A siren song

Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

The new Richard B. Fisher Center for Performing Arts at Bard College is not a building as much as an act of seduction. Alternately stark and alluring, it presents a series of shifting images, all the while keeping you wonderfully off balance.

Designed by Frank Gehry, the $62-million center opened this weekend with a gala celebration that drew a steady stream of cultural types up to this bucolic hamlet at the edge of the Hudson River. With a 900-seat performance hall, a smaller black-box theater and several rehearsal rooms, it should give a significant boost to the school’s public profile. And the building’s undulating stainless steel facade is an example of the kind of aesthetic exuberance that has made the 74-year-old Gehry an international celebrity.

Yet behind this mask of sensuality, one finds a more nuanced architectural experience. The building’s boxy, concrete forms suggest a tougher, more complex world -- something deeper than superficial beauty. It is a mature, confident work by one of the world’s great architectural talents.

Wrapped inside its shimmering steel container, the main performance hall faces a lush, rolling meadow. The smaller theater and rehearsal rooms are plugged into one side of this form. A dense patch of woods acts as a backdrop for the center, with the Catskill Mountains rising in the distance.

The arrangement allows Gehry to create a mesmerizing architectural narrative. Most visitors will arrive from the south, passing along one side of the meadow. Seen from a distance through a few scattered trees, the main facade appears like an amorphous steel cloud. As you get nearer, the facade takes on a more anthropomorphic quality. The bulging steel plates, which frame the sides of a gaping lobby entry, evoke the mouth of a gigantic dead fish -- an old Gehry theme. By echoing the soft folds of the distant hills, they also serve to root the building in its context.

As you circle around the center, the image suddenly shifts. Seen from the side, the steel plates that frame the main hall seem to peel away from the structure’s surface, revealing the simpler concrete forms that house the rehearsal rooms. The separation of these forms has a practical function. Gehry has filled the interstitial spaces with skylights, allowing light to spill down into the various public rooms. But it also creates a remarkable visual tension, between the sensual and the pragmatic, a world of dreams and a world of hard-edged reality. It tells us that both are necessary parts of the human experience.

That tension continues inside the lobby of the main hall, where the exterior forms are revealed to be nothing more than a skin, a patchwork of thin steel plates supported on a grid of muscular I-beams. Light spills into the lobby through a series of vertical slots set between these panels, like gigantic gills.

The concrete shell that houses the hall, meanwhile, is intentionally more banal, its form pressing up against the lobby to create an unexpected sense of compression. From here, visitors slip along either side of the hall before entering it. Once they do, its soaring height evokes a sense of psychological release.

Many will see the center as a prelude to the Walt Disney Concert Hall scheduled to open in Los Angeles in October. In both, Gehry collaborated with acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota. The Bard version is a perfect balance of openness and intimacy, brute force and elegance. The layout is unusually shallow and wide, establishing a cozy relationship between audience and orchestra. The walls and floors are bare concrete. Two rows of balconies wrap around the space like large, enveloping arms. The contoured wood ceiling evokes hanging drapery. Here, music takes center stage.

As is often the case in important works of architecture, getting to this point was not easy. Gehry completed an earlier design for the Bard performing arts center in 1998, for a site located in the southern portion of the main campus. A coalition of local environmental and preservation groups fought the proposal, pointing out that the art center’s massive fly tower would have been visible from Montgomery Place, a landmark estate known for its 19th century manor house and rolling farmlands. The fly tower, they said, would have destroyed a historic view that inspired various Hudson River School artists in the mid-19th century.

School officials countered that the original site was also located next to a number of existing arts facilities that they hoped to renovate after the main hall was completed. Moving the project would essentially mean building an entirely new complex, at an additional cost of roughly $15 million.

Nonetheless, the school’s president, Leon Botstein, eventually agreed to the move, and Morgan Stanley’s chairman emeritus Richard Fisher, a Bard trustee, wrote a check to cover the additional costs. It was worth the money. Few sites are as bucolic. The result is a more cohesive -- and powerful -- design.

Not everyone is so pleased with Gehry’s recent achievements. On Friday night, for example, a small group of students -- one wrapped in an American flag, another stark naked -- danced in front of wine-sipping board members to protest the cost of the project. (Bard has one of the highest tuition rates in the country.) Earlier, critics, reacting to the accolades heaped on Gehry since the completion of his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, have accused the architect of a kind of gratuitous flamboyance. To them, the architect’s exuberant forms are simply more visual noise. Finally, to old-time Modernists, the apparent disconnect between the sculptural exteriors and the simplicity of the interiors is a form of architectural dishonesty. Form does not follow function.

The Richard B. Fisher Center can be read as a direct response to such criticism. To Gehry, the linking of form and function is just another trap. Life, after all, is a volatile mix of need and desire. Why not embrace both? In doing so, Gehry reminds us that the power of art stems, to a large degree, from its lack of practical value. Meanwhile, students may recall a slogan from an earlier generation: Imagination is power.