Word: botta
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cramped that the permanent collection had to be taken down whenever a temporary show went up. In 1990 designs for a new building were made public. It would cost $60 million, all in private money, and the architect was an Italian-Swiss little known in America: Mario Botta...
...Botta, 51, deserves all praise for coming up with a design that isn't disfigured by post-Modernist hokiness, as is the 1991 Seattle Art Museum, designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. No smirking little "references" to grand architecture done in pasteboard; no one-shot ironies or graphic-design quips. Botta's brick masses occupy their site with authority and dignity, and their striations save the windowless walls from dullness. It might have looked like an art bunker, but Botta avoided this by splitting the mass symmetrically with a protruding skylight: a big cylinder sliced...
...floor aims to give the visitor a coup de theatre, and it does. After a low entranceway the space soars, thanks to a circular well that rises clear through the building and finishes in the slanting oculus 130 ft. above. It transmits enough light down through the building for Botta to use a dramatic chiaroscuro of materials without sinking the interior in gloom-a striped floor of black and gray granite, for example...
...galleries are the best part of the museum, as they ought to be. Botta has done them with impeccable taste and has resisted the temptation to make them depend on artificial light. Because the blocks of the museum mass are stepped back, each floor gets its share of filtered daylight through the roof, and the detailing of these skylights recalls the great prototype of Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, still the most beautiful art-display building erected in postwar America. Botta worked for a time in Kahn's firm in the U.S., and the influence...