I just saw the construction site for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, which is slated to open, somewhat ominously, on 11-11-11.  The concrete foundations, framing, and much of the roofing are up.  The museum, by Cambridge, Massachusetts architect Moshe Safdie, consists of eight unique, pod-like structures strung around a huge pool of water.  It’s stunning that a new museum like this, similar in scale to the Getty Center, is taking shape in the middle of this small Arkansas town, within an undisturbed Ozarks forest.  Less stunning is the strange, artless geometry of the structures.  

Although it’s the name of a nearby spring, “Crystal Bridges” seems New Agey and vaguely evangelical, not artsy at all.  Perhaps we can be grateful that Alice Walton, the Wal-Mart heiress who founded the museum and just blessed it with a $800,000,000 endowment, didn’t want to call it the Alice Walton Museum of American Art.  The artwork is strong for a new collection.  There are some great twentieth-century canvases and an original James Turrell Skyscape, which is housed in its own separate structure.  A new art museum, whatever its aspect, is always a good thing.

My journey south is, in one sense, a pilgrimage to the Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas built by architect E. Fay Jones in 1980.  Thorncrown is one of those buildings that both architects and real people adore, like the Guggenheim in New York.  It’s unlike a lot of canonical contemporary buildings in that it’s small, religious, and in an out-of-the-way (for the architectural establishment, at least) place.  And that’s a lot of what intrigued me.  After working in architecture offices in New York, where I administered projects in places as far away as the Middle East and Asia, I’m eager to find a way to build that’s more attuned to place and culture, and also more pragmatic.

In published photographs Thorncrown is all glorious geometries, symmetries and connections, an architect’s technical drawings sprung to life and set, for maximum drama, on a stone bed in the woods.  Seeing the chapel in person for the first time left a different impression.  The structure seemed less like a building, less architectural in spirit, than like an apparatus, instrumental in spirit.  And there is a spirit there, a dazzling transparency that collapses layers of space (the space within the building, the space between the trees, the space of the sky) on one another.  The building is materially overstructured, with redundant framing, braces and trusses.  And yet as one steps inside the figure of the building vanishes, leaving a visitor standing up against, and yet also carefully distanced from, the elements.  I want to know how this building does all that it does.