ART REVIEW : A Satellite Museum Lands in Downtown San Diego

When the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art last year underwent its fourth name change since the 1960s, transforming itself into the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the move had the ring of a pure marketing decision. Under the La Jolla banner the museum had developed a national reputation for adventurous programming; but, to many people locally, the association with the wealthy, seaside enclave in which it resides had encumbered the institution with a taint of snobbishness and exclusivity.

In a city with a rather low and timorous art profile, that perception can be something of a burden--especially if a museum is in the midst of trying to raise nearly $10 million for much-needed expansion, renovation and enhancement of endowment funds. Dropping the exclusive “La Jolla” and adding the expansive “San Diego” automatically enlarged the potential funding pool.

On Saturday, the museum opened a 10,000-square-foot satellite space 13 miles from its La Jolla base--conspicuously, in rapidly redeveloping downtown San Diego. Some years ago the museum had operated a scruffy storefront satellite, also downtown, but this sleek new enterprise is very different. Its location is prominent, its look upscale, its ambitions marked.

The downtown branch occupies a small triangle of land between the historic Santa Fe railroad depot, built in romantically Spanish Mission style in 1915, and the newly opened, 34-story America Plaza Tower, designed in a flashy motif of last-gasp-of-1980s-excess by Chicago architect Helmut Jahn. (A hotel, as yet unbuilt, is planned for the third side of the triangle.) The trolley station at the foot of the awful tower is handsomely covered with a steel, open-trussed canopy, which recalls Jahn’s marvelous design for the United Airlines terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

Wedged between two significant mass-transit points and adjacent to a planned hotel, the location of the two-story museum is excellent. However, the operative word here is “wedged.” That describes the awkward footprint of the building, which the developer, Shimizu Land Corp., had originally planned to lease as retail space.

Already designed, and built as little more than a shell when the museum received it, the wedge-shaped building was further compromised for its unforeseen future as an art museum space by tall windows on both floors, surrounding all four sides. For the demanding job of designing appropriate exhibition interiors for this shell, the museum hired an unusual team. It was composed of architect David Raphael Singer, who is working with project architect Robert Venturi on the planned renovation and expansion of the La Jolla facility, and artists Richard Fleischner and Robert Irwin. Singer and Irwin are based in San Diego, Fleischner in Rhode Island.

The team decided to keep the tall windows at both ends of the building. An elevator was located by the entry, while the other end features a narrow staircase. The stairs widen dramatically at the bottom, in a witty allusion to the grand staircases of 19th-Century Beaux Arts museum designs. A filtered skylight above helps brighten the path, while a window midway up the stairs and overlooking the trolley platform offers a comforting view with which to locate yourself in relation to the outdoors.

There are other nice touches. Light oak floors, reception desk, baseboards and window benches make an inviting entry, while the abundant windows at the ends orient the interior toward pedestrians on the street. Spattered paint of pale violet and cream is sandwiched on the inside of some windows, creating an eccentrically frosted effect. And, a big, saw-tooth skylight on the second floor yields full, soft, ambient illumination for the largest gallery.

With the exception of a 350-square-foot conference room and a 500-square-foot bookstore, all the museum’s operational facilities, including staff offices, remain uptown in La Jolla. Just over half the satellite building is devoted to exhibition areas.

The ground floor includes an orientation lobby, a 1,500-square-foot main gallery and a 500-square-foot side gallery. The larger second floor houses a 2,800-square-foot main gallery and a 600-square-foot side gallery. All have high ceilings and concrete floors.

Unfortunately, all are also shaped like trapezoids (or, if there are in fact no parallel walls--and it’s hard to tell--trapeziums). Entered from a corner, rooms without any 90-degree angles in its walls create a distinct sense of perceptual disorientation, which no amount of acclimation seems to lessen.

Given their windowless size, the main galleries are especially difficult. Presently they house 16 works from the museum’s permanent collection, works whose often ungainly installation indicates the obstacles to hanging art in oddly shaped rooms.

Consulting artists for the design of exhibition galleries is praiseworthy, yet one shouldn’t be surprised when the result is spaces that seem most amenable to the kind of art those artists make. Both Fleischner and Irwin create architecturally related, non-figurative installations that are specific to a given site; often, those installations exploit geometry and perceptual quirks.

However, neither artist works with the placement of given objects--that is, of paintings and sculptures--for effective display, which is a very different matter.

These eccentric galleries won’t easily meet that need, although curatorial experience in working with these rooms should certainly help future exhibitions. Still, the downtown building might be more easily adaptable to site-specific installation art.

In a way, the problem ironically repeats the one in La Jolla, where precious-looking but awkward museum spaces were carved out of what had originally been a house. The clumsiness of those galleries is what prompted their planned renovation and expansion. Now, similarly awkward galleries have been carved out of retail space downtown.

Perhaps the satellite was just over-designed. Rather than attempt to convert raw, unfinished retail space into something polished and museum-like--something, in other words, that it really couldn’t be--the maintenance of its provisional, makeshift character might have yielded a certain liveliness.

It wasn’t exactly a raw warehouse to begin with, but that might have been a productive way to consider the blank space the museum was handed. Such converted spaces have been successful elsewhere--most notably in Los Angeles, at both the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art’s warehouse space in Little Tokyo.

The latter model is particularly apt, for the San Diego project came about as a kind of miniature version of what brought us MOCA’s building at L.A.’s California Plaza. Shimizu Land Corp. was obliged by the city to devote a percentage of the construction costs for its building to public art. Rather than commission sculptures or paintings for the site, an agreement was struck with La Jolla to use the small retail structure as an exhibition hall.

The developer gave the museum a 99-year lease at $1 a year. Also forthcoming was $1.2 million toward the cost of interior renovations, as well as subsidized parking. The anticipated annual operating budget of $250,000 must be provided by the museum.

In addition, Shimizu gave the museum access to six recessed, glass display cases lining a marble corridor off the lobby of the Helmut Jahn tower. Unwisely, the museum has placed a painting, drawing or wall sculpture from the permanent collection as decoration in each, resulting in a vulgar fusion of a merchandise display and an advertising poster for the nearby satellite.

Needless to say, these paintings and drawings were never meant to be seen in this publicly disadvantageous way. If I were among the artists, I’d shriek.

How--or even if--the downtown branch will function as a marketing tool for the main event in La Jolla remains to be seen. The dramatic potential for reaching new audiences is certainly there. Some idea of the impact might be gauged in July, when the board of trustees plans to decide whether to proceed with the full expansion of the La Jolla facility, or whether to scale back Venturi’s admirably adventurous scheme.

Museum of Contemporary Art, 1001 Kettner Blvd. at Broadway, San Diego, (619) 234-1001; through Feb. 26. Closed Mondays.