Art: The Big Room

What form should a museum take in midcentury? There is the palace-a grand gallery with lofty, vaulted skylights. There is the closed box-an exhibition space sealed off from outside light and divided into cubicles where displays can be lighted with the calculated drama of a stage set. Chicago’s Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 72, whom fellow architects rank with Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, accepts neither form. In Mies’s view, a museum should be composed only of “three basic elements-a floor slab, columns and a roof plate.”

In essence, Mies’s concept goes back to the Japanese house, in which anonymous space can serve as living room, dining room or bedroom, depending on what furniture is brought forth. In the same way, Mies’s museum area can be divided by partitions to take on the character of whatever is displayed within it.

Mies put his principles into classic but temporary form at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition with his German Pavilion, a building that proved to be one of the most influential structures of modern times. But for a long time Mies found no time or opportunity to build a permanent museum. His opportunity came when Nina Cullinan, daughter of Texas Oilman Joseph Stephen Cullinan, offered the Houston Museum of Fine Arts $625,000 to build a new wing.

Last week Texans walking through the new Cullinan Hall found it good. The building is supported by four 82-ft.-long girders above the roof, leaving 10,000 sq. ft. of column-free space beneath a 30-ft. ceiling. Opening to the north is a curving façade of grey-tinted glass which has become the main museum entrance. In such stark simplicity, the touches of elegance-Roman travertine on the entrance stairs and terrace, green Venetian terrazzo floors-take on a rich but restrained resonance.

Museum Director Lee Malone says: “All this space is so majestic, so flexible.” To prove it last week Director Malone put on a display of 60 ultramodern paintings (e.g., France’s Hans Hartung and Manhattan’s Mark Rothki), hung each picture from the ceiling on picture wire to provide an installation as nearly invisible as the museum’s own structure. Donor Cullinan said happily: “The new wing is like a great stage which faces the city. Another might have built a nice, safe building. I wanted something that would be contemporary for generations to come.” Touring the building in a wheelchair to spare an ailing hip, Mies agrees: “Buildings last so much longer than any function, and you must design with that in mind. Good design does not grow old.”