Art: Museum with a View

On a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, Milwaukee has just built one of the country’s finest examples of modern architecture put to work for civic purposes. It is a new Memorial Center, designed by Architect Eero Saarinen (TIME, July 2, 1956), combining quarters for veterans’ services and a new home for the Milwaukee Art Institute in an open, dramatically cantilevered structure built for $2,700,000. In its first five weeks of full operation, the Memorial Center has already added new zest to community life and revitalized art interest in the city. The Art Institute’s housewarming show—some $3,000,000 worth of masterworks by El Greco, Rembrandt, Goya, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso—drew a record turnout of 53,031 visitors, more than the museum in its old headquarters could normally expect in a whole year.

After the Fireworks. “The Problem now,” says the Art Institute’s director, Edward H. Dwight, 38, “is to keep them coming.” Director D wight can apparently count on the drawing power of the new building’s architecture. “It just insists that you wander in,” said one Milwaukeean. When the city staged a fireworks celebration for its World Series-winning Braves last month in front of the Memorial Center, some 7,100 celebrators decided to take in the art show. Many of them had never been in an art gallery.

The problem posed to Architect Saarinen in planning the center was far from simple. He had to design a monumental building of many uses that would at the same time be the gateway to a park and the lakefront symbol of the city. His answer was to keep the main floor open, se that a visitor entering from the upper level, off Lincoln Memorial Drive, can see through to the lake beyond, thus providing a visual link between city and lake. To give the building sweep and drama, he designed soaring, 30-ft. cantilevers for the upper stories, which house meeting rooms and a two-story memorial hall.

Within, Memorial Center is designed around an open central-courtyard plaza. The main gallery is 120 ft. by 50 ft. Enough lighting fixtures have been built into the ceiling to turn the building into a blazing beacon at night, but Architect Saarinen broke with the modern tendency to seal off gallery space from outside light, left two wide glass areas so that the lake can be kept in view even while looking at pictures.

Into the Majors. Milwaukee is steamed up over its new Memorial Center. Art lovers contributed $300,000 to stage its first show, are now planning to raise another $250,000 to build a second gallery below the present museum area. With interest and enthusiasm running high, Director Dwight now sees a chance to parlay the new building into a major art museum, one that will lift Milwaukee into the major-league category in art to equal its standing in baseball and beer.