Link museum celebrates five years
Write a letter to the editor
Okay, so it’s not a Charlottesville attraction, but it’s pretty attractive— enough that we wrote a cover story and saucy sidebar about it when it opened. If Saturday’s free admission to see Link’s Americana mixed with rails isn’t enough, there’s the brand new Taubman art museum next door.
Wish this was a Charlottesville attraction.
Instead of pantheons for sports let’s hope UVA finds a donor for a Stout designed art museum, TJ could use some competition.
Yeah, just what we need here, a monstrosity by a Gehry wannabe! That will put us the map…
Really, the use of the word “attraction” to describe Roanoke’s museum is more that a bit of a stretch. The museum has nothing worth mentioning in its collection, one OK Sargent, and a few other thing that are slightly interesting by SW Virginian standards, but nothing worth traveling for. It isn’t really worth pulling off of 81 for if you do happen to be passing through. The traveling exhibits that will stop there are no doubt going to bring something to Roanoke that it has been lacking, but only someone who lives somewhere even more culturally impoverished would need to travel to see that sort of stuff.
The building itself may be daring by SW Virginia standards, but it’s more than a little cliched and wayyyyy out of place where it is. Roanoke, and Charlottesville too I’d say, would do far better to develop it’s own unique small city charms and not make itself look even more provincial by trying to compete with the big boys. They’ve made a mistake there, and I’m sure they will be struggling just to keep it running in a few years.
Have you been there artsnobb ?
Looks like a gem to me and worth a visit. Maybe this could be on the Obama wish-list for Charlottesville.
info from the web-site:
At the heart of downtown Roanoke, the new 81,000 square foot Taubman Museum of Art proves an arresting landmark for visitors arriving from US I-581. As Roanoke’s most contemporary structure, it provides an analog for the city’s evolution from industrial and manufacturing town to technology-driven city. The building’s forms and materials evoke both the drama of the surrounding mountainous landscape of the Shenandoah Valley and the lyrically gritty industrial-era building culture of the great early 20th century railroad boom, when Roanoke came to prominence as a switchpoint city of the new South.
The finish on its undulating, angel hair-finish stainless steel roof forms reflects the rich palette of colors found in the sky and the seasonal landscape. Inspired by mountain streams, translucent glass surfaces - some brilliantly clear and others frosted to filter and modulate interior daylight - emerge from the building’s mass to create canopies of softly diffused illumination over the public spaces and gallery level. As it rises to support the stainless steel roof, a layered pattern of angular exterior walls surfaced in shingled, patinated zinc gives an earthen and aged quality to the façade.
The glass atrium allows the lobby to be filled with natural light during the day, while at night the translucent glass roof surfaces are illuminated to allow the volume to glow like a beacon and draw visitors to museum activities.
“Hokie” stone, an Appalachian Dolomite limestone native to western Virginia and quarried in Blacksburg, is used in the lobby, shop and café, as well as in other public spaces throughout the new building, adding a familiar, natural texture and color to the interior. Variations of tone and texture in the stone are intended to evoke the striations, clefts and eroded rock surfaces found in the region’s famous caverns, cliffs and river gorges.
Illuminated glass treads lead visitors up a limestone-clad grand staircase to the galleries. At the landing, a luminous sculptural ceiling of cascading, back-lit, translucent polycarbonate panels will draw visitors forward through the central gallery hall to the permanent collection galleries. In the contemporary art and American art galleries, this luminous ceiling feature extends into these spaces to diffuse daylight from clerestory windows and skylights above.
The third floor administration level receives a significant amount of natural daylight, which will permeate through the many strategically placed clerestories created by the building’s undulating, layered roof forms.
In keeping with the trustees’ mandate, the new Taubman Museum of Art features significant sustainable design components, including modulated day lighting, passive solar energy systems, a thermal conserving envelope, and computerized building management systems, among other ecologically smart mechanisms.
Summarizing his approach to the design for the Taubman Museum of Art, Randall Stout said, “A guiding principal of this project is creating a powerful relationship to the natural landscape and its influence over life, learning and art in Roanoke. Our references to nature are intended as deeply meaningful ones and are central to the purpose. At the completion of other buildings I’ve designed, I have heard new interpretations of the architecture. Sometimes these surprise me at first, but eventually I see the buildings through others’ eyes, too. In this way, a new public building is like a Rorschach inkblot test. The beauty of architecture is that it creates a democratic situation by engaging every observer equally and making room for every possible interpretation. Like art, it connects people with their own past experiences and future ambitions, and provokes an intriguing array of responses. We hope the Taubman Museum of Art will function in just this way.”
For more information on the architect, visit Randall Stout’s website at http://www.stoutarc.com.
Betty, all the people who can’t navigate the internet thank you.
I haven’t been to the museum since it opened. I saw it a lot when it was under construction. I’ve heard Mr. Stout himself speak about it, and I had a friend who worked on the project show me around a very detailed computer model of the building. I’m not at all impressed. Like Gehry’s work, it falls apart upon closer inspection, but unlike Gehry’s work, it isn’t even novel any more. Stout worked for Gehry, and his museum isn’t much more than Gehry lite. There were numerous reason why Bilbao worked. The same thing isn’t going to happen in Roanoke.
It seems like you haven’t been to the museum. If you have, it clearly didn’t make enough of an impression for you to be able to say anything yourself about the building or the experience. My other thought is that you are connected to it in some way and want to promote it. In that case, writing an original thought or two still might be more convincing than lifting verbatim from the website’s promotional BS.
The website photos are extremely misleading. The building looks nothing like them. It is out of scale for the site, and ignores its context. It is an obviously derivative showpiece that does nothing so much as make Roanoke look desperate to appear significant somehow. The collection is not much different than what was displayed in Center in the Square before someone in Roanoke decided that a mega-million dollar home was what could turn a weak collection into a tourist draw. Fine for Roanoke if that’s what they want. There is no reason why we would want or need to have that here.
artsnobbb, no I haven’t been there, but do plan to go. I’ll be interested in checking out your commentary of the architecture. I have no connection to the museum, but do hope when UVA finally gets around to building a new art museum with adequate heating and cooling for housing art ( which the present museum lacks) that they will not commission another Jefferson knock-off. Modern architecture has had a difficult time gaining a foothold at The University.
Artsnobbb, it might indeed be Gehry-lite, but it’s far more exciting than most anything Charlottesville has going on architecturally right now. Many of our newer public buildings are rubbish, and our housing developments are crap for the most part. Charlottesville seems to be filled with a multitude of homogenized Lewis & Clark Square knockoffs, and widdle PUDs full of ToyTown pastel homes sporting super wide corner boards. Gag.
If the attraction you’re looking for is american art then maybe Lynchburg, and not Roanoke, is the town to visit. The Maier Museum at Randolph College, formerly Randolph Macon Woman’s College, has a wonderful collection started in 1920 by one of the of the first woman art history teacher’s, Louise Jordon Smith, who also endowed the collection. The building is a plain jane, having been built in the winter of 1951 with funds from the Mellon Foundation, as a secret repository for the National Museum of Art in case of an emergency. The collection has some of the finest examples of Hopper, Bellows, Sargent, Chase, ect. that I’ve ever seen. Sometimes a fabulous building takes away from the pure beauty of the art and this structure in its simplicity is well suited for the collection it displays.
http://maiermuseum.randolphcollege.edu/default.asp
Don’t wait too long to visit, for the collection is embroiled in controversy with the college using the sale of the art to try to prop up it’s lagging finances .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/18/AR2007091802132_pf.html
good news ? The University has hired an architecture firm to design the new art museum
http://www.weissmanfredi.com/projects/
bad news— no money— anyone got a couple million to spare ?