually morphing from structure to sculpture and back again. The steel ribbon is looped, with no beginning and no end, though its circuitousness is occasionally lost in its folded, abstracted sculptural presentation.

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The Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture by the Phaidon Press editors, (Phaidon, 2008).

PICTURES

Images courtesy of Randall Stout Architects.

1: The Art Gallery of Alberta during the day.
2: The Art Gallery of Alberta during a snowstorm.
3: The museum’s Great Hall in its glass atrium.

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“If you think of it being unfurled,” says Stout, principal of his eponymous Los Angeles-based firm, “it’s a single piece of cloth.”

It’s a reminder that despite changes in taste, form, and medium, all artistic expressions are due for circular revision one day, and that the last generation’s flop can always hope to be the next generation’s discovered treasure. That’s an especially important lesson for a museum that will dedicate 80 percent of their exhibition space to changing exhibits and traveling shows.

And although phases of art and culture may be mutable but repetitive, the iconic regional and natural forms that influenced the ribbon’s expression and the building’s form deserve an idealized permanence, also hinted at with the looped ribbon. Stout has several such comparisons for the serpentine curves of the ribbon and the loosely assembled play of transparency and opacity that make up the rest of the AGA’s addition (the twists and turns of the Saskatchewan River that runs through the city, Inuit stone sculptures, the northern lights), but these were merely implicit ways for him to understand the forms that were emerging in the design process. “It’s not a storyline that people have to be told or understand,” he says.

But these forms are undeniably there, and Stout even refers to the ribbon as the “borealis.” So, this gesture has brought together both astronomical phenomena that existed for ages without man’s appreciation or existence, and the quarrelsome, humanistic jockeying of art salons, largely played out over the time-scale of the contemporary news cycle. This dichotomy is matched by the presence of rational, functional spaces within free-form glass expressionism, and the re-investment into existing infrastructure with contemporary Deconstructivist form.

An invitation in from the cold
The AGA (currently under construction and expected to be completed by 2010) is located in downtown Edmonton, next to Sir Winston Churchill Square, the main civic plaza of the city, in an institutionally rich neighborhood. It’s near city hall, the main library, and primary performing arts venue.

Stout’s design reuses 37,000 square feet of the original 55,000-square-foot structure, designed by the local architect Don Bittorf. Bittorf’s 1968 Brutalist composition (then known as the Edmonton Art Gallery) suffered from poor insulation and vapor barrier protection, and its concrete had began spalling down to its reinforcing steel. The competition brief for the new AGA called for the architects to preserve as much as they could of the original building by stripping it down to its bare structural elements and building it back up again. It also called for architecture firms to find ways to get the building to be a more interactive and visual presence in downtown Edmonton. Eight galleries across three levels in the original build are being renovated, and its roof will contain a sculpture garden.

Stout approached the building’s lack of engagement with the urban fabric around it by basing his $65 million, 27,000-square-foot addition around a four-level, full-length glass atrium. This atrium primarily contains public and circulation spaces, but his design also adds large gallery spaces as well. On the west façade of the building, a rectilinear zinc-clad volume containing galleries cantilevers enigmatically over the glass atrium wall. It is supported by a two-story steel truss on the perimeter with diagonals in plane with the wall. These verticals truss components become columns and thread down through the existing structure to new foundations.

To deal with the cold climate and seasonally variable long periods of sunlight and darkness of this extreme northern city, the museum is intensely insulated, and its glass sections will feature high-efficiency glazing. It uses a wall system that places an insulating air cavity between exterior and interior walls (a common system in Canada that’s relatively untested in the United States), in addition to other sustainability and energy efficiency features.

Suspended circulation
Visitors enter the 5,000-square-foot atrium and are presented with several public spaces (a café and a museum shop), before passing into its Great Hall, a large atrium-encased multi-purpose event and exhibition space where the curving swoops of the stainless steel ribbon hang in the air with an air of surreal creative tension. The ribbon is made of “post-formed cylindrical structure shapes,” says Stout, and is suspended by steel supports along the atrium curtain wall. “It gives the illusion of hovering in space because your eye reads the curtain wall structure as part of the glazing system, but in fact it’s that steel back-up component to the curtain wall that’s holding this as a suspended object,” he says.

Between the steel supports, aluminum mullions form rectilinear grids across the atrium curtain wall. A free-standing, cantilevered stair that tapers in width as it rises takes visitors to the upper level galleries.

Throughout the interior and exterior of Stout’s museum, his steel ribbon makes organic, evolving transitions from one structural function to another. It begins at the front entrance as a roof canopy and then it drops down nearly to the ground level, curling around itself to form what Stout and his team call the “snow cone.” This cone will collect snow and ice from the building’s roof, and, given Edmonton’s long and intense winters, looking through the transparent atrium wall into this structure could be compared to staring into the heart of an ancient glacier; another way his design references the perpetual cycles of the natural world. The ribbon then rises up the west side of the museum and acts as a sunscreen. It stretches out to become a gallery roof and then cradles back into the building to encase an elevated members’ lounge.

From this free-form atrium (clearly influenced by Stout’s former boss Frank Gehry, FAIA) the AGA’s white-box gallery spaces are calm, rectilinear, and functional. Visitors are eased out of the ebulliently expressive atrium into the largely rational galleries by scaled-down ceiling heights that create “gallery foyers,” interspatial zones that prepare patrons for a quieter visual experience.

This design language dichotomy is seen in Stout’s Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Va., as well, and it’s something he saw all around him during his many visits to Edmonton. As he studied his museum’s site, he noticed that the streets of Edmonton were planned in a hyper-rational grid system with nary a twist or a curve. The surrounding building stock was dull, dour, and blandly unified, he says. Yet, the Saskatchewan River was allowed to run through the city very much as it had before the city existed; its wilderness floodplains and wildlife still largely intact. “I started to think that maybe unlike Americans, Canadians are comfortable with this kind of dichotomy,” Stout says.

Revision
Stout’s nuanced use of the circular ribbon will likely aid his design’s cultural viability and longevity. Instead of some kind of blithely explicit “Circle of Life” ocular window opening onto a richly vernacular giant weaved quilt or tapestry from a far away, dusty cave, Stout has given the AGA an abstracted and deformed circle that hides its unity with obstructed view corridors and an overwhelming grandness of scale, both of which are obvious stand-ins for the fallibility of human knowledge. This forces those who see it to remember that cultural and artistic traditions only seem to become torn from the creative humanist continuum. How many times has Modernism died and been reborn? When does Neo-Postmodernism arrive? Neo-Deconstructivism? Stout’s work with the AGA acknowledges that revisionism of all kinds will bring scholars and artists back to the same canvas, book, or particle collider as their ancestors.