Art Museum of Western Virginia Unveils Design for New Building by Los Angeles Architect Randall Stout

Roanoke, Virginia, 03/21/2005

The Art Museum of Western Virginia today unveiled the much-anticipated design for its future home in Roanoke, one of the most historic cities of the storied Blue Ridge Mountain region of the United States. The 75,000 square foot structure will be the first purpose-built art museum ever constructed in Roanoke, and a significant step in the further development of the region as an arts destination of national and international stature. Since the mid-1950s, the Art Museum has built a collection of exceptional objects exploring and celebrating the unique culture of the area within the larger narrative of American art. Collections focus upon 19 th and early 20 th century American art, including a significant 2001 bequest of paintings by and archival materials related to landmark artist Thomas Eakins and his family; regional, American and international modern and contemporary art; and American design and decorative arts with a strong emphasis on the southern Appalachians.

Currently scheduled to break ground in fall 2005 and open to the public in fall 2007, the new Art Museum building has been designed by emerging Los Angeles architect Randall Stout, principal of Randall Stout Architects, Inc. and an internationally admired proponent of sustainable "green" architecture. The building - a dramatic composition of flowing, layered forms in steel, patinated zinc and high performance glass paying sculptural tribute to the famous mountains that provide the city's backdrop and shape its spirit - will be the architect's first major freestanding museum. The facility will be situated on Salem Avenue, between Market Street and Williamson Road, bounded by railway tracks at one of the most visible intersections in downtown Roanoke.

The new Art Museum building will quadruple the size of the institution's current facilities at Center in the Square. In addition to greatly expanded, flexible exhibition space, the building will feature a large multi-purpose auditorium, an enlarged Art Venture (the Art Museum's interactive gallery and art center for children), a book and gift shop, a library and study center, an art studio, a café, and terraces, as well as staff offices, art storage, and preparation areas. Evoking a grand mountain outcropping, a faceted glass atrium soars skyward at the center of the design, providing a glowing orientation space for information, ticketing, temporary art installations, scheduled museum functions, and informal encounters.

The project budget for the Art Museum's new facility is $46 million. The Art Museum has raised over $30 million to date toward this financial goal. The fundraising campaign is chaired by Art Museum trustee Jenny Taubman. "The new Art Museum building will sit upon a pivotal geographic and historical site in Roanoke's urban fabric," said W. Heywood Fralin, president of the board of trustees of the Art Museum. "It is our hope and intention that Randall Stout's spectacular architecture will create not only an extraordinary physical gateway to the city itself, but to its future as an essential arts destination across our region. Our vision is to create a great American place - a place so rich and relevant in unique programs and collections, and vivid in its relationship to the history and soul of the Blue Ridge, that it becomes a 'must see' destination for people everywhere. We are pleased and honored to contribute to the economic growth and cultural enrichment of our city and our state."

Georganne C. Bingham, executive director of the Art Museum, said, "It is fitting that after decades of collecting and presenting important art to the public, we are now creating a building whose design is commensurate with our program. Randall Stout's vision perfectly complements our goal for the Art Museum to be relevant and contemporary in its attitude - a catalyst for dialogue and creativity, a place for community interaction, a source of pleasure, a home for artists and craftspeople of the area, and, above all, a platform for lifelong learning. With the new building, the Art Museum is affirming its passionate commitment to the importance of art to everyday life."

Bingham added that the Art Museum has retained Sonnet Takahisa, co-founder of the New York City Museum School and one of the nation's most admired experts in the field of arts education, to help develop a comprehensive and innovative educational program that will link the Art Museum to K-12 schools and universities throughout the state.

In conjunction with the unveiling of Randall Stout's design, the Art Museum will launch Process and Promise in a New Art Museum , an exhibition of models, plans, drawings, and other materials illustrating Randall Stout's design. The exhibition will remain on view to the public in the Art Museum's galleries until the institution moves into its new facility.

The Search for Site and Architect

The Art Museum's decision in 1998 to undertake a building program developed in response to recent growth. Expansion of the institution's collections through gifts and acquisitions was paralleled by increases in attendance, membership and annual fund contributions. Space limitations at the institution's Center in the Square facility placed constraints upon its ability to fully address programmatic ambitions, including display of permanent collections, presentation of temporary exhibitions, and expansion of educational activities. Additionally, lack of physical presence on the street failed to fully support the Art Museum's visibility or communicate its growing stature. Art Museum former director Dr. Judy Larson and trustees saw a clear opportunity to make a much larger contribution to a dialogue about art that would engage an increasingly broad range of constituencies.

An appropriate site was secured through a gift from the City of Roanoke, and the institution affirmed its commitment to creating a major work of contemporary architecture downtown. Plans for an architect selection process were developed, and a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) was sent to firms nationwide in 2000. The trustees' architect selection committee subsequently chose four architectural offices as candidates for the new Art Museum commission: Antoine Predock Architect PC, E. Verner Johnson and Associates, Michael Graves & Associates, and Randall Stout Architects, Inc. In announcing their decision to award the Art Museum commission to Randall Stout in 2002, the committee cited the architect's unique combination of poetic sensibility, technical mastery of environmentally advanced design strategies, and intimate, lifelong relationship with the landscape and culture of the Blue Ridge Mountain region of the United States.

Born and raised in nearby Tennessee, 46-year-old Randall Stout founded the firm of Randall Stout Architects, Inc. in Los Angeles in 1996. Widely admired for structures that relate vividly to the particular composition of their natural settings, employ technologically advanced solutions to sustainability, and draw program from inside to outside to establish a perfect economy of sculptural gesture and scale, Stout has designed museums, corporate headquarters, aquatic centers, power stations, firehouses, and other industrial structures in the United States and Europe.

His firm has received numerous design and sustainability awards and honors, including many from the American Institute of Architects. In 2003, the architect's firm received the American Institute of Architects' "Top Ten Green" Award for its Steinhüde Sea Recreational Facility in Germany (2000), where its other projects include the Melittabad Minden Swimhall and Recreation facility (1998); North Minden Power Plant (1996); and Rehme Waterworks (2000). Stout designed a 29,000 square foot addition for the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee, scheduled to open in April 2005. Among the firm's many civic and educational commissions are the Vasquez Rocks Park Interpretive Center in Agua Dulce, California (to be completed in 2007) and the Dockweiler Beach Youth Center in Los Angeles, California (to be completed in 2006). Prior to launching his eponymous firm, Stout was a senior associate architect with the firm of Frank O. Gehry & Associates (now Gehry Partners) in Los Angeles; prior to that he was a senior designer with Skidmore Owings & Merrill.

The Building

At the heart of downtown Roanoke, the new 75,000 square foot Art Museum building will prove an arresting landmark for visitors arriving from US I581. As Roanoke's most contemporary structure, it will provide 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 will reflect 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 - will 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 will give an earthen and aged quality to the façade.

The building occupies three levels above ground, with all functions organized off a central 4,300 square foot atrium space. The atrium will serve as a multi-use "facility within a facility" for ticketing and information, temporary installation of large-scale sculpture and small exhibitions, public meeting, special events and performances, and spontaneous, informal encounters. The glass atrium will allow the Art Museum's lobby to be filled with natural light during the day, while at night the translucent glass roof surfaces will be 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, will be 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. Public spaces, including the Art Museum lobby, café, shop, auditorium, and education areas, are located on the ground level, along with support areas associated with the loading dock, art receiving and shipping, and security.

More than 16,000 square feet of gallery space for permanent collection and temporary exhibition galleries will be located on the building's second level. Illuminated glass treads will 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 will extend into these spaces to diffuse daylight from clerestory windows and skylights above.

The third, and uppermost, level of the new building will hold the Art Museum's board room, director's suite, and staff offices. The third floor administration level will receive a significant amount of natural daylight, which will permeate through the many strategically placed clerestories created by the building's undulating, layered roof forms.

The Art Museum building will contain advanced technology for distance learning to serve the entire region of western Virginia. It will feature fiber optic cable links to broadband networks across the state to enhance K-12 education and provide greater access to the visual arts. Such technology also will enable the Art Museum to interface with artistic endeavors at museums, universities and other institutions across the Commonwealth, across the nation, and beyond. The new facility also will incorporate an immersive virtual reality experience.

In keeping with the trustees' mandate, the new Art Museum building will feature 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 Art Museum, 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 our building for the Art Museum will function in just this way."

About the Art Museum of Western Virginia

In addition to its highlight holdings of 19 th and early 20 th century American art, significant American and international modern and contemporary art, and design and decorative arts, the Art Museum's collection also includes several smaller areas of specialty, including European art and ancient Mediterranean art.

Important acquisitions to the permanent collection have increased, with over 250 noteworthy pieces added in the past five years. In 2001, Peggy Macdowell Thomas, grand-niece of Susan Macdowell Eakins, bequeathed her collection of important works by landmark artist Thomas Eakins, Susan Macdowell Eakins and their circle, including paintings, sketches, decorative arts objects, archives, photographs, Japanese prints, and personal effects. From 1998 to the present, the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust has enabled the Art Museum to purchase masterworks by Winslow Homer, John H. Twachtman, Childe Hassam, Edward H. Potthast, Maria Oakey Dewing, Robert Riggs, Maurice Prendergast, Frederick Frieseke, Alonzo Chappel, John Singer Sargent, Robert Henri, William Bradford, and others. American decorative arts acquisitions, supported in large part by the Rosalie K. and Sydney Shaftman Endowment, include such recent key purchases as an intricately inlaid 1810 Abingdon tall clock attributed to cabinetmaker Peter Rife, contemporary regional ceramics, and modern design objects by Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Roanoke-based Thaden-Jordan.

The beauty of western Virginia has inspired many local artists and attracted many others to the region, and the Art Museum is committed to showing and collecting the best of their art. The Art Museum's support group for acquisitions, the Collectors' Circle, and other donors also continue to add contemporary artworks to the collection, including pieces by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Petah Coyne, John Cage, Jiro Okura, Dorothy Gillespie, David Diao, and Sally Mann. Areas of recent focus include the work of emerging photographers and a commitment to technology initiatives for new media pieces, a reflection of the transformation of this area of Virginia into a new technology research and development center.