Building for the future

LOS ANGELES - Here amid the tire dealers and the pizza joints, in the former carpet warehouse that is Randall Stout's office, sits a little Roanoke.

There's the Wachovia Tower, and the Roanoke City Market building food court. The old Shenandoah Hotel. The O. Winston Link Museum. The railroad tracks. And the new Art Museum of Western Virginia - resting among the other mock-ups, like a sculpture among boxes.

If you need evidence that Roanoke's new art museum has the architect's attention, here it is. Stout's narrow work space is dominated by the project. Next to the model of downtown Roanoke is the working model of the museum. As recently as last month, Stout and company still were tinkering with it, adding new pieces with glue and tape.

The 75,000-square-foot art museum, which will more than double the museum's exhibit space, has been a long time coming - and no one knows it better than Stout. After his selection in 2002, Stout spent months talking to people inside the museum and out - 50 or 60 people, by his estimate - about what the new museum should include.

In between times, Stout wandered. He went to the star. He went to Explore Park. He went to Natural Bridge. He went to Floyd County, and the New River Gorge. He took lots of photographs.

"He would say things like, 'I love these mountains. I love these rocks,'" recalled the museum's director at the time, Judy Larson. "You just knew as you were driving around his mind was thinking, 'How can I incorporate this into the building?'"

Now we know.

Golden age of museums

This is the age of the blockbuster museum. As cultural tourism has become big business, museum designs have grown wilder and wilder, clamoring for attention.

Frank Gehry's breathtaking Guggenheim Museum, which helped turn the industrial seaport of Bilbao, Spain, into an international tourist attraction, has inspirited numerous wannabes, including Roanoke. But the explosion of new museums in America began even earlier, said Scott Tilden, editor of the book "Architecture for Art: American Art Museums 1938-2008."

"A lot of people recognize we're in a golden age of museum construction, " Tilden said. "What it really gets down to, ultimately, is businesspeople who finance museums said, 'We want a museum in which the building itself is as much a work of art as the work inside.' It's marketing. I think it's a good thing. In most cases, the public becomes delighted with these spaces."

The museum boom has led to some eye-catching building designs. The Milwaukee Art Museum's addition, designed by Santiago Calatrava and completed in 2001, has a sunroof that spreads open as wide as the wingspan of a Boeing 747. The Denver Museum of Art addition, now under construction, has been likened to a crystal, an origami swan and a flower.

And now this. It stands to reason that Stout would come up with something radically different. Once a senior associate with Gehry, Stout has been on his own since 1996.

He was on a list of candidates to design an addition to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond when the invitation came to make a design proposal in Roanoke, too. Stout not only agreed, but he also took his name off of the Richmond list.

"I felt like my personal take on architecture was more aligned with what opportunities existed in Roanoke," Stout explained.

In fact, the new Art Museum of Western Virginia had caught Stout's imagination. The building, to be located at the forefront of downtown, has the potential to be as striking in its way as the Sydney, Australia, Opera House, the famous sail-topped, performing arts complex that overlooks Sydney Harbor, Stout believes.

"I've got this 'Life's too short' test," said Stout, noting that Gehry, his former boss, spent 15 years working on the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which opened in Los Angeles in 2003.

If he's going to spend the better part of a decade on a project, Stout said, it has to be a good one. "I felt Roanoke passed that test."

Reflecting its surroundings

Not sure what to make of Stout's design yet? Think of the roof as ridgelines. Imagine the walls as layers of stone, angling into the earth. Imagine caves inside, and the hallway past the galleries as a river gorge.

Still confused? You're probably not alone. First reactions to Stout's building range from excitement to befuddlement, sometimes at once. "Wows" come mingled with furrowed brows.

This is a building that rewards a little meditation, however. And it doesn't hurt to talk to Stout himself.

Just hearing his voice helps. Stout may live in Los Angeles, where he once worked with Gehry on the Disney hall, but the Knoxville-born architect still sounds like east Tennessee.

Maybe that's why people here connect with him. He speaks our language, with the polish you'd expect from someone who graduated summa cum laude from the University of Tennessee (class of 1981).

"He has a wonderful way of describing the elements of the plan that shows you it really belongs" in Roanoke, said Roanoke City Manager Darlene Burcham. "If you take time to really study it ... then it has great meaning to it."

Consider the way the walls tilt on the side of the museum beside the railroad tracks - like layers of rock shouldered upward by colliding continents. And the roof's multiple curves, which echo the Appalachian skyline. The stainless steel with its swirled finish should reflect the changing seasons, Stout said, as well as the changing sky; it even should reflect the dogwoods in the spring. And that arch over the third-floor porch, looking out on Williamson Road? Stout lifted those lines straight from Natural Bridge.

The travertine in the entry hall floor was chosen to match the color of the ribbed limestone that undergirds downtown. Some of those ribs jut from the ground beside Elm Avenue near the library; take a look (Stout did).

Stout is an advocate of environmentally friendly buildings and has given lectures on the topic. Roanoke's museum will use recycled materials and have a waste heat recovery system. The water-based floor system for heating and cooling also will cut down on waste, altering the temperature where it's required for human comfort, Stout said, and not 20 feet overhead.

Some architects might start with a design, then make the museum fit. Not Stout.

The 46-year-old architect began with building blocks, each one representing a necessary part of the museum, from galleries to toilets.

Stout and his staff made the blocks themselves in Stout's wood shop, and scrawled the labels on top. Then they played with them on a tabletop - piling them up, taking them down again, moving them around. Stout brought the blocks to Roanoke and Judy Larson, then the museum director, and museum curator Susannah Koerber got a crack at them, too.

"The first couple of passes with the blocks, they're loose," Stout explained. Soon enough, however, "it starts to be like a Swiss watch, or a Rubik's cube," he said, locking his fingers together.

Once the blocks were in place, the hikes and day trips came into play as Stout began to sketch the building's surface. In his sketchbook, in drawings that at first glance seem abstract, a museum starts to emerge. Walls become rock ledges, or curve like riverbanks. A dramatic entryway angles into the sky.

Finally came the models. One, now at the museum, was created for fund-raising purposes and does not include recent design changes.

Another, made of more bendable, less permanent materials, including Plexiglas and something that resembles poster board, is actually the project's cutting edge. Among the recent changes: more Hokie stone in the cafe walls. (Hokie stone, basic building block of the Virginia Tech campus, has proved popular in early versions of the design.) A bay window in the back of the building has been altered so as not to catch the brunt of the setting sun. And the outside walls will now be clad with zinc instead of rock.

Art meets technology

Here in Stout's California office, the architects cut and paste. They even use Scotch tape. But forget the compass and T square of old; the building's dimensions are measured by a mechanical arm made by MicroScribe, with an electronic pencil, or stylus, at the end. All the architects have to do is touch it to the model's surface, and the stylus and accompanying software transmit arcs, angles and dimensions directly into a computer.

All tinkering aside, the design is mostly set. The high, glass entryway, which includes a special layer to diffuse heat and sunlight, is meant to attract the attention of drivers speeding by on Interstate 581. The only portion of the building to be lit at night, it will serve as a kind of beacon, the architects said.

On the first floor will be a cafe, a bookstore, an auditorium and the space once intended for an IMAX - for now, simply designated as "museum space." On the third floor will be offices and the boardroom.

The art will go on the second floor, above the flood plain. A long hallway will open onto the galleries, a study room and a virtual reality CAVE - the acronym for Cave Automated Virtual Environment - to be installed with technical assistance from Virginia Tech. Modern art and art's intersection with technology will be a focus of the new museum. Once past the exhibit spaces, the hallway will open into a bay window.

You could see the hallway as a river leading through a mountain gorge, said Stout, and emerging into light again.

Or not. If the nature metaphor doesn't work for you, Stout said, let it go. "It's not like a Disney theme, where you're driving the point home to every person. It's a way to make beautiful things."

He tells the story of a bathhouse he designed in Germany, which has won design awards.

Stout designed it with a reclining sunbather in mind. At the dedication, a woman said it looked just like a bird.

'A work of art'

Museum board president Heywood Fralin, a fan of classical Greek architecture, admits that Stout's ideas took a little getting used to.

"I guess I was ready to question whether the design was right for Roanoke," Fralin said. But he was bowled over by the model Stout unveiled in the fall of 2002, which the museum has kept under wraps until this week.

Most people warm to it, whatever their first reaction, said Jenny Taubman, who chairs the fund-raising committee. "It doesn't take very long to start loving that building."

"I think it's a work of art," said Ed Murphy, a museum board member and head of Carilion Health System.

"Certainly we all await the public's response," said Deanna Gordon, who headed the committee that picked Stout as architect. "I can't imagine a good deal of it will not be positive."

"I think it will become part of the fabric of the Roanoke Valley," Fralin said. "Fifty years from now, I dare anybody to talk about tearing this building down."