Norton Simon to Receive the Gehry Touch

Jennifer Jones Simon, president of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, is working with architect and museum board member Frank O. Gehry to develop plans for a renovation of the museum’s building and gardens. Work on the project--which is budgeted at more than $3 million--is expected to start in June and be completed within a year.

Gehry, a longtime friend of the Academy Award-winning actress and her late husband, who founded the museum that bears his name, said the plans reflect her desire to make the facility “more open, accessible and friendly” and use it more extensively for lectures and musical events.

Sara Campbell, the museum’s director of art, concurred. “I do think the museum has been perceived as a fortress and a little standoffish. With Mr. Gehry’s help, we can provide visitors with a more comfortable ambience and a more meaningful experience,” she said.

“The changes will be quite subtle, but the impact could be big,” Gehry said in a telephone interview from his office in Santa Monica. “It’s not completely settled,” he said of the project, but tentative interior plans call for improving the lighting, raising the ceiling on the main floor and dividing long corridors into smaller galleries to provide more intimate viewing spaces for small paintings. In addition, a few skylights may be installed and the black terrazzo on the lobby floor may be changed to a lighter-colored stone, he said.

Outside, the gardens will be altered in an effort to complement the art collection. Contours of the plantings will be softened and the rectangular pool will be reshaped into a curved form, more in keeping with the 19th century paintings in the collection. “The gardens won’t be a copy of Giverny,” Gehry said, referring to the flowering, lushly landscaped grounds and waterways at French Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s home north of Paris. But that popular setting, which served as subject matter for some of Monet’s best-known paintings, has been an inspiration to the architect’s plans for the Simon museum.

The only new structure--and the only aspect of the renovation that is likely to stand out as a Gehry design--will be a teahouse in the garden. It will be a 1,500- to 2,000-square-foot building that will provide refreshments for visitors, but it will not be furnished with a full kitchen, he said.

The museum’s building, at the corner of Colorado and Orange Grove boulevards, was designed by architects Thorton Ladd and John Kelsey as the Pasadena Art Museum, a showcase for modern and contemporary art. It opened to great fanfare in 1969, but it was inadequately funded and sank deeper and deeper into debt. Norton Simon took over the museum in 1974 and transformed it into a home for his collection of 12,000 works, including large holdings of European Old Masters, Impressionist paintings and Asian art.

Simon closed the museum for a year for a major renovation and reopened it in 1975. Relatively minor upgrades have been made since then, but Gehry’s project is the most ambitious to date.

Gehry said that Jennifer Jones Simon first consulted him about possible changes last fall, after he joined the board of trustees. “She initially asked me about colors and lighting, but it’s like unraveling a sweater. Once you get started, you don’t know where to stop,” he said. As plans have evolved, both have consulted with various museum directors and artists “to get a sense of where it should go,” he said.

Because the museum is a tribute to the taste of a brilliant collector, changes aren’t made lightly, Gehry said. “You wonder, should you do anything? When you go there on a day when the museum is packed, people seem to be very happy with it. So why fix it?” But changes aren’t being made just to do something new, he said. The point is to display the collection to a better advantage and to enhance visitors’ experience.

Galleries undergoing construction will be closed as needed, but the museum will remain open to the public during most or all of the project.