Museum, Nature to Blend in Newport

Genoese architect Renzo Piano’s schematic design for Newport Harbor Art Museum’s new building, approved Thursday night by the museum’s board of trustees, allows for massive future expansion of the building on its 10 1/2-acre site at the corner of East Coast Highway and MacArthur Boulevard in Newport Beach.

Piano discussed his design on Friday in words that suggest a magic realm of nature and culture. The interior space of the one-story, $20-million museum will be defined by a series of walls aligned parallel to Coast Highway. Set into the hillside, these walls will create a series of “fingers” extending from MacArthur toward Avocado Road. (Museum officials are refusing to release any sketches or renderings of the plan.)

The roof, which Piano calls a “flying carpet,” will have several functions. It will be a porous membrane, letting in light and air. It will merge with the surrounding vegetation of the hillside. And it will serve as the entrance to the museum. In Piano’s words, the museum will be a “microcosm, protected by an organic shelter,” permitting visitors to move from outside to inside “without a big psychological separation.”

Visitors will park their cars above the museum--next to land that will one day house a 12-acre park and the new location of the Newport Beach Public Library--and walk to the roof of the museum. This vantage point will yield an unobstructed view of the ocean, above the level of the houses on the ocean side of Coast Highway.

And from the roof--as Piano told an amused audience in his Friday lecture at the Pacific Design Center’s “WestWeek ‘89” conference--visitors will “fall down into the museum,” or rather, as he corrected himself, “come gently down” via an escalator that leads to the main hall of the museum. In other words, this building will have no “front door” as such and no traditional welcoming facade.

Piano said the design was intended as a solution to the site’s major problems: the noise of the traffic at the busy intersection and the lack of privacy.

Inside, a “street” running through the center of the building will connect the “fingers” housing various departments and functions of the museum: the two galleries housing the permanent collection, the temporary exhibit gallery, auditorium, restaurant, bookstore, education and staff support areas.

“Every time you cross the ‘fingers,’ you are in touch with different functions of the museum,” Piano said. This device is intended to involve the viewer in a synergistic experience of the museum as a whole.

Piano emphasized that the “street” also crosses the professional working areas of the museum, helping to provoke the viewer’s sense of “curiosity,” which he believes to be a very important element of the cultural experience.

“It’s kind of a secret building in spirit,” Piano said, offering visitors “the sense of discovery.”

Whereas the “fingers” are relatively compressed spaces, the street also will offer visitors multiple opportunities to experience gardens that will surround and penetrate the museum.

Piano said he is particularly interested in paying attention to the “immaterial” aspects of the museum--sun, light, air. The organic, “breathing” quality of the museum will be further enhanced by raised flooring in the galleries, which will allow air to circulate upward in a gentle manner conducive, Piano said, to “a well-tempered environment.”

The architect explained that the roof will change as it extends toward Coast Highway, beginning with an “almost totally vegetable” character--surrounded by greenery--near the parking lot and becoming “more mineral”--with the use of stone and paving materials--closer to the ocean overlook.

While the walls will likely be clad in dark stone “to increase the feeling of connection with the earth,” the roof will be made of 20-foot-long, 5-foot-wide curving concrete elements that are only 3 inches thick. Piano and the Newport Beach architecture firm of Blurock Partnership are still refining the system by which the light will be filtered into the permanent collection galleries.

Project manager Roger Roman of Fluor Daniel, the Irvine-based construction-management firm overseeing contracts for the building, cautioned Thursday night that only 15% of the museum’s design has been worked out so far. He had high praise for Piano, calling the architect “very mysterious, very magical, very demanding of himself--he’s pushing what’s possible.”