Taubman Museum of Art Opens New Building To The Public |
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| Sunday, 09 November 2008 01:25 |
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The Taubman Museum of Art was designed by Los Angeles architect Randall Stout, principal of Randall Stout Architects, Inc. and a noted proponent of sustainable “green” architecture. A dramatic composition of flowing, layered forms in steel, patinated zinc and high performance glass, the building pays sculptural tribute to the famous Blue Ridge mountains that frame the city and shape the region’s spirit. The Taubman Museum of Art will be the architect’s first major freestanding museum. “The opening of the Taubman Museum of Art is an amazing achievement and a historic milestone for both the institution and the region,” said John Williamson, president of the museum’s board of trustees and vice chair of the capital campaign committee. “We look forward to the museum’s future and the bolder role it will play in the life of Roanoke and our community.” The Taubman Museum of Art Building - At the heart of downtown Roanoke, the 81,000 square foot Taubman Museum of Art building will be Roanoke’s most contemporary structure and provide an analog for the city’s evolution from industrial manufacturing town to technology center. The building’s forms and materials evoke the drama of the surrounding Shenandoah Valley landscape, as well as the building culture of the early 20th century railroad boom that first brought Roanoke to prominence as a major urban center of the new South.  The finish on the building’s undulating stainless steel roof forms reflects the rich palette of colors found in the sky and the seasonal landscape. Inspired by mountain streams, translucent glass surfaces – some clear and others frosted to filter and modulate interior daylight – will emerge from the building’s mass to create canopies of softly diffused illumination over public spaces and in the galleries. As it rises to support the stainless steel roof, a layered pattern of angular exterior walls surfaced in shingled, patinated zinc gives an earthen and aged quality to the façade. More than 11,000 square feet of gallery space for permanent collections and temporary exhibitions are located on the building’s second level. Illuminated glass treads lead visitors up a limestone-clad grand staircase to the galleries. At the landing, a luminous sculptural ceiling of cascading, back-lit translucent polycarbonate panels draws visitors forward through the central gallery hall to the permanent collection galleries. In the contemporary and American art galleries, this luminous ceiling feature extends into these spaces to diffuse daylight from clerestory windows and skylights above. In 2007, the Taubman Museum of Art received one of the prestigious 2007 American Architecture Awards awarded by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd., which honor and celebrate the most outstanding new accomplishments for architecture designed and built in the United States by leading American firms and international architecture firms practicing in the USA. The Permanent Collection In addition to holdings of 19th and early 20th century American art, significant modern and contemporary art, new media art, photography, and design and decorative arts, the museum’s permanent collection also includes several smaller areas of specialty, including visionary art, Japanese prints, European art, and ancient Mediterranean art.  Important acquisitions to the permanent collection have increased of late, with over 500 noteworthy pieces added in the past eight years. In 2001, Peggy Macdowell Thomas, grand-niece of Susan Macdowell Eakins, bequeathed her collection of important works by landmark artist Thomas Eakins, his wife, Susan Macdowell Eakins, and their circle, including paintings, sketches, decorative arts objects, archives, photographs, Japanese prints, and personal effects. From 1998 to the present, the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust has enabled the Art Museum to purchase masterworks by Winslow Homer, John H. Twachtman, Childe Hassam, J. G. Brown, Maria Oakey Dewing, Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, Robert Henri, William Bradford, Theodore Robinson, Norman Rockwell, George Inness, Edward Steichen, and others. The museum’s support groups for acquisitions, the Collectors’ Circle and the contemporaries, will continue to add artworks to the collection. Recent additions include pieces by Hermann Herzog, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Petah Coyne, John Cage, Jiro Okura, Dorothy Gillespie, David Diao, and nationally prominent regional artist Sally Mann. Areas of recent focus include the work of emerging photographers and a commitment to new media pieces, a reflection of the transformation of western Virginia into a new technology research and development center. Visit : www.taubmanmuseum.org/ Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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