From the Director

Discoveries in the Art of Construction

This article first appeared in the July–August 2008 issue of Insight, the Museum’s bimonthly magazine.

A fellow art museum director said to me once about a decade ago, when nearing the completion of his own facility construction project, in a tone of both pride and frustration, that he was involved in seemingly all the choices of his building, right down to the choice of bathroom tile. I was skeptical: surely such details could be managed in other ways? One of my many discoveries in the construction of UMMA’s dramatic expansion and restoration is that indeed many such decisions, both large and small, inevitably hit one’s desk as director, no matter how solid a team of staff, designers, managers, and contractors we may have at our disposal. Art museum buildings are unusually demanding in their details and their mechanical requirements, as you can read elsewhere in this Insight. Equally, in an age of many new museum buildings and expansions, scrutiny both to the broad brushstroke issues of design and to the details of both design and execution is exceptionally high. Especially when a building is, like ours, intended to be both a thing of beauty on its own terms and a highly functional “container” for art and educational and social experience, success or failure is often to be found in the details that ultimately help shape the behaviors and experiences that will take place within.

Nearing two years into the process of construction—and thinking back to our groundbreaking in September 2006—we’ve learned enormously about the necessity of, and the challenges to, “getting it right”—a broad commitment shared by the Museum’s staff, our design architects at Allied Works Architecture, our contractors at Skanska and legion subcontractors, our University partners in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction division, and many others. Inevitably, with a project carrying a $41.9 million price tag, no matter how thorough the planning, there will be discoveries (aka surprises) along the way. Like everyone doing buildings in the U.S. in recent years, we were hit by dramatic, unpredicted spikes in the cost of steel, concrete, copper, and other construction materials—and in the costs of getting all these materials to Ann Arbor. Not everything can be known before construction begins—such as exactly what will be found underground during excavation (happily, no long-forgotten burial grounds—as was the case at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco—although we did find unexpected remains of the old Romance Languages Building) or the condition of long-hidden interior features (where the discoveries were a mixed bag—with some elements in good repair while others had sustained regrettable losses in past building renovations).

Many other decisions that must be made during the process of construction arise not from discovery but challenge. Heat (and then unseasonal chill) made achieving the preferred mix in the stone aggregate flooring for the Frankel Wing’s public spaces harder to achieve, but we’re very pleased with the results. Materials don’t always initially meet expectations or need—as when some of the new wing’s complex glass elements had to be redesigned in order to achieve the necessary interior climate expectations and environmental goals. The exigencies of what I often characterize as the Frankel Wing’s “warm minimalism” mean that the variances in construction—the degree of “wiggle room,” if you will, that is possible in fitting a window or a metal detail—are incredibly small, requiring exceptional skill and on-the-job ingenuity on the part of our contractors and craftspeople. Carefully selected paint colors that look great when tested have to be refined once subjected to the varying natural and artificial light conditions of both a century-old historic landmark and a new piece of modernist construction.

Another kind of surprise has come in simply seeing what we’ve long known in blueprints and floorplans translated into large, physical reality. Even for those of us who (misguidedly!) pride ourselves in having become spatially sophisticated, there have been surprises in reading how differently—typically how much better—a space presents itself in reality than what we might have expected based on two-dimensional floorplans over which we had obsessed for a few years. One of my favorite surprises to date has been the discovery of unexpected views. While I had long relished the sightlines that Brad Cloepfil’s architecture would give us from the outside in, I had a less clear understanding of how varied and frankly beautiful the views would be from the inside out—reshaping our understanding of the entire zone around the Museum of Art.

These and myriad other discoveries await all of us when the expanded Museum of Art reopens in 2009. The most tantalizing discoveries await—the effect of returning the Museum’s growing art collections to the Museum, to new and newly refurbished and reconfigured galleries, public areas, and storage spaces. That’s ultimately the set of discoveries at the heart of this entire project—creating a new and better home for the visual arts here at UM and in Ann Arbor.

James Christen Steward
Director

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