The Eli and Edythe Broad Museum East Lansing
It has been suggested that Zaha
Hadid’s Broad Museum in East Lansing looks like the business face of those multiple-bladed
men’s razors.* The lower left image,
of a Gillette razor, depicts the device as (a) emitting some kind of spooky
shaving rays or (b) maybe blocking incoming radiation. I’ll assume that the Hadid office had
something like the latter in mind, with its deep, stainless steel fins arrayed
across the museum’s large, glazed openings (lower right image), oriented such
that they will most certainly receive direct sun.
The top photo, of a portion
of the museum exterior, is not exactly the way the museum looks, but the reason
it turned out this way, a happy accident in terms of taking graphically
interesting photos, is the point I want to consider. The photo was taken on a bright, sunny, clear-blue-sky day
in mid-April, just after noon. The
camera was set to automatically determine the aperture opening and the length
of time its shutter is open.
Following its automatic program, the camera correctly read the intense
glare of reflected sunlight and determined that, with so much energy fleeing
the stainless steel surfaces, it set itself so as to drastically sift out extra
light. Otherwise, faced with an
unmediated blast of solar radiation, the camera would have produced nothing
more than a white image. The
photograph is evidence that there was still so much sunlight jumping off the
building’s skin, even after the camera shut itself down, that the essential
texture of the building was still discernable. However, the camera had to shut itself down so much that the midday
sky went dark: it reads as if it were nighttime. Viewing the building, our eyes work similarly to defend the
retina against a flood of glare.
The message of the facade can
be read, most sympathetically, as representative of the need to shield artwork
from daylight. The delivery of
that message is a little extreme: the glare coming off the stainless steel is
substantial (like the rays emitted from those razor blades). Another way to consider a working
elevation for a building, a museum or otherwise, is as a design that not only
shields the interior from a surfeit of illumination, but works to shade itself
and, at the same time, treat the viewing eye gently.
Inside, the small museum has six
long-ish galleries that stretch away from a sky and north-side illuminated
central stair. It’s a simple plan
idea and entirely appropriate to a museum this size. It is at this center where daylight is permitted to enter
most effectively and so that a little daylight sneaks harmlessly into the
galleries and helps us to orient ourselves. Light also enters the western galleries, from the west and
southwest, limiting the work that can be shown to that which is durable enough
to resist the deteriorating rays of the sun. Deep fins and tinted glass will filter the light
somewhat, but the uses of these galleries must still be constrained. The light is welcome visually; the curators will no doubt
take care to work with it. The upstairs
eastern gallery only receives a bit of daylight from the central stair at one
end, making it safe for more fragile artworks. The café at the east end, near the east entrance, is
substantially daylighted and with considerably less protection for the interior
spaces. The space is visually interesting, open, patterned with light and shadow,
but may sometimes turn out to be uncomfortable. Lots of air conditioning may be needed.
The question is, does the
aggressively variegated, reflective envelope and the configuring of the
building so that it appears to be aiming itself at something, contribute
significantly to the interior daylight quality and performance of its galleries? Probably not. You could get these good interior spaces without all that
aggravation. Nevertheless, it’s a nice, small museum.
Citations
Broad Museum photos: c. 2013 Martin Schwartz
Gillette Fusion ProGlide
Power Razor image:
http://www.gillette.com/en/us/products/razors/proglide.aspx
* Thanks to Chris Sullivan.
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