The Barnes unveils its design

The Barnes Foundation announced last week that it would unveil an overview of the long-pending architectural design for a downtown Barnes museum, but only for a select few. There was to be no public display of the design until Wednesday, when the Philadelphia Art Commission was scheduled to consider and vote on the overall concept, which still lacks major specifics and details.

In other words, one of the most important and controversial building projects in the city's history was to be acted upon without public disclosure or debate. The Art Commission was to meet on the 18th floor of the City Services Building on Arch Street in a room with chairs and space for no more than a few dozen people (many more actually stood in an alcove of the room, with their view of the design presentation cut off).

Welcome to Philadelphia, birthplace of American democracy.

The scheme to keep the design under wraps until the last possible moment, based on a ruling by the City Solicitor's Office that the design was "proprietary" information, fell through when the solicitor retreated in the face of threatened suits under the Freedom of Information Act.

Venturi adds his voice

At the same time, the Friends of the Barnes Foundation posted a letter addressed to them by Robert Venturi, by general recognition Philadelphia's one world-class architect.

"The current building in Merion was designed specifically for the Barnes collection," Venturi's letter argued, in part. " . . . . The building and site design are an integral part of the collection, and vice versa. Separating them vastly diminishes the value and purpose of both." Venturi added that "the expenditure of $200-$300 million for a new site and building seems an indiscrete [sic] and ridiculous waste of money when existing museums and libraries are undergoing major budget cuts, [and] when the original Barnes Museum building and site work perfectly well for the collection."

Note to Robert Venturi and also to Inga Saffron, the Inquirer's architecture critic, and the Inquirer's editorial board: The Barnes Foundation in Merion is not and never has been a museum, but remains an educational institution. The point is important, since the legal chicanery involved in breaking the Barnes trust, going back to 1930, involves fudging the distinction between a private educational foundation and a public museum in order to challenge the Foundation's tax-exempt status.

"'A monstrous carbuncle'

Venturi's letter was sent to the Inquirer among other news outlets, but no notice was taken of it. Stephan Salisbury, who covers the Barnes story for the Inquirer, told me that he didn't see how the letter was "germane" to the Art Commission hearing.

The New York Times website rapidly filled up with comments on the design. One respondent likened it to a "monstrous carbuncle," and another observed that it was architecturally inferior to the Youth Study Center, the prison demolished to make way for the Barnes.

I don't know that I'd agree with the adjective "monstrous," but I do see the point about the carbuncle. The galleries supposedly (but not actually) replicating those in Merion and designed to contain Albert Barnes's collection are tucked away to the side; and, as Nicholas Ourourssoff of the Times remarks, they require a hike through a maze of courtyards and lobbies. Ouroussoff concluded that the new design "is the strongest argument yet for why the Barnes should not be moved in the first place."

A shell around a replica

I can think of stronger arguments myself, including Venturi's, and a few that have to do with the protection of trusts and the preservation of one of the country's most important cultural heritage sites. But Ouroussoff does have a point. The Tsien-Williams design for what indeed would be (contrary to Albert Barnes's vision and express instruction) a "Barnes museum," is dreary, insipid, and banal: a boring shell around an inferior replica.

Naturally, the Art Commission murmured its approval on cue.

If the Commission had even minimally attempted to discharge its public responsibility, it would have heard not only the glutinous and self-congratulatory presentation of the architects themselves, but would have invited expert opinion (with Robert Venturi at the head of the list) from around the country, and would have insisted on fully detailed plans— not merely a generalized external design with only the most cursory rendering of interior space.

Unasked questions about cost

It also would have asked the hard questions no city agency has yet pursued, namely what the itemized cost of the proposed building and grounds would be, and whether funds are fully in place to meet them (that story for another day). It would have wanted to know how the Barnes administration plans to shoehorn 250,000 people a year into galleries whose maximum daily capacity is 425 persons. It would have conducted hearings over days and perhaps weeks to make a fully and properly informed decision.

Instead, it took less than two hours for Commission chairman Moe Booker to bring down his gavel on the proceedings. Offered a packet of information that included the text of Venturi's letter by the Friends' Evelyn Yaari, Booker ruled that the Commission members could read it only after their votes had been cast.

My turn to speak

The two hours included public commentary, limited to two minutes per person. Your faithful columnist duly lined up to get his own two cents in. I wanted to put on record the existence of the Venturi letter— to which no one at that point had alluded-- and what I took to be its relevance to the Commission's proceedings. I added a few remarks, some of which I have shared with you, about the new site design.

I concluded with the observation, of which I am feelingly convinced, that there is a special art hell for those who desecrate or destroy great works of art or public monuments, both of which are represented in the unified aesthetic experience of the Merion galleries and grounds. That hell includes the vandals who dynamited the great Buddhist shrine at Bamiyan; the fools who tore down Penn Station in New York; and the Swedish general who blew the roof off the Parthenon.

In the present disgrace, there is more than enough blame to go around— for judges, politicians, major foundations and the art community. But the Barnes saga is far from over. And the good fight to save the Barnes Foundation and its vision of art education as a vital instrument of democratic culture has, for my part, just begun.♦


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