Word: vaulted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fact, of the Japanese Arata Isozaki's work. Isozaki's first major commission in the U.S., the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles, evokes a dreamy pre-Columbian (or extraterrestrial) temple. The exterior is rich and singular: roughly cut red sandstone blocks, green aluminum panels, a barrel vault floating above the ; sidewalk. Inside, only the library, with its extraordinary white onyx window, is architecturally aggressive. The seven scrupulously conceived galleries are restrained, plain, deferential...
...like Charles Garnier, who created the Paris Opera, and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, France's supreme engineer. But he gave the Gare d'Orsay all he had, and that, backed by the decorative and engineering resources of fin de siecle Paris, was quite a lot: a vast semicircular barrel vault of iron and glass, stretching 150 yards from end to end, with elliptical-domed side vaults along the Quai Anatole France facing the Seine, all encased in a wrapping of richly carved limestone facades whose swags, cartouches, urns, allegorical figures and pediments bring to mind the words of Antoinin Careme, Talleyrand...
...clear from the start that whatever form the collection took, Laloux's vast and grimy barrel vault made demands of its own. It had 30,000 square meters of floor and no walls. The group led by Lachenaud figured that the collections would need 47,000 square meters enclosed by walls on which to hang the paintings. This meant putting a new building inside the old, and there was no question of designing it in the manner of Laloux. "It could not be a pastiche," says Lachenaud. "The station itself was pastiche, a 19th century parody of what the 18th...
...This axiality was compared, by critics who saw it in the model or not at all, to the Maginot Line or perhaps the Valley of the Kings -- a set for an Italian production of Aida. Not so: it mediates beautifully between the almost incomprehensibly large space of Laloux's vault and the scale of one's own body. It retains all that was most benevolent in beaux arts grandeur -- the reassurance offered by architecture that the individual is the reason for the state. And every part of it is functional: the detached facade wall of each terrace, for instance...
...rest of the building, natural light is Aulenti's main subject. Her use of it reaches its peak of tact and skill in the galleries for impressionism and postimpressionism at the top of the museum, fitted into the dead space between facade and vault. This parade of rooms, with its 30 or so Van Goghs, its nearly 40 Cezannes, its Monets and Manets and Renoirs, its superb array of Degas bronzes, is bound to be the popular core of the museum, and Aulenti was right to put it up high, closest to the light. "Light is impressionism," she says...