Art may not be among the first things that come to mind when you think of State College, Pennsylvania—but perhaps it should. University art museums are a varied lot: Some are among the grandest you can find, while others are strange spare rooms fulfilling a musty pledge to a donor to keep the Dürer etchings on display.
The Palmer Museum at Penn State contains the largest art collection outside of the state’s urban centers, which might sound like faint praise, but it is not. It has 11,000 pieces, and a very healthy fraction of those (eight percent, up from four) are now on display in a brand-new facility designed by Allied Works. The Palmer was formerly housed in the university’s most interesting building, principally designed by Charles Moore, but it simply wasn’t large enough. (The university will be repurposing that building and seems serious about retaining its principal interior features.)
The site offered to Allied Works was a parking lot on the edge of Penn State’s arboretum. It’s unfortunate that this site is a little beyond the point where campus morphs into a suburb, but Allied Works has made much of the plot.
The building is a series of staggered volumes that Allied Works principal Brad Cloepfil described in conversation with AN as both “a weave in plan and section” and “a ramble across the garden.” Deference to the 370-acre arboretum, which contains a botanical garden immediately adjacent, was the prime creative impulse. The surrounding landscape, designed by frequent collaborator Reed Hilderbrand, sought to deferentially link these showpieces for art and plants.
Cloepfil did not want to build a domineering structure, expressing a frustration with “shiny bauble” museums “where the galleries are small and circulation confusing.” Instead, the team produced a zigzag clad in local sandstone and pierced it with irregular fenestration and occasional stainless steel brise-soleil panels—resembling intermittent cyclopean rave glasses.
The wooden-plank-ish texture of the sandstone cladding is Norman Jaffe–esque, and the impression is accentuated by how Allied Works vertically arranged them, making a point about their structural superfluity. Cloepfil explained: “It’s cladding; it’s not load-bearing. We didn’t try to pretend it was a Roman wall.”
This all makes far more sense once you go inside, where the sequence of galleries is superb. Cloepfil explained his conception of an art museum as “prescribing a journey,” one that in this case is exceptionally scrutable thanks to double-height atria and Nittany Valley views. The experience he intended was that one might “intimately engage the art in some small rooms, and then you’re linked to the landscape in a kind of rhythmic sequential journey.”
A real skill of the undertaking was designing for what the collection actually is; contemporary galleries so often seem plotted solely with huge contemporary art in mind, leaving smaller older pieces adrift. Here, the design accommodates human-scaled pieces by Maurice Prendergast, Robert Henri, Marguerite Zorach, George Grosz, and many others exceedingly well.
Many gallery walls surprise by being brightly painted: Colors selected by director Erin Coe range from dark blue to russet red disrupt the expectation of white. Sometimes these walls terminate short of the ceiling, and at other points paint shifts to white at a certain height. It was another product of Cloepfil’s frustration with “the white box” as gallery default: “When you go to neoclassical museums, you see small paintings in 30-foot-high spaces, and one of the reasons it works is because of the entablatures and cornices and encrusting ornament. Now that we don’t use these anymore, you have to strike some lines.”
The most egregiously and delightfully painterly feature is a large window across an atrium from the second-floor baroque gallery, which frames rolling hills and mountains as well as George Innes might have. The principal stairway is another humanizing touch, oak-lined and homey, which Cloepfil compared to a rocking chair. “You don’t touch the art; you do touch the stairs.”
The design principally carried out the aims of museum leadership. Coe explained: “What I wanted to do at the new museum was remove barriers to participation.” She admitted that “some of those barriers were physical,” or architectural. But beyond the new, larger space, new acquisitions are also taking center stage: An inaugural exhibit showcases many fine Pennsylvanians, from Mary Cassatt to Keith Haring to Andy Warhol and Howardena Pindell. There are also more than 30 new acquisitions on display. Much else awaits unearthing, and now the museum has room to do it.
Outside, Reed Hilderbrand’s transitional landscape feels just right. “This space doesn’t want to have all of the horticultural complexity of a botanical garden; it wants to feel like an extension,” said principal John Kett. To that end, sculptures by Anthony Caro, Beverly Pepper, Seymour Lipton, and others are scattered throughout the grounds.
Cloepfil was tired of having “banal experiences in really fancy buildings.” He has deftly avoided that here.
Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn.
