The Palmer Museum, with architecture by Allied Works and a landscape by Reed Hilderbrand, opens at Penn State

Artwork will not be among the many first issues that come to thoughts while you consider State Faculty, Pennsylvania—however maybe it ought to. College artwork museums are a assorted lot: Some are among the many grandest you will discover, whereas others are unusual spare rooms fulfilling a musty pledge to a donor to maintain the Dürer etchings on show. 

The Palmer Museum at Penn State incorporates the most important artwork assortment exterior of the state’s city facilities, which could sound like faint reward, however it isn’t. It has 11,000 items, and a really wholesome fraction of these (eight p.c, up from 4) at the moment are on show in a brand-new facility designed by Allied Works. The Palmer was previously housed within the college’s most fascinating constructing, principally designed by Charles Moore, nevertheless it merely wasn’t massive sufficient. (The college will likely be repurposing that constructing and appears severe about retaining its principal inside options.) 

The positioning supplied to Allied Works was a car parking zone on the sting of Penn State’s arboretum. It’s unlucky that this web site is a little bit past the purpose the place campus morphs right into a suburb, however Allied Works has made a lot of the plot. 

The constructing is a collection of staggered volumes that Allied Works principal Brad Cloepfil described in dialog with AN as each “a weave in plan and part” and “a ramble throughout the backyard.” Deference to the 370-acre arboretum, which incorporates a botanical backyard instantly adjoining, was the prime inventive impulse. The encircling panorama, designed by frequent collaborator Reed Hilderbrand, sought to deferentially hyperlink these showpieces for artwork and crops. 

Cloepfil didn’t wish to construct a domineering construction, expressing a frustration with “shiny bauble” museums “the place the galleries are small and circulation complicated.” As an alternative, the crew produced a zigzag clad in native sandstone and pierced it with irregular fenestration and occasional stainless-steel brise-soleil panels—resembling intermittent cyclopean rave glasses. 

The wooden-plank-ish texture of the sandstone cladding is Norman Jaffe–esque, and the impression is accentuated by how Allied Works vertically organized them, making some extent about their structural superfluity. Cloepfil defined: “It’s cladding; it’s not load-bearing. We didn’t attempt to fake it was a Roman wall.” 

This all makes way more sense when you go inside, the place the sequence of galleries is excellent. Cloepfil defined his conception of an artwork museum as “prescribing a journey,” one which on this case is exceptionally scrutable because of double-height atria and Nittany Valley views. The expertise he supposed was that one would possibly “intimately interact the artwork in some small rooms, and then you definately’re linked to the panorama in a type of rhythmic sequential journey.” 

An actual talent of the endeavor was designing for what the gathering truly is; up to date galleries so usually appear plotted solely with big up to date artwork in thoughts, leaving smaller older items adrift. Right here, the design accommodates human-scaled items by Maurice Prendergast, Robert Henri, Marguerite Zorach, George Grosz, and lots of others exceedingly nicely. 

Many gallery partitions shock by being brightly painted: Colours from darkish blue to russet crimson disrupt the expectation of white. Typically these partitions terminate wanting the ceiling, and at different factors paint shifts to white at a sure top. It was one other product of Cloepfil’s frustration with “the white field” as gallery default: “Whenever you go to neoclassical museums, you see small work in 30-foot-high areas, and one of many causes it really works is due to the entablatures and cornices and encrusting decoration. Now that we don’t use these anymore, you need to strike some traces.” 

Essentially the most egregiously and delightfully painterly function is a big window throughout an atrium from the second-floor baroque gallery, which frames rolling hills and mountains in addition to George Innes might need. The principal stairway is one other humanizing contact, oak-lined and homey, which Cloepfil in comparison with a rocking chair. “You don’t contact the artwork; you do contact the steps.” 

The design principally carried out the goals of museum management. Curator Erin Coe defined: “What I needed to do on the new museum was take away limitations to participation.” She admitted that “a few of these limitations have been bodily,” or architectural. However past the brand new, bigger house, new acquisitions are additionally taking middle stage: An inaugural exhibit showcases many superb Pennsylvanians, from Mary Cassatt to Keith Haring to Andy Warhol and Howardena Pindell. There are additionally greater than 30 new acquisitions on show. A lot else awaits unearthing, and now the museum has room to do it. 

Exterior, Reed Hilderbrand’s transitional panorama feels excellent. “This house doesn’t wish to have the entire horticultural complexity of a botanical backyard; it desires to really feel like an extension,” mentioned principal John Kett. To that finish, sculptures by Anthony Caro, Beverly Pepper, Seymour Lipton, and others are scattered all through the grounds. 

Cloepfil was uninterested in having “banal experiences in actually fancy buildings.” He has deftly prevented that right here. 

Anthony Paletta is a author residing in Brooklyn.