Adding Glass-Box Minimalism to Midwestern Downtown

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

DAVENPORT, Iowa - Whatever you think of Minimalist architecture - sleek and sexy or cold and impersonal - it's hard to deny its remarkable durability in the art world. For decades it has been the preferred style of art dealers and curators, as conservative in its way as the 19th-century salon tradition. Its familiarity only adds to its main virtue: the ability to instantly imbue an art institution with a gloss of cultural sophistication.

The Figge Art Museum here, the first major American building by the British architect David Chipperfield, is a monument to that notion of good taste. Mr. Chipperfield has a knack for making Minimalism look fresh, and here he has designed a very pretty box. Tasteful almost to a fault, the building's sharp-edged forms and carefully buffed surfaces, which have a soft, reassuring glow, will be especially comforting to those who like their world organized in neat compartments.

More important, the Figge has already added a frisson of excitement to a once-dilapidated area of this city of 100,000. And Mr. Chipperfield, who draws heavily on old Modernist history here, deftly roots his design in its surrounding grid of dull brick buildings.

Good taste, of course, is about emulating the taste of others, which rarely leads to new ideas. Though thoughtfully conceived, the Figge doesn't venture into dangerous territory. Its cool aesthetic is in telling contrast to the expanding emotional range of contemporary architecture: what might have seemed like a leap forward less than a decade ago now seems quaint and conventional.

Set on the edge of downtown along a bank of the Mississippi River, this industrial-scale building was built to house the expanding collections of the old Davenport Museum of Art. The project is also part of a long-term effort to reconnect the downtown area to Davenport's waterfront, a former manufacturing area dominated by scattered parking lots and a docked riverboat casino. Eventually, the city plans to transform the waterfront into a public park, adding to the museum's soothing aura.

This is a common strategy for revitalizing dying industrial cities whose civic leaders see cultural tourists and their disposable income as an antidote for the loss of manufacturing jobs.

In the art world, it has become fashionable to dismiss the cultural component of urban development plans as an expression of a museum board's vanity. But you would have to be a hardened cynic not to feel supportive of the Figge's efforts here. The museum, clad in translucent glass, looms over the mostly barren brick buildings that surround it and has an elusive simplicity. Seen from downtown, the building's corners sometimes seem to be dissolving into thin air. It helps anchor the surrounding neighborhood, while its ethereality seems to suggest that the area's renaissance could be a momentary fantasy.

That image gets more complex as you draw near the building. The main facade overlooks a vast plaza paved in concrete bricks, which put the museum at a slight remove from the city. Pierced by the lobby entrance and a service door, the facade has a symmetrical, buttoned-up look. But that symmetry breaks down as you circle around to the back, where a grand staircase cut directly into the facade leads to the main lobby and a restaurant, offering sweeping views of the river and the riverboat casino. (Some of the development costs are being covered by Vision Iowa, a state fund that channels gambling proceeds into cultural and civic projects.)

Most architects will recognize the contrast between the front and back as a winking reference to precedents like Le Corbusier's 1927 Villa Stein in Garches, France. There, too, the taut symmetry of the main facade gives way to a more informal composition in the rear - an expression of the complex inner life hidden behind the building's stoic public face. The idea also harks back to Vaux-le-Vicomte, the 17th-century palace built by Louis XIV's finance minister, where the humble facade veiled a potent expression of state power.

Mr. Chipperfield's careful nod to history gives the building a nuanced complexity that you won't find in a conventional glass box.

But that effect diminishes once you enter, as less is more becomes less is less. The lobby, a clean composition of horizontal white bands and towering doorways punctuated by the blood red wall of the restaurant at one end, is neither pretentious nor dazzling. The main galleries are conventional white cubes, though well proportioned and generously scaled. Of these, the warmest is the top-floor temporary gallery, a rough warehouse-like space that currently houses Janet Cardiff's remarkable "40 Part Motet" (2001), whose elliptical arrangement of 40 speakers, each projecting the voice of a single singer, brings the space to life. (In general, the architecture of the galleries is not well served by the collection, a mix of Mexican, Haitian, European and American art.)

Unfortunately, the museum's temperament is aptly summarized by its educational gallery, a relatively small space surrounded by a lecture hall, library and art studios. The layout suggests that art is here to be dissected by academicians, with the institution serving as a place for moral education rather than aesthetic pleasure, a legacy that is particular to American museum culture. You long for a bit of the messiness of the art studios to spill out into the galleries, for children to smudge the walls with paint-stained hands.

Such drawbacks make Mr. Chipperfield's work seem less intellectually rigorous than it did at first glance. In his still-young but robust career, Mr. Chipperfield has joined the ranks of prominent architects who express their ideas through scale, proportion and a refined palette of materials. He has spent time in Japan, where he briefly became enamored of the work of Tadao Ando, whose masculine concrete houses are monuments of monastic simplicity. His buildings also echo of the work the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza.

Mr. Chipperfield has yet to match Mr. Ando's potency or Mr. Siza's gentle lyricism. Nor does he venture into surreal territory, in the way of, say, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Judging from his past work, he may be too naturally cautious to risk the failures and false starts that are part of a truly creative process.

He is nonetheless a highly competent architect. And this project, set in the American heartland, offers the occasion to reflect on how, in a relatively short time, architectural debates that were once confined to the ghetto of academia have worked their way into the cultural mainstream. Think about it. A decade ago, a museum like the Figge would have been greeted as a daring departure from the kind of dull brick institutional boxes that were then the norm. Today, you are tempted to ask yourself, is this all there is? That's a huge step forward.