1Pavilions terminate to east withY-shaped column supportingroofs’ shading projections. Left iscurve of café roof.

Tadao Ando’s new museum at Fort Worth both learns from Kahn’s greatKimbell and copes with the scale and nature of contemporary art.

BOXING WITH LIGHT

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Building next to an internationally recognized masterpiece isinevitably a daunting task, but to create a building of similar type tothe great work is a challenge that few can rise to. Tadao Ando wonthe competition for the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum in 1997(AR February 1998). It is part of the city’s cultural complex, set in apark in a low-density suburb of the city, just across the road fromLouis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, one of the greatest gallerybuildings of the last century.

The big site is flat and featureless, so Ando has transformed it bydextrous tree planting (partly to mask the car park), walls against thebusiest roads, lawns and a shallow pool, or rather young lake, overwhich the city’s downtown makes a dramatic skyline. But as Andoremarked when he got the commission, even if the site was dull ‘theKimbell is a mountain’. Ando’s strategy for organizing the newbuilding is partly based on the Kimbell, with calm parallel galleryspaces, lit as far as possible by daylight and opening on to nature (inthe Kahn building exquisitely planted courts, but in the Ando themuch larger new park). To some extent, Ando turns his back (or atleast west side) on Kahn, with a dull elevation, car park and (atground level) service spaces. Perhaps it was impossible to address theearlier building directly, and when the planting round the car parkgrows the juxtaposition of the two will seem more gentle.

For all the similarities, there are very significant differencesbetween the two buildings. Kahn’s galleries are reminiscent ofCistercian vaults in their awesome simplicity. Ando’s exhibitionspaces are concrete boxes within glass ones. The heavy inner boxesare the main containers for the artworks, while the glass ones

provide intermediate spaces between galleries and the lake and lawns. The other major difference between Ando and Kahn is that

Ando (for all the size of his site) found it necessary to put his gallerieson two levels. One of the reasons for this must surely be thedifference in scale between much contemporary work and thepaintings in the Kimbell, which contains a fundamentally privatecollection of works of easel and domestic scale. Fort Worth’sModern needed larger spaces, some of double height, toaccommodate really big pieces. Ando has exploited the possibilities of his two levels of galleries with sudden surprisingjuxtapositions of volume and scale, but the arrangement means thatlower, single-height galleries must inevitably seem slightly secondclass because they cannot receive daylight. Upstairs galleries are toplit as in the Kimbell, either through diffusing fabric ceilings (such asthe one over the stair hall) or from clerestories, which project lightonto inclined cornices and then down into the spaces. In both cases,daylight is supplemented by artificial sources, but arrangements seemrather clumsy compared to the apparently effortless combination ofconcrete vaults and botanically curved metal reflectors of Kahn’sbuilding.

Routes through the galleries are arranged to encourage wandering,with some openings arranged enfilade, but with occasional departuresfrom axiality. The major public space is the double-height entrancehall which, as you go in, offers fine views over the lake, the semi-private garden beyond and the glass boxes of the gallery spacespoking out into the water to receive the Hockney-like constantlychanging dappled reflections of the water surface. To the right of the

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2Looking out from the intermediatespace between glass and concreteboxes over lake to skyline of FortWorth.3From north, towards entrance hall.site plan

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A Fort Worth Modern Art MuseumB Kimbell Art MuseumC Modern Art Museum car park

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1 entrance hall2 information desk3 museum shop4 café restaurant5 terrace6 auditorium7 gallery8 art workshop9 loading dock

10 storage11 offices12 art classrooms13 sculpture terrace14 mechanical plant15 parking

4Richard Serra’s rusty landmarkfrom south-west.5The semi Neo-Classical entrance.6, 7Entrance hall.8Intermediate space betweenconcrete gallery box (left) and glass.9Special oval gallery with AnselmKiefer’s Book with Wings.10Ando exploits changes in scale oftwo-storey building.

ground floor (scale approx 1:1250)

first floor

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entrance is the auditorium and a cafeteria that has a terrace pokingout into the lake. To the left is the information desk, from which youare directed to either the entrance of the ground floor galleries, orthe stairs, where you are cleverly deflected upwards by the curve of aspecial ground floor gallery.

All this is very thoughtful, and the building is pleasant andsometimes exciting to be in, while providing unassertive spaces in theconcrete boxes that never overwhelm the works on display in thefirst hang. But it must inevitably be compared to the Kimbell, bothbecause of its sighting and its parti. Differences are quite profound.While the Kimbell, for all its monumental qualities, is welcoming witha generous embrace, the double height of the Ando building is partlyresponsible for a much more formal, almost scraped Neo-Classicalentrance. The entrance hall itself, for all its fine volume and views(and its dramatic bridge, which leads staff over the volume at firstfloor level) is both austere and rather daunting. The insistent rhythmof glazing bars dominates perception.

To me, from both inside and out, the bars seem heavy, and theproportions they describe elongated and overstretched. While notadvocating planar glazing, I wonder if there couldn’t have been a lessstrident approach to making the glass walls, which themselves arecausing some problems of insolation and glare. The relativecoarseness of the glazing contrasts with the really excellent quality ofthe fairfaced concrete, which rivals Zumthor’s at Bregenz (ARDecember 1997), most unusual in the US. As in the Austrian building,the soft grey walls are an excellent backdrop to all visual art – surelythe most important attribute of any gallery. Undoubtedly, Ando hasmade a fine museum – but on that site, it is inevitably subject to toughappraisal. ROGER MORANT

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11Double-height gallery to house scaleof contemporary artworks.12First-floor gallery with clerestoreylight reflected off inclined cornice.13The great stair, under diffusing fabricceiling.

ArchitectTadao Ando Architect & Associates, TokyoProject teamTadao Ando, Masataka Yano, KulapatYantrasast, Peter Arendt, Larry Burns, RollieChilders, Nobuhiko Shoga, Jory AlexanderLighting consultantGeorge Sexton AssociatesPhotographsAll photographs by John E. Linden apart from1 by Mitsuo Matsuoka and 2 by Tadao Ando

south-north section through galleries

dull west elevation (facing Kimbell) in which aluminium panels are sometimes substituted for glass to reduce insolation

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