The long and disruptive Congress Square construction project in Portland is, hopefully, coming to an end. It began with public protest, a design competition and local optimism to transform the heart of the Arts District into an engaging public space. A cost of more than $7 million and financial suffering of Free Street’s small businesses has been part of the city’s public investment.
With that in mind, would it not be reasonable that the four finalists of the Portland Museum of Art addition contest recognize the significance of this urban redesign by celebrating the enlarged front plaza with a welcoming and gracious entry? Only one finalist keeps the current entry to the building. Three have entries facing the service side of the Hay Building on narrow Free Street. All four seem to favor a competing entry through the sculpture garden off High Street, an often-congested speedway through Portland.
All four proposed additions to the PMA also dominate the museum site in height and building mass. As I see them, the exterior aesthetics are varied, vociferous versions of architectural “shock and awe.” Checking the websites of the four architectural firms behind them, I found experience working with older buildings, but little or none with working within an intimate historical context like this one. What we have in Portland is not like the decrepit and disillusioned urban center in Bilbao, Spain, that came to house Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim.
Henry Cobb’s 1983 Payson design was and still is much admired. Cobb recognized and used Maine’s historical precedents, functionally and aesthetically. He also reduced the building mass by stepping down into the site to accommodate the historical McLellan House and Clapp Building.
But the four design proposals treat Cobb’s Payson addition as an older spinster sister, glumly reduced to servitude as a back garden wall and worthy only to perform interior housekeeping tasks. She is dismissed, presumably, because time has not been kind; her tired and wrinkled face is no longer deemed appropriate to receive visitors.
All four of these proposed designs are resolved to be the coquettish younger sister with skirts hiked in frisky, wanton abandon. One can only feel sad for the unseemly way our distinguished forebears of the museum site are treated.
The four proposals aren’t “bad architecture” unto themselves. They might work somewhere else. But ranging from giddy to very flirtatious, they are in capricious disagreement with the context. Why was one local architect selected to be on all four firms? And why aren’t local engineering and design firms part of the teams?
I believe the request for public comments is more a public relations gesture. Whether one design survives or all four are jettisoned will be determined at the Portland Country Club, at Christmas gatherings and other exclusive social interactions. Preservationists will have a lot to say to the A-list on the PMA board. Donation pledges and social shunning will hang like the Sword of Damocles.
If the Payson is soon draped in a black shroud, we’ll know that group hubris to make a statement triumphed over precedent and context.
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