A good fit for museum’s chief, its two styles and its kids

If most successful buildings begin with the right match of architect and client, then the appeal of the new Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh doesn’t really become clear until about midway through an interview with its executive director, Jane Werner.

Like most museum administrators these days, Werner talks with almost unsettling fluency about fundraising -- in her case, an ambitious capital campaign that helped finance a $22.5-million expansion by the Santa Monica firm Koning Eizenberg Architecture, adding more than 50,000 square feet of space. She can discuss in great detail the design competition, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, that Koning Eizenberg won in 2000, beating out high-profile finalists including the New York firms Reiser + Umemoto and Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects. And she’s frank about how the recession and Sept. 11 conspired to force the museum, like so many others around the country, to scale back the more fanciful elements of the initial plans.

But only after she steps from behind her desk on the second floor and leads a visitor through the new exhibits is it obvious why the new building, which opened at the end of last year, works as well as it does -- and why Werner made such a good fit as a client for principals Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg, whose best designs, which include residential projects on the Westside of Los Angeles and the renovation of the Standard Hotel downtown, are smart, modern and unfussy.

Disappointed that there aren’t more children around on a weekday morning, Werner begins without any apparent self-consciousness to do her best impersonation of a 9-year-old. First, she picks up a couple of puppets and improvises a scene in the Mister Rogers wing. (Fred Rogers was a native of nearby Latrobe, Penn., and much of his collection, including his iconic sneakers and zip-up cardigan, wound up here in 1998.) In the next room, she contorts her body in front of an interactive video display, sending a series of digital ripples across the screen. Then she grabs a rubber ball and sends it to the top of a contraption that snakes down from the ceiling like a giant Rube Goldberg machine.

Later, back in her office, when she explains how much she wanted an expanded building that was down-to-earth and stripped of pretension, the point seems almost redundant.

Indeed, what Eizenberg and Koning have brought to the museum, along with the luxury of nearly four times as much space as it had before, is a sense of accessibility and a relaxed kind of architectural sophistication. The job was a tricky one: The museum had long been located in a neoclassical 1897 post office in the Allegheny Square section of Pittsburgh, just north of downtown. Across the street was the old Buhl Planetarium, an excellent example of streamlined Art Deco architecture from 1939 that had been vacant since 1991.

The city was willing to make the planetarium available to the children’s museum for a nominal fee. But that meant closing off the street and figuring out a way to connect the buildings, which are very different architecturally: The post office tall and elegantly detailed, capped off by a copper dome, the planetarium boxy and low to the ground and almost entirely free of ornament.

Koning and Eizenberg’s first plan called for a new building in the shape of a folded Japanese lantern, a form that owed a significant debt to the rice-paper lamps of Isamu Noguchi. Sheathed in translucent polycarbonate, it would have resembled a huge, glowing nightlight, signaling the sense of welcome and safety the museum wanted to convey. But the lantern scheme proved impractical. It would have been expensive to build. And it would have reduced the amount of display space because hanging exhibits on the inside of the polycarbonate’s folded planes would have been difficult if not impossible. Not to mention that Koning and Eizenberg weren’t even sure how they would construct it.

Their design had been among the more muted of the finalists in the competition. Now they faced the prospect of making it more modest still. But a serendipitous conversation with artist Ned Kahn led to a solution. Kahn had been commissioned to design a fountain in front of the museum, but he worried that Pittsburgh’s frigid climate would allow it to operate only a few months out of every year.

Happy to give up on the fountain idea, Kahn began working with the architects on a design to replace the lantern facade. Koning and Eizenberg proposed a fairly conventional glass box, around which Kahn would add a skin of tiny plastic squares set into a sturdy aluminum frame. In essence, the architects agreed to give over the facade of the new wing to an artwork -- the kind of collaboration more self-involved architects would never have agreed to. (Kahn thinks of it as a “wind sculpture” and titled it “Articulated Cloud.”) When a breeze passes across the screen-like facade, those plastic flaps -- there are 43,000 -- flutter and shimmer, as if the whole building is shivering. They also act as a sunshade and cast changing shade patterns inside.

The facade is kinked slightly at the second floor, as if the building were cinched around the waist. That small but significant gesture angles the screens on the facade away from the box behind it just enough to let in slivers of direct sunlight and allow some views from inside of the adjoining buildings.

The new wing is connected to the sidewalk by a low glass entryway framed by a steel superstructure that is painted white. It leads to a high-ceilinged lobby that offers visitors an immediate sense of choice: There is a large stair across from the front doors, but also visible connections to the older buildings.

To the left, glass walls behind the ticket desk offer views of the arched windows of the original post office, whose ground floor has been turned into a spacious art studio. On the other side of the lobby is the old planetarium, which contains a gift shop and lounge.

The roof of the planetarium now holds photovoltaic solar panels, which helped the expanded museum earn Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. And under the original dome, where stars and galaxies were once projected, there is a now a “garage workshop” that includes the kind of deliberately un-slick machinery games and interactive displays that recall the exhibits at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, where both Werner and Kahn once worked.

Other interior spaces, such as an area on the top floor where kids can make and sail their own ships in huge water tanks, are similarly approachable to the point of looking unfinished. Bold, clean-lined graphics by Paula Scher of Pentagram add to the feeling that the museum wants to come across to the children as energetic but not precious. The same is true outside, where the new building makes no overt gestures toward contextualism but still manages to operate as both bridge and beacon.