The point should be: is it good architecture?
—Robert Venturi

Public-spiritedness and civic pride are virtues not conspicuously evident in many American towns and cities these days. Cynicism, incompetence, and corruption among public officials; apathy and brittle self-centeredness among business leaders and ordinary citizens; violence, anomie, and despair among the poor: this is the litany we hear repeated over and over again in the papers and news reports and that we can witness for ourselves every day on the streets. To be sure, many municipalities have embarked on public-relations campaigns to attract taxpayers and tourists. But how many cities live up to their advertisements? Optimistic city dwellers will recall a handful of episodes when public-spiritedness triumphed over apathy, when some of their fellow citizens banded together for reasons larger than their own gratification or aggrandizement. But for most of us such episodes are the exception rather than the rule: they stand out vividly precisely because they are so rare.

Not that this state of affairs is wholly bad.

Not that this state of affairs is wholly bad. Corrupt and incompetent public officials are indeed unsavory and oughtn’t to be countenanced—although one may perhaps be forgiven for concluding that they, like the poor, will be always with us. Yet because the desire for community typically competes with the imperatives of freedom, it is hardly surprising that individuals should regard the impersonal workings of bureaucracy most benignantly when they are least demanding and intrusive. Especially in a modern urban environment, the call for community—when it is more than simply rhetoric—is often an alibi for imposing upon individual discretion.

Nevertheless, it is difficult not to be impressed by genuine examples of public-spiritedness and civic pride when they do occur. Anyone who has visited Seattle, Washington, in recent years will know that the city is a veritable bastion of such virtues. Seattlites, as they are wont to call themselves, exhibit an unflinching exuberance about their city and its amenities. And, clearly, their enthusiasm is contagious, for Seattle has enjoyed enormous growth over the last decade. Even in the midst of the current economic recession, the city seems vibrant and prosperous, its mood determinedly optimistic. I can’t remember a place where the hotel porters are so unremittingly friendly.

Given the peculiar place that art has come to occupy in our society—having become in many circles more a patent of social achievement and token of political broadmindedness than an object of aesthetic pleasure—it was only to be expected that Seattlites would bring unusual dedication and energy to the task of supplying their city with a new art museum. And so they have. Nearly half of the $62 million needed for the project in downtown Seattle was raised by floating a public bond: “the largest successful public referendum for an art museum in the U.S.,” as a press release proudly informs us.

Nor was it surprising that Seattle should have chosen the celebrated Philadelphia-based architect Robert Venturi (in collaboration with the local firm of Olson Sundberg) to design its museum. The gentle postmodernist and winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize could be counted on to imbue a new museum with the requisite measure of brand-name aura. Moreover, the firm of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates has rather specialized in providing a pleasing rhetoric of civic-mindedness to accompany their urban buildings. Although Venturi and his wife, Denise Scott Brown, claim to have found inspiration in such monuments of architectural excellence and civic responsibility as the Las Vegas strip and Pop Art, they have expended considerable energy writing and talking about the importance of “context,” sensitive urban planning, and community.

Venturi’s important discovery was that by supplying his buildings with a script, he needn’t worry so much about the architecture itself. When the late Gordon Bunshaft decried one of Venturi’s early projects as “ugly and ordinary,” it was the work of a moment to turn the tables and declare that Bunshaft’s dismissive epithet was really a “compliment.” How much better—or at least more interesting—Venturi reasoned in Learning from Las Vegas, to be ugly and ordinary than “heroic and original” like all those elitist modernists of yore.

Consider the main entrance façade of the new Seattle Art Museum.

Consider the main entrance façade of the new Seattle Art Museum. It curves unexpectedly as it trundles down University Street to meet First Avenue, dipping suddenly inward again in a little dimple before petering out blandly a few yards later toward Union Street. The uninitiated observer might think that the way Venturi shaved off the corner, displacing the entrance from the grand stairway that leads up into the museum, was merely a clumsy attempt to give an otherwise drab structure a distinctive profile. In this age of postmodernist quirkiness, one might in fact conclude that Venturi’s solution was merely ugly and ordinary. But the uninitiated observer would have spoken without the benefit of Venturi’s filigree of commentary about inside meeting outside, his explanation that the building is “a civic work of art that does not upstage the art inside . . .  at home in its context, at ease in the ethos of its place,” &c. This is sheer flapdoodle. But it is precisely what public-spirited clients, wanting to do the right thing but unsure of themselves, want to hear.

Has Venturi succeeded in Seattle? The answer has to be both Yes and No. Yes, doubtless, insofar as one looks at the Seattle Art Museum as an exercise in civic piety. For Venturi would certainly seem to have succeeded in designing a spot that the public, or part of it, likes to visit. On opening day, one hears, hundreds of people stood in the legendary Seattle rain for hours to catch a glimpse of the inside of their new museum. During my three-day visit, the museum’s café often had long lines of people waiting for a cup of cappuccino or other up-to-date sustenance, and the bookstore seemed always to be doing a brisk business. The galleries were far more sparsely populated, though perhaps that had something to do with the fact that several had only just opened.

In any event, Venturi would also seem to have succeeded in his oft-announced ambition of creating a place that was “likeable to children.” The compact, five-story building, sited on a steeply sloping hill just a block or two from the waterfront and the famous Pike Place Market, is clad mostly in limestone panels. On the side facing University Street, the panels are decorated with stylized fluting. Up about the fourth story are incised, frieze-like, fourteen-foot letters spelling out SEATLE ART MUSEUM—the world’s largest incised architectural letters, Miss Scott Brown hazarded, and no doubt perfect for those just learning to read. Also for children is the mélange of parti-colored granites, marbles, and terra-cottas decorating the façade at ground level. Vaguely reminiscent of the circus (though Venturi spoke of African and Pacific Northwest art, which feature prominently in Seattle’s collection), these festoon a variety of whimsical arches and columns framing over-sized window bays that divide the grand stairway inside the building from the pedestrian staircase echoing it outside. Here, too, the effect is neo-Romper Room.

In a recent interview, Venturi took issue with the heavily “theoretical” direction that much academic architecture has taken in recent years (partly, perhaps largely, under the influence of his 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, but we may leave that to one side). “The point should be,” he declared: “is it good architecture?”¹ Well, is it? As has been frequently noted, many of the distinguishing architectural elements of the Seattle Art Museum are similar to Venturi’s recently completed Sainsbury Wing for the National Gallery in London. (The Seattle design was in fact conceived first, but the Sainsbury Wing was executed far more lavishly.) The use of limestone paneling, the hypertrophied lettering incised in a freize spelling out the name of the institution, the idiosyncratic corners, even such details as painted aluminum columns topped with vaguely Egyptoid decoration: both museums have them in common. As it happens, some columns in the Seattle Art Museum are virtually identical to those used in the Sainsbury Wing: It cuts down on the cost, Venturi explained, to repeat such ideas. In fact, much that one might say about the Sainsbury Wing can be repeated, mutatis mutandis, about the Seattle Art Museum.² Both museums contain some fine exhibition galleries. In Seattle, the suites of smaller galleries on the south side of the building reserved for Asian art (on the third floor) and older European art (on the fourth floor) are far more successful that the large bays on the north side of the building where African, Native American, and twentieth-century art is exhibited.

In both museums, the greatest interior disaster is also the most pretentious architectural “statement”: the grand stairway. In both, the stairway boasts a series of brightly colored arches (for the kids?) that are perched like a papier-mâché canopy in glorious uselessness above the stairs; both stairways rise at the edge of the building, alongside a series of large windows, in order to make them seem separate from the building proper; both are strangely—perhaps even deliberately—ill-proportioned; and both are set obliquely to the right of the main entrance, disrupting the natural circulation of the building. In Seattle, the stairway cannot even be said to go anywhere, since when one climbs to the top, one finds oneself not in a gallery but on a landing directly in front of the building’s rear entrance: So long, and thanks for coming. In Seattle, too, someone had the ghastly idea of distributing half-a-dozen large Chinese stone sculptures up the stairway. Together with the arches, the ensemble looks, as one wit put it, like nothing so much as the entrance to a certain species of Chinese restaurant.

The point should be: is it good architecture?

The point should be: is it good architecture? The tradition that Venturi repudiates held that “God is in the details.” There is a problem with details at his new museum. As everyone knows, it rains a good deal in Seattle. One might therefore expect an architect to take extra pains to assure that drainage was adequate. When I first arrived at the main entrance of the Seattle Art Museum, it was raining lightly. Collected in the little plaza in front of the entrance was an inch or two of rain water. What happens when it really starts raining? In addition, on the third and fourth stories there are large bay windows set into the dimple that rises the height of the building. The windows overlook Eliot Bay, just off Puget Sound. It is a dramatic sight—or it would be if only one could see it properly. One of the mullions, about four inches wide, is set just at the eye level of the average adult. Venturi is about my height, so he too must have occasionally gazed out upon his mullion. Perhaps the children that he hopes to entertain can get a good view of the prospect beyond.

In architectural terms, anyway, the Seattle Art Museum is not much of a success. But Venturi has succeeded grandly in his ambition to create a museum that is not “elitist,” that champions the idea of “art as part of everyday life.” The original Seattle Art Museum, an Art Deco structure cloistered far from the city center in the bucolic acres of Volunteer Park, was built in the early Thirties by Dr. Richard E. Fuller primarily to exhibit his superlative collection of Asian art (a collection that, incidentally, was greatly enhanced by Sherman Lee, for many years the distinguished director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, when he came to work at the Seattle Art Museum in the late 1940s). This period building is being restored and will reopen as a center for the study of Asian Art under the aegis of the new museum. As Venturi noted in some public remarks, the Volunteer Park building conformed to the traditional conception of the museum as a pavilioned gallery set apart from the hubbub of daily life.

He did not pursue the idea except to brand it “elitist,” but it is perhaps worth noting that this conception of the museum is patterned on the idea of the museum as a temple of art: as a repository of objects that are rare, precious, demanding. Whatever its architectural vocabulary, the museum in this sense looks back in spirit to such lofty structures as Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin. It does not attempt to meet people on the level of their everyday experience, seducing them inside with quiche, cappuccino, and the latest art-world trend. Instead, it offers them a mode of experience that is patently different from—and perhaps more exalted than—their experience of everyday life.

The Seattle Art Museum, Venturi noted, stands at the opposite end of the spectrum. Its model is not the pavilioned gallery set apart from the demos, but what he referred to as “the traditional loft building.” Early models for this vision of the museum include Philip Goodwin and Edwin Durell Stone’s 1939 building for the Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan. Far from being segregated from the daily life of the city, the museum in this sense is an extension of daily life. It exists, as the architectural historian William H. Jordy observed in these pages some years ago, “with a revolving door on the street and an enlarged view of what a museum . . . should encompass.”³ Perhaps, as Venturi put it, this anti-elitist conception of the function of the art museum is “a very beautiful idea.” There can be little doubt, at any rate, that it is an idea whose time has come. Venturi estimated that in an old-fashioned “elitist” museum, nearly 90 percent of the building was given over to exhibiting art. Today, he said, the total is closer to 30 percent. The rest is largely given over to what are euphemistically termed amenities: bookstores, gift shops, restaurants, members’ lounges, &c.; that is, income-producing enterprises to supplement the museum’s budget. If the Goodwin-Stone building for MOMA brought the museum down off its pedestal, subsequent developments have brought it right out into the street—if not, indeed, even further afield. In the article just cited, William Jordy remarked that this democratizing trend in museum design, epitomized at the time he was writing by Cesar Pelli’s expansion of MOMA, then underway, “puts one in mind of certain building arcades, like that at the base of New York’s Citicorp building, or of shopping marts like Quincy Market, South Street Seaport, Harbor Place, and Ghirardelli Square.”

The new Seattle Art Museum would fit in snugly at South Street Seaport or at most of the other venues that Mr. Jordy mentions. Indeed, given Venturi’s declared ambition of realizing the “beautiful idea” of an anti-elitist museum, it seems appropriate that SAM (after MOMA, acronyms are de rigueur for the aspiring art museum) should happen to be located in a part of town conspicuously populated with strip-joints and porno theaters. Almost directly across from the main entrance, for example, is an establishment called the Lusty Lady, which appeared to be doing a far more vigorous business than the museum. It would also appear to be an enthusiastic supporter of the arts. When the museum first opened, “The Lusty Lady Welcomes SAM” is said to have been emblazoned across one side of its marquee, “Expose Yourself to Art” across the other. Perhaps joint memberships could be arranged: visit the Lusty Lady, then stop by the museum for a refreshing beverage. Visit her ten times and get a free poster from the bookshop. The Lusty Lady might also provide an appropriate place for some collaborative efforts: one imagines that Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, and other “cutting-edge” performance artists would feel right at home there. Venturi spoke a good deal about the prominent role that education plays in the modern, anti-elitist museum. No wonder he professed himself pleased by the proximity of the Lusty Lady.

Behind—but not so far behind—Venturi’s ideology of anti-elitism is a political agenda.

Behind—but not so far behind—Venturi’s ideology of anti-elitism is a political agenda. The name of that agenda is multiculturalism, and the “arts community” in Seattle—as in so many other places—has fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. The unacknowledged truth about Seattle’s collection is it is mostly second-rate or worse. Apart from its holdings in Asian art, which are reputedly among the best in the country, it has little of lasting merit. Its twentieth-century collection, with few exceptions, is an inventory of fleeting trends. Its holdings in nineteenth-century European art are mostly shallow and undistinguished, as are many of its holdings in the Old Masters. The museum has made much of its collection of African and Native American art, but only a commitment to the imperatives of multiculturalism could persuade one to take most of these objects very seriously as art. It was cheerfully pointed out to me that the museum owns the hatchet or club or tomahawk with which Captain Cook was dispatched lo these many years ago. This of course is splendid. But it highlights one of chief problems facing the Seattle Art Museum. The objects of which it is proudest are chiefly of anthropological, as distinct from artistic, interest. A commitment to multiculturalism requires that this be denied, and it is denied in the easiest possible way: by dispensing with the very idea that there are important distinctions to be made between aesthetic achievement and anthropological curiosity. As Venturi put it recently, “our whole ethos must be tolerant and inclusive.” In other words: who says that a painting by Titian is of greater aesthetic merit than that tomahawk?

In Seattle, the governing ideology of multiculturalism seems mostly low-key and implicit, though its effects are everywhere patent in Venturi’s new museum. Seattle’s commitment to multiculturalism has not been lost on bien-pensant journalists, however, many of whom have loudly trumpeted its virtues to the world. In a recent issue of New York magazine, for example, Kay Larson, long a reliable compendium of politically correct opinions about cultural matters, delivered herself of a fawning article in praise of Seattle’s “internationalist” accomplishment. There are “no standard European histories here,” Miss Larson purred.

“The masterpiece mentality,” “hero objects”: this little gem of multiculturalist sermonizing has it all, even the requisite dollop of what we might call postmodern unintelligibility. What, after all, can be meant by “a collaborative level of quality”? What except a thoroughgoing confusion that denies the idea of quality altogether. It is also typical of the reigning multiculturalist fashion that Miss Larson should speak of objects screaming their “moral superiority” when the superiority in question is not moral but aesthetic. Yet this is precisely the distinction—between morality and aesthetics—that our politically correct multiculturalists have blurred in their eagerness to subjugate culture to ideology.

It may go without saying that the vision of an anti-elitist museum to which Venturi, Miss Larson, and many others subscribe today could not be pursued without a powerful spark of self-righteousness. This is evident throughout the rhetoric surrounding multicultural endeavors such as the new Seattle Art Museum. But it is perhaps nowhere more blatant than in the endless talk one hears about the “educational” and didactic function of the “new” museum. It is gleefully pointed out that there are more “resource centers” and computer-imaging systems, more publications and symposia in the new musuem than in their stuffy counterparts of old. There are endless tours for schoolchildren and lectures for adults. Is this not a marvelous thing, bringing ever more art, in an ever more entertaining fashion, to ever more people? A moment’s thought tells us that what is being offered to the public in the guise of an educational resource is really a kind of deception of the public. What they are getting is not culture but a bill of goods. The philosopher Hannah Arendt saw this with exceptional clarity. “What is at stake here,” she wrote in “The Crisis in Culture,”

Robert Venturi, like Kay Larson, is a sterling example of the “special kind of intellectual” that Hannah Arendt had in mind. Behind their jus’-plain-folks anti-elitism is a particularly insidious brand of elitism: an elitism that would deny the public what is most valuable in our cultural heritage in the name of ideological accommodation. In this sense, the Seattle Art Museum is more sinned against than sinning. Those who brought it into being wanted to do the right thing. Their mistake was believing that public-spiritedness can be freely exchanged for artistic quality.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.