ART REVIEW : A Cathedral of Culture for Silicon Valley

The second-floor galleries of the new $14-million addition to the Museum of Art here says a lot.

Temporary plywood walls separate the large central room from narrower galleries on each side, while raw ventilation ducts and uncovered insulation climb toward the imposing barrel vault with its long band of skylights which dominates the main room. Unfinished or not, the 45,000-square-foot addition capped by these galleries will open today, as scheduled.

What this “ready-or-not” debut says is two things. The opening declares a determination on the part of the art museum’s board and staff, and of the city redevelopment agency that made the expansion possible, to make the young institution an integral feature in the development of a cultural life for the third-largest city in the state. And the $4-million shortfall in fund raising, which has left the new building unfinished, speaks of the near-absence of a robust philanthropic community essential to making that dream live.

The San Jose Museum of Art was incorporated in 1969 on the crest of the art boom in the United States that characterized the decade. Since then, it has occupied a lovely, if small and decidedly inadequate, post office building designed in 1892 by local architect Willoughby Edbrooke. The Romanesque Revival structure is located on a once-prominent corner in a faded downtown that had not hit bottom in the accelerated sprawl to suburbia that also marked the time.

The population of San Jose doubled in the 1950s, and again in the 1960s, but the explosive growth of the aptly nicknamed Silicon Valley was taking place far from the city center. In a scenario played out countless times across the country since--not least in Los Angeles--a city redevelopment agency eventually began to use public funds to leverage private investment in an effort to jump-start an urban core.

Offices, a convention center, shopping arcades, a major hotel and other amenities were planned and built. A significant art museum, which reigns as the conventional symbol of modern urbanity and sophistication, was integral to the plan.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the corporate architecture firm selected by the agency to build the addition to the San Jose Museum (a second firm handled the interior), ran with that conventional symbolism in shaping its overall design for the one-third acre site. The prevailing architectural metaphor is the museum as Cathedral of Culture: A central barrel-vaulted “nave” flanked by two “side aisles” yields a rudimentary building profile based on the 11th-Century European basilica.

This general metaphor nods specifically to the building style of the original post office. Edbrooke’s design derives from the pioneering modern architecture of the great New Englander H.H. Richardson, whose use of massive masonry walls, small windows and classically derived ornamental motifs--columns, arches, arcades--is typically described as Romanesque Revivalism.

In a final bow to the metaphor, San Jose’s sleek new Cathedral of Culture stands directly across the street from St. Joseph’s Cathedral, a sumptuous Catholic church newly refurbished. If the chosen architectural imagery of the museum is conventional, it nonetheless conspires to establish a nominal centerpiece for the city.

The addition’s elevations match those of the post office, and the soft beige sandstone with which it is clad both complements and contrasts the rough-hewn sandstone of Edbrooke’s design.

Yet, the relationship between the new building and the old is poorly handled.

In an apparent effort to create a graceful visual transition between the heavy masonry of the Richardsonian post office and the structural transparency of classic modern architecture, the architects designed a tall, free-standing entrance portal, complete with columns, which is located several feet in front of a grid of aluminum and glass that forms the museum’s actual entrance wall.

Visually and physically, you’re meant to pass through “the old” into “the new.” The new portal, however, is too flimsy to compete with the volumetric authority of the adjacent post office, while the scale of the aluminum-and-glass grid has no apparent relation to the powerful masonry wall that it abuts. The big doorway flags the main entrance and the addition claims handsome simplicity, but the building slides easily into the blandness of the conventional corporate architecture that surrounds it.

Inside, the capacious first- and second-floor galleries add more than 13,200 square feet of exhibition space to the 5,150 square feet in the old building. Those galleries that have been completed have the look and feel of contemporary New York loft spaces: high ceilings, cream walls, wood floors, principally artificial illumination. Stylistically, the galleries complement the agenda of the San Jose Museum, which last year adopted a mission statement to focus on contemporary American and European art.

Working with a tiny permanent collection, director I. Michael Danoff and curator Colleen Vojvodich have sought to underline the new mission through the museum’s principal inaugural exhibition. “Compassion and Protest: Recent Social and Political Art From the Eli Broad Family Foundation Collection,” which derives from a show at the Santa Monica-based foundation last year, includes 27 works by high-profile artists principally from New York: John Ahearn, Leon Golub, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Anselm Kiefer, Cindy Sherman and 10 others.

Too small adequately to survey so large and diffuse a topic, the show is nonetheless insistent. Art with an interest in social and political issues--submerged since the triumphant rise of American abstract painting in the 1950s--is claimed to have lately resurfaced as the most significant and compelling development of the day.

The handsomely produced catalogue is excellent in presenting the sociopolitical origins of modern art, but it doesn’t do very well in arguing its case for the complex trajectory of postwar culture. Social and political expressions here are considered as topical subject matter. If we’ve learned nothing else from Pop and Minimal art--which began to bust up the formalist logjam 25 years ago and laid the foundation for the work in the show--it ought to be that social or political content is equally a question of form.

Indeed, the exhibition itself obviously has an agenda quite separate from that addressed in the art. The newly rich Silicon Valley may be among the wealthiest regions in the nation, but it is apparently tight-fisted when it comes to cultural philanthropy.

The fund-raising effort to expand the San Jose Museum of Art, which began more than five years ago, has to date raised a paltry $3.6 million from private and corporate sources. (City agencies have kicked in $6.5 million.) The inaugural show, housed in a half-finished building, means to offer Los Angeles collector Eli Broad as an exemplar: He’s an entrepreneurial, first-generation self-made multimillionaire who spends considerable sums of money on contemporary art and the museums that show it.

The Silicon Valley is crawling with those same adjectival-rich folk. Plainly, the inaugural hopes a couple of them will get an idea.