BARNRAISING
As architects Herzog and de Meuron were designing the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, Long Island in the late naughts, the stock market plunged and, along with it, their budget, from 80 to 26.2 million dollars. They turned this calamity to advantage and deeply reimagined the original design, for nineteen individual sheds clustered together like a village, as two long conjoined sheds lying side-by-side. The simplified structure, completed in 2012, is dazzling. Inspired by local vernacular barns, its generous scale and gentle landscaping make for an elegant and unpressured art experience.
To be sure, these are no ordinary sheds. Their shells are a severe poured concrete, their roofs are lined with a high-grade honey-hued plywood, their trusses are zealously detailed, and their interior proportions are more zen-like than barn-like. But the museum is sited at a distance from the road and set in a meadow of high grasses, so that its profile remains inconspicuous. (A friend who drives through Water Mill frequently told me she only noticed the building last summer, when an artist installed lit panels along its street-facing facade.)
That Herzog and De Meuron reconceived the building so deeply to meet costs is admirable, and speaks to their architectural savvy. The museum doesn’t feel reduced. Compare this building to another suburban starchitect project, SANAA’s River Building at Grace Farms, which opened in 2015 at a rumored cost of 150 million dollars. The facility, a series of small glass pavilions built with triple-glazed uniquely curving glass panels and flush metal roofs with concealed gutters, yields a fraction of the usable space and occupies the site like a cartoon spaceship. Compared to that pretty folly the Parrish scores points for pragmatism and plainspeaking. This building feels right at home within the flat lands and old New England spirit of the South Fork.
Photograph copyright Iwan Baan.