Design

It is a singular achievement. The new $23 million Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University combines innovative modernist architecture, state-of-the-art energy and light- efficient construction, and a carefully preserved natural setting. The location on a gentle knoll at the corner of Duke University Road and Anderson Street on Duke's Central Campus (between the East and West campuses) is a convenient hub for the Durham community and the Research Triangle region. In this remarkable architectural setting, the institution's greatest ambition is to bring to its audiences what Nasher's Mary D. B. T. and James H. Semans Director Kimerly Rorschach describes as "wonderful works of art illuminated by a wealth of ideas and accompanied by an array of programs for all audiences."

Named for benefactor Raymond D. Nasher, a 1943 Duke alumnus and Texas-based commercial developer, the 65,000-square-foot Nasher at Duke is a symbol of the university's commitment to and interpretation of contemporary issues through the arts. An arts advocate since his student days, Nasher was one of the first real estate developers in the United States to place sculpture and other art in commercial retail complexes. For their personal collection, Nasher and his late wife Patsy initially concentrated on modern American and pre-Columbian art. Today, 50 years later, their 20th-century modern sculpture collection is considered one of the most extensive and significant private collections in the world. As a natural extension of their growing role as philanthropists and world-class art collectors, in 2003 the Nashers opened the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Many objects from their 300-piece collection are displayed in the 55,000-square-foot Center-designed by Renzo Piano-and a 1.5-acre garden by landscape architect Peter Walker.
Nasher kept close ties to Duke, serving on the university Board of Trustees from 1968 until 1974 when he was elected trustee emeritus. He had long seen Duke's need for an art museum. Housed in a former science building on the East Campus, the original Duke University Museum of Art (DUMA) was in need of better exhibition space and a more accessible location. Nasher initiated steps for a new art museum in 1998 by donating $7.8 million toward a new facility and helped choose the splendid location, a wooded area where students had once studied native plants. The gift inspired donations from other benefactors and The Nasher Foundation of Dallas added an additional $2.5 million.

Stunning design
Uruguayan-born architect Rafael Violy, who recently completed the new space for Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, was selected in 2000 to design the museum. His projects include expansion projects at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, and the Brooklyn Children's Museum. The Nasher was his first stand-alone art museum in North America and the creative result is stunning.

Composed of five geometric softly hued pre-cast concrete pavilions radiating out from a 45-foot-tall great hall, the Nasher provides 14,000 square feet of exhibit space in three gallery pavilions, a 173-seat lecture and media hall, and a pavilion housing the caf, museum shop and classrooms.

An astoundingly dramatic space, the great hall is set beneath a 13,000-square-foot, multi-faceted glass roof supported by perforated girders and steel beams arranged at dynamic angles and intersecting with a grid of glass panels. It is a multiple-purpose space, functioning as the museum's lobby and entrance hall, a performance and exhibit space, and a friendly courtyard. Ceiling-to-floor glass panels between the pavilions bring the natural world inside, framing vignettes of tall leafy trees and sunny sloping meadows whose subtle hues blend with the grand hall's expansive green slate floor. Under the aegis of Durham landscape architecture firm Lappas and Havener, the surrounding 9-acre site has been carefully naturalized with a minimum of hardscape, and parking is screened by the gently sloping topography and a border of pines. The great hall space is both serene and exhilarating-beautifully integrated with nature but, as Rorschach describes it, a kind of Grand Central Station, a busy nexus leading visitors to choose among the three gallery pavilions and the two dedicated to offices, classrooms, research materials, retail sales and dining.

Opening presages greatness
Ground was broken in 2003. In June 2004, Nasher toured the under-construction museum and declared that it had the potential to become one of the most important and most interesting university museums in the country. Certainly the program planned for the Nasher at Duke's opening day on October 2, 2005, presages greatness. Open free of charge from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m., the museum will inaugurate its two new special exhibition galleries with "The Evolution of the Nasher Collection" and "The Forest: Politics, Poetics and Practice." Unlike previous Nasher Collection shows, "The Evolution of the Nasher Collection" places the works of art in a personal context and explores the tastes and interests of the Nashers through their long collecting collaboration. Seminal works by Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore and others will be on view, many for the first time in the Triangle. "The Forest: Politics, Poetics and Practice" features the collected works of 30 artists from around the world focusing on a forest theme. Appropriately, the exhibit speaks to the wooded landscape of the museum and to the 8000 acres owned and managed by Duke University, as well as to the interplay of art, landscape, the ecology and human interaction with the environment.

Project architect John Kinnaird of Rafael Violy Architects, has shepherded the Nasher through its design and construction phase, dividing his time between Durham and Violy's headquarters in New York. He discusses the feats of engineering and physics that allow the faceted roof to succeed structurally while appearing as almost a piece of sculpture. "The geometry of the roof is achieved by building up off of five steel-box beams, one from each pavilion," Kinnaird explains. "These beams work both as the main supporting structure for the roof and as air distribution for the lobby and create a kind of table. Secondary beams from the main entrances rise up to form the peaks of the roof." One result of this complexity of steel and skylights is a kind of shadow play that enlivens the hall throughout the day. At night when the hall is lighted and twinkling lights illuminate the beams, the effect is warm and intimate, creating an ambient space for group entertaining and special performances. Kinnaird explains that the glass in the roof is low iron glass with a kind of ceramic "frits" silk-screening that filters out 65 percent of the direct light while allowing transmission of the broadest range of the color spectrum.

Within each pavilion, natural light is also a main feature. Clerestory windows can be covered with solar shades or left open for brightness. "Traditionally in museums, there is an effort to control outside light for protection of the exhibits. We have sought innovative ways to allow natural light in, while still making our exhibition pavilions suitable for a variety of uses," says Kinnaird. Each pavilion is enlivened by a palette of earth colors and the textures of natural materials such as selected fine woods. In the lecture hall, the rich tones of the makore wood panels and texture of the walls work to create a very warm and inviting space. With experience from commissions from major performing arts centers, Rafael Violy Architects has created a state-of-the-art auditorium and media pavilion for the Nasher at Duke, featuring walls with absorptive panels behind slatted wood spaced at 2-inch intervals and laid over fabric screening. The acoustics are designed to enhance audio-visual presentations and small concerts.

The pavilion housing the museum store, administrative offices and university and community classrooms reflects the same creative attention to detail. Glass window walls bring the outdoors in. Each room is furnished with handsome classroom furniture, sinks with water, audio-visual equipment and wall finishes that allow for enthusiastically creative art projects. Director Kimerly Rorschach said the museum is closely involved with the community through the Duke Neighborhood Partnership that targets residential areas closest to the university. "In the past, we've involved neighborhood students in the Nasher at Duke, but our broader goal is to involve students from all the schools in Durham in our work here," she says.

Rorschach sees the 64-seat Nasher Museum Caf as another means of making the museum a destination for students, visitors, researchers and artists. The caf, tucked into an angled-glass walled space on the Anderson Street side of the museum, features a view of a Mark di Suvero sculpture on loan from the Nasher Collection. Tables with umbrellas spill out of the caf onto the terrace beyond and provide "eyes on the street" neighborliness for caf patrons who can watch visitors arriving at the museum via city buses that stop on the street below. "The cuisine will be good," says Rorschach, "and will be provided by the well-known Durham catering firm Sage and Swift."

Intriguing themes
Sarah Walker Schroth, Nancy Hanks Senior Curator, assembled the inaugural exhibition, "Evolution of the Nasher Collection." "Ninety pieces of the Nasher's Collection from the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas will be displayed in Pavilion I and the great hall through May 21, 2006," said Schroth. She organized the exhibition to answer the questions: "When does one become a collector?" and "What is the mindset of a collector?" Her exploration of the personal side of collecting and the Nasher Collection has never been done before. She plans to use 90 pieces, not all of them 20th-century sculpture, to tell the story of how Raymond and Patsy Nasher's taste and collecting focus evolved from their first piece of modern American art, Ben Shahn's 1954 Tennis Players, through pre-Columbian art, Oceanic art, African art, Guatemalan textiles, Navajo rugs, and the work of Pop Artist Andy Warhol. "Patsy was good friends with Andy Warhol," says Schroth. "She and their three daughters were painted by him. So it wasn't always sculpture, but if you say Nasher today, modern sculpture is the first thing that comes to mind."

Schroth is particularly proud of the inaugural exhibit "The Forest: Politics, Poetics and Practice," the brain child of colleague Kathleen Goncharov, the Nasher at Duke's Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art. "A friend who is the director of an art gallery in Rome called me recently," says Schroth, "and complimented us on The Forest. She called it one of the most important contemporary exhibitions ever assembled." Schroth notes that as a result of the interest and support generated by the Nasher at Duke, many friends and benefactors have made generous donations and loaned major works for the museum's permanent collection. "We are very excited that one of our board members loaned us a sculpture by Ron Mueck, who recently exhibited at the Venice Biennale. His 8-foot-tall self-portrait will be a huge hit in our inaugural installation of the permanent collection, 'Nature, Gender, Ritual,' in Pavilion III."

It is shaping up to be a dazzling occasion as the Nasher at Duke opens October 2 with a magnificent building and an exhibition of one of the world's top personal art collections. Raymond D. Nasher will be there as well to see his vision of a world-class art museum at his alma mater become reality.

Sidebar

NC State Frank Thompson Building Set For Renovation
The proposal to renovate and expand the classical Frank Thompson Building on the campus of North Carolina State University has met with enthusiasm and an outpouring of interest. The ambitious project to transform the building into a multifaceted, first-class center for theatre, dance, gallery space and a crafts center will cost $15 million. Students have pledged $10 million through a new fee increase, and private individuals, businesses and the greater NCSU and Raleigh community are expected to raise $5 million more.

An architectural landmark designed by Hobart Upjohn, the scion of the New York architectural firm Upjohn and Company, the Frank Thompson Building has been a focal point of campus life since its completion in 1925. It was designed as the campus gymnasium to house all of the college's athletic activities-physical education classes, intramurals and, of course, the Wolfpack men's basketball games. It was also an ideal venue for activities as diverse as concerts, commencements and dancing to the big bands of the Swing Era, becoming the source of fond memories for generations of students and alums.
Named for Frank Thompson, a 1910 NC State graduate who captained both the baseball and football teams before dying in World War I, the building continued to host basketball games until Reynolds Coliseum was built in 1949. In 1963, the physical education programs were moved to the modern Carmichael Gymnasium, but the venerable old building continued to house an extraordinary mix of campus activities and, increasingly, cultural programs. In the 1970s, the main floor of Thompson became the official home for the NC State theatre program, acknowledged as one of the best in the region.
The planned renovation of the facility will provide quality space for the visual and performing arts programs, including NCSU Center Stage, the Crafts Center, the modern-focused Dance Program, the Gallery of Art & Design, the Music Department and the University Theatre. Headed by a distinguished committee, co-chaired by Richard K. Bryant and G. Smedes York, the project to restore the Frank Thompson Building is off to an impressive start.
-Diane Lea