Art Underground : New National Museum Has a Low Profile

French experts had to be imported to prepare the special slurry walls around an excavation that was big enough to hold three Lincoln Memorials. The architects’ design had to be changed to protect a linden tree that is more than a century old, and the building’s roof had to be strong enough to support a 4.2-acre garden with soil 3 1/2 feet deep.

These were just a few of the challenges encountered in building the nation’s first major underground museum.

The Smithsonian Institution’s $73.2-million complex, with two exhibit halls and a research and education center, is near completion and expected to open in September.

Smithsonian officials call the project unique. The architect says he has taken special pains to build it so that the people who work and visit there will not feel like they are in a rabbit warren.

“There is nothing like this,” said Dr. Robert M. Adams, secretary of the Smithsonian, who is almost as proud of the expansive catacomb as he is of the artifacts it will house.

Garden Was Complication

“To build underground is one thing,” said architect Jean-Paul Carlhian, “but to build underground with a garden on top complicates things.”

The 360,000-square-foot complex is an ingenious answer to the Smithsonian’s problem of how to find space for a growing collection of treasures without crowding the capital’s historic National Mall.

Of the 14 museums in the Smithsonian’s cultural empire, half are arranged around the long green rectangle between the Washington Monument and the Capitol.

The new complex, which will house Asian and African art and an international studies center, had to go below the surface and directly behind the famous Norman Revival “castle” that serves as the cornerstone of the 140-year-old institution.

In a scene dominated by towering monuments and bold edifices, the complex was designed for subtlety and understatement. It also represents a nearly magical simulation of open and airy atmosphere in a cavern cut off from most natural light.

Except for domed entrance pavilions, little of the three-story structure is visible above ground.

Subtle Colors, Forms

“We tried to build this with a lot of restraint,” said Carlhian, explaining that he used earthen colors and natural limestone in many public areas. “It is the art that will tell the story in a museum.”

At a kiosk-style entrance for employees, Carlhian designed winding stairways full of light. Visitors descending to the lowest level pass through a crypt-like room into a 285-foot-long gallery that is brightly illuminated by four huge skylights. Inside are trees, a fountain, huge pots of orchids and an enormous mural depicting the Smithsonian buildings.

“It’s important to give people a sense of elation and surprise when they are 60 feet down,” he said.

Meeting the special demands of a museum project under such conditions and on one of the nation’s most carefully guarded pieces of real estate took 10 years of planning and almost three years of construction.

Congress (which established the Smithsonian Institution from the bequest of the 19th-Century English scientist James Smithson) allocated $36.6 million in public funds to the project.

The rest came from Smithsonian trust funds and private contributors, corporations and foreign governments. (South Korea and Japan gave $1 million each; Bahrain contributed $50,000 and the Federal Republic of Cameroon donated $7,500.)

Art Finds a Home

Assembling the exhibitions was probably the easiest task. The art works came from new donations and from the Smithsonian’s already vast inventory.

New York medical researcher and art collector Arthur M. Sackler, who also kicked in $4 million toward the building, gave 1,000 works of Asian art as the centerpiece of the museum of Asian and Near Eastern art, which will bear his name.

The second museum will feature the collection of the National Museum of African Art, works that became part of the Smithsonian in 1979 and have been hung in several town houses in the Capitol Hill district.

The other major occupant, the international center, is the fulfillment of a dream of S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian from 1960 to 1984, who advocated a greater emphasis on the non-Western world.

The center, Ripley said, is a place “where we can have events, meetings, exchanges and debates between people--heads of state or whoever” that will “focus on these countries in a special way.”

Even after the many review panels that oversee the Mall were sold on the idea that the subterranean design would work, the project had to overcome problems that most other below-ground structures do not.

Delicate Foundation Work

To make sure the impact of driving support piles into the massive excavation would not damage the fragile castle and other nearby buildings, French work crews with special expertise were brought in to build retaining walls from a clay called bentonite. While proceeding delicately, the workers and architects had to be mindful of the weight of tons of cultivated earth and the visitors that would be directly overhead.

Amid it all, the Japanese architect Junzo Yoshimura, who provided the original concept, suffered a stroke and had to resign. In 1980, Carlhian’s company, the Boston architectural firm of Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson & Abbott, took over.

Last December, dozens of Smithsonian employees began moving into the offices on the lowest level, which is below the water table.

Susan Bliss, one of the first employees to move in, says that so far, “the people who work here are doing fine.”

Paul B. Paulus, an environmental psychologist at the University of Texas at Arlington who has studied underground structures, said that although people may miss seeing daylight and windows, such an enterprise shows that “you can make the environment a positive one to give people a sense of fairness.”