The current renovations of the Hood Museum recently stirred up controversy. The $50 million renovations are scheduled to be completed in January 2019 and focus on expanding and creating new spaces. Conflict has arisen over the efforts to harmonize new additions with the vision of Charles Moore, the original architect.
Moore was one of the major, international figures known in postmodern architecture, a style of architecture that is currently out of fashion, Williams College art professor E.J. Johnson said. Brutalism, a style of architecture that came before postmodernism, has started to come back in style and is influencing the current renovations, he said.
Architects Billie Tsien and Tod Williams are in charge of the new renovations. Tsien, who was a student of Moore, said that she wanted to extend the mission of the museum’s education program by designing new study centers in a newly-created Center for Object Based Inquiry, which will feature state-of-the-art technology for the study of different objects at the museum.
“Dartmouth hired [the architects] with a tough problem — we wanted a lot of new things for a very small space,” Hood director John Stomberg said. “But they found a beautiful, creative solution. We preserve the majority of the original building and still get a new museum experience.”
The issue of creating more square-footage in the available space is primarily being addressed by closing the archway to the Hood courtyard and creating a concourse.
Of the new additions to the museum, Tsien said that the design will be a very quiet, modernist work, with fairly simple lines and forms. The new entrance from the Green will be characterized by a sense of quiet serenity, Tsien said.
The Hood is surrounded by the Hopkins Center, which features similarities to the Lincoln Center in New York City and ’60s style architecture, and Wilson Hall, which features a 19th century, Richardsonian style, Tsien said. To harmonize with the red brick of Wilson and the white facade of the Hop, the new Hood entrance will be made of soft, gray and white brick, Tsien said.
“[The new entrance] is trying to relate to the buildings on both sides,” Tsien said. “On one hand, it’s brick, so it has a conversation with Wilson, and the off-white color has a conversation with the Hop. Whenever we build a building, we don’t see them as a foreign object that was just dropped down, we see them as having a conversation in context with the surroundings.”
Tsien said that their design will provide a quiet companionship to Moore’s more idiosyncratic and playful work, as a way to respect the original design.
However, some commentators in the architectural community, such as Johnson, disagree.
Johnson said that the present design that is available through an illustration seems unforgivingly rectangular and boxy, and has little to do with the spirit of Moore’s building.
“It makes me think of going into some sort of hospital waiting room,” Johnson said. “It is so unforgivingly dull and has nothing to do with what Charles did, and seems to me to be no way to enter either a museum or classrooms.”
Johnson said that the new design completely compromises the experience that Moore created of going into the museum, and that the design is insensitive to the integration of the museum to the other buildings.
“The shape of the Moore building picks up on the curvilinear shapes of the older buildings, but the building to replace the Moore courtyard is boxy, white and sharp-edged — it’s totally antithetical to the buildings around the space,” Johnson said.
Johnson noted that though the 1980s style of the Hood is no longer in vogue, the building remains a important historical work.
“I think museums should have a responsibility to architecture as a work of art, and the Hood is responsible for preserving Moore’s work as a work of art, and it is not behaving responsibly for that,” he said.
In response to general criticism for the new designs, Tsien said that she understood that certain people want things to remain the same, but that she also thought the needs of the College have changed.
“I think that what we have done in our work is to be present — we don’t want to copy Moore — but in a very quiet way,” Tsien said. “What I think people don’t understand and have not considered is that we are restoring a huge amount of this building, much more than we’re making new.”
Stomberg said that while not everyone has been in support of the renovations, the design team has considered how to minimize the changes to the original building and maximize the impact of the new building.
“The team responsible for the building really feel that ultimately, the proof will be in the pudding,” he said. “When the building’s done, everyone will come around, and what we’ll end up with will be a monument that stays true to the vision of Charles Moore, and also to the visions of Billie Tsien and Tod Williams.”
Tsien stressed the restorative component of the project.
“The whole face of the building that faces the Black Family Visual Arts Center quadrant is being restored,” she said. “Sixty-five percent of what we’re doing is restoring the existing building and the existing architecture.”
Less visible renovations will also be a fundamental part of the process, Stomberg said, including windows, the roof, the floor, the walls and the interior lights. He said that the renovations were driven by five goals that the College wanted to accomplish: increasing the visibility of the front facade from the Green, inclusion of an interior public area for social events, establishing the Center for Object Based Inquiry, constructing five new art galleries and a new concourse and creating an office suite for staff.
The additions to the museum will increase the square footage by 50 percent, but despite the increase in space, the net increase in energy consumption will be zero, Stomberg said.
