Download PDF scan of original article

We began the process with a question: how does one go about creating a great building?

On May 17,1997, the Contemporary Arts Center presented a program titled In Search of Significance: A Symposium on Building Greatness. It was to be the first in a long series of public discussions on the architecture of a new building. It was the first step in choosing an architect—one who could help create a physical embodiment of ideas that had sustained the institution for decades.

Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic who was then the Chief Cultural Correspondent for the New York Times, said in his keynote talk: “I know of no other time a program like this has existed. People talk about museums all the time, and about their architecture, and about their mission, and about the relationship of their architecture to their mission, but it is generally after the fact, after buildings have gone up. This is the first time in my memory that an institution has mounted this kind of public event at this stage of the game, at this part of the process—at the very beginning. We are all here not to be the architectural equivalent of Monday-morning quarterbacks, and that, in and of itself, says a huge amount about the seriousness with which the CAC and Cincinnati are going about this business”.

Goldberger and the other discussants (Aaron Betsky, Ben Nicholson and Helen Searing) could not know just how far the institution had already come in its consideration of architecture and mission. Indeed, the spaces occupied by the Center over some sixty years had played an unusually central role in defining its mission and its possibilities, and architecture was now central to the discussion of its future. It was for that exact reason that the museum would so impudently take on a “search for significance”.

The building documented by this book is an extraordinary work of art. That is so because, rather than a mere warehouse for objects or a workspace for museum professionals, it is a purposeful expression of ideas about art museums and their publics, about urban environments and the people who inhabit them, about constructed spaces and human interactions within them.

The art of architecture is nearly always the product of many hands, and the creation of the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art has relied upon the contributions of hundreds of architects, engineers, craftspeople and CAC supporters and staff. The ideas and ideals embodied by the architecture of the Rosenthal Center, however, were developed by Zaha Hadid, working closely with a much smaller team. They draw upon two primary sources: her own theories—developed over many years of “paper architecture”, uncompleted projects and a few early commissions—and the Contemporary Arts Center’s unique history, point of view and relationship to its community.

“Any new home of the Contemporary Arts Center should be a building of architectural distinction, a building that would create excitement and symbolize the Center’s mission as the progressive arts institution in the region. The building itself would be a sign, proclaiming to the city, to visitors, and to the world: “here is a place that values experiment, innovation, and diversity.” Equally important, the building would represent the CAC’s proud history of nearly sixty years of service to the people of Cincinnati as an intellectual and artistic well-spring.” [Charles Desmarais, Contemporary Arts Center: Preliminary Program, September 30, 1996.]

From the start of the architect selection process it was clear that—though improved exhibition, education and entertainment space were needed-visibility and accessibility were the main drivers of change for the CAC. Designed in the late 1960s, the Center’s home at 115 E. Fifth Street was extraordinary for its time. It was one of the first purpose-built spaces for the exhibition of contemporary art in America, and it was located in the city’s central business district, at a time when most contemporary programs were housed in adapted industrial spaces in urban fringe neighborhoods. However, the Center was located on the second floor of a commercial development, with minimal exposure to the traffic of the street, and after more than three decades above a Walgreen’s pharmacy it could hardly claim “top of mind” awareness in its community.

The topic of a possible new home that would cure some of these deficiencies was first raised in the late 1980s. At that time, then-director Dennis Barrie and a CAC trustee committee proposed to relocate the museum to the former Ohio Mechanics Institute-College of Applied Science Building (now the Emery Center) on the edge of downtown Cincinnati. Morphosis, the architecture team that at the time comprised Michael Rotondi and Tom Mayne, developed a preliminary adaptive re-use concept that had all the raw toughness that brought them to prominence in the 1980s. But the plan was eventually scotched after criticism that the site was too far from the downtown core. A later proposal to move the CAC into the new, Cesar Pelli designed, Aronoff Center for the Arts was rejected as lacking sufficient space and institutional autonomy.

(In retrospect it seems both decisions were the right ones. At the OMI building the CAC might have forever locked itself, as other organizations nationally did at the time, into a role as an “alternative space” on the periphery of the urban core. The Aronoff Center space was primarily located in the basement of the three-theater facility—certainly not a space that would have addressed the need for greater visibility.)

If the CAC was no closer to a building after all this, the seed, at least, had been sown. An unforeseen event, however, radically changed the terms of the discussion, and delayed action for several years.

It is impossible to understand the relationship of the Contemporary Arts Center to its community without understanding the most famous event in its history: the Center’s successful defense, in 1990, of the right of Cincinnati citizens to view a controversial exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. The political drama and criminal trial that surrounded that exhibition decision have been widely reported. It was a debate with seismic impact on the region’s social policy, psychology and self-image. For the CAC, it was a coming-of-age.

All contemporary art museums yearn to have an impact on the way people view their world. This is not to say that museums, by policy, promote particular social or political positions, but they do have a goal of encouraging openness to new ideas and different ways of seeing the world. It is the only way one can engage contemporary art. The Mapplethorpe controversy was traumatic for the CAC in the short term, costing thousands of dollars in legal fees and rattling a fragile fundraising framework. But at the same time, the institution proved that it stood for something, affirming its basic values of innovation, diversity and free inquiry. Perhaps even more important, the CAC became visible in a way that it had never been, a principal voice in a major civic discussion. By 1995, though struggling financially, the Contemporary Arts Center was the undisputed symbolic leader of progressive cultural activity in the region. Had the institution never taken on that mantle it is unlikely it could ever have raised the millions of dollars needed, first to stabilize the budget, and then to build the Rosenthal Center. Indeed, had it not assumed that leadership role, it would make no sense as the civic monument it has now become, boldly sited at the most prominent of city intersections.

* * *

There are at least five people who could claim—all with legitimacy, depending on point of view and definition of terms—to have first advanced the idea of a new CAC building in 1996. But it is certain that Dr. Stanley M. Kaplan, then President of the Board of Trustees, was the first to propose as a site the corner of Sixth and Walnut Streets. At a September 1996 board retreat, the green light was given to explore the idea; throughout that autumn I worked on a preliminary building program with a Board committee and several consultants, while Dr. Kaplan and I began the long process of building financial and political support. By mid-1997 the Board had appointed an Architect Selection Committee and the venture was under way in earnest.

Having determined that the search process would cast a wide net, with the goal of choosing an architect who would work alongside board and staff to develop the design, the CAC publicized the project. More than 300 architects from around the world requested application materials; 97 submitted formal Statements of Qualifications. The Selection Committee spent the weekend of November 7-8, 1997, narrowing the choice to twelve semifinalists—Coop Himmelblau (Wolf Prix), Diller & Scofidio, Herzog & De Meuron, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Rein Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Eric Owen Moss, Jean Nouvel, Toyo lto, Antoine Predock and Bernard Tschumi—who were invited to Cincinnati to view the site and meet with the committee. The group, minus Herzog & De Meuron and Ito (who withdrew) and Nouvel (who had met earlier with some committee members in Paris) came for interviews December 12-14, 1997.

On December 15, three finalists were announced: Zaha Hadid of London, Daniel Libeskind of Berlin and Bernard Tschumi of New York. One month later the committee made a five-day, whirlwind trip to London, Lille, Paris, Berlin, Basel and New York, visiting buildings by the finalists and meeting with all the finalists in their studios. Their responses to CAC concerns helped refine the vision.

Hadid told the group, “It’s a box situation. How can you begin to release the site from the requirements of the box? All American cities are about the grid. This needs a forceful subtlety—breaking the grid but not necessarily in a vulgar way.” She made quick sketches—not of a building, but a kind of energy diagram—that were exciting, if indecipherable.

“When you look at a building in a book,” Tschumi said to the committee, “you see a façade, a static object. The history of architecture is a description of static space. My work is about moving through space. So I say (partly as a polemic) I feel an affinity more to filmmakers than to other architects.” Through their interaction with Hadid and Tschumi, the committee came to realize that it was seeking an aggressively dynamic approach to the densely urban site that had already been chosen. Indeed, the group began to understand intellectually what its members surely had intuited earlier, in choosing three architects who all leaned toward what academics would call a deconstructivist approach in their work. Energy and motion, both implied and actual, would be essential if the Center was to achieve a building that could hold its own on the busiest corner in the city and, moreover, command the attention of art audiences increasingly hungry for sensate experience.

Libeskind was the only person who presented prepared concept drawings, and I took notes: “He takes us into a room furnished only with a table and chairs, where a wall of frenetic sketches has been installed. This is his analysis of the CAC project which, unlike Hadid’s purely conceptual approach, gives us the first glimpse of what our building could look like. It is a bold first effort, a dark rectangular box cleft from top to bottom with a curving shaft of light, and it gets the committee’s attention like no theoretical discussion could.

But I am not the only one, I realize later, who is troubled by Daniel’s failure to play by our unwritten rule that the design must grow out of discussion with us as clients, and out of a deep understanding of the particulars of our situation. If we are to be so proud as to attempt to create a new paradigm for the contemporary art museum, we surely won’t succeed with quick answers to complex questions.”

Given the extraordinary talent of the three finalists—not to mention their wildly different but equally passionate personalities—it is not surprising that the committee simply could not choose among them. In the end, a small stipend was offered to each of them to prepare concept booklets of a uniform size. Specific instructions were given not to design a building but to show the approach that the firm would take. Libeskind further refined his concept of a dramatically severed box, but it seemed to come from nowhere: why this expressionist gesture? this unresolved narrative? this connotation of violence? Tschumi was the most practical and specifically responsive to the written program’s demand for “raw, ‘New York loft’-type space” within which artists and curators would create freely, but his sketch was too detailed to come off as a concept and too much like a Guggenheim/MOMA hybrid to inspire the group.

Hadid, on the other hand, re-defined exhibition flexibility by proposing a “kit” of different-size galleries, independent volumes fitted together in a three-dimensional puzzle hung from a warped concrete plane. Though the building as completed looks little like her first sketches, it has maintained the principle of function-driven forms that visibly define the look of the building exterior. Most important, Hadid’s proposal embraced and extended what the CAC views as central to its relationship with its audience, “experiences outside boundaries”.

On March 4, 1998, the Center proudly announced the selection of Zaha Hadid.

* * *

Despite the attention construction of the Rosenthal Center has brought to the museum, the Contemporary Arts Center is hardly a new institution. Founded in 1939 as the Modern Art Society, it drew upon the experience of two people closely associated with the creation of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1929: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MOMA’s legendary founding director, and Edward M. M. Warburg, an early MOMA trustee.

It was Warburg who, approached by two young Cincinnati women (Peggy Frank and Betty Pollack) about the prospect of jobs at the New York museum, suggested that they launch their own effort in their hometown. After recruiting another friend, Rita Renschler, and then a circle of supporters, they did exactly that.

The only other American museums of the era to tackle modern art head-on, devoting themselves exclusively to the progressive and the experimental, were the Institute of Contemporary Art, founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art, a MOMA outpost, in 1935; and New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, opened as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939. Thus, when the Modern Art Society presented its first exhibition (“Modern Paintings from Cincinnati Collections” opened in November 1939) in a gallery borrowed from the Cincinnati Art Museum, it embarked upon a bold adventure: the creation of the first American exhibition center for avant-garde art west of the Hudson River.

For nearly fifteen years the Modern Art Society exhibited at the CAM in various unused galleries at the pleasure of the museum director or—when space at the museum was not available—in other ad hoc situations. Then, in 1954, the Society was granted space for its first “permanent galleries” in the basement of the museum. Carl Strauss, Cincinnati’s greatest missionary of the Modern in architecture and a passionate supporter of the Society, created two “exhibition rooms”, each approximately 900 square feet (84 m²), and a smaller narrow gallery.

The design had a homey, almost domestic feel, with walls of tongue-in-groove fir paneling and floors of asphalt tile. Its primary innovation, as reported in a major architecture journal, was to conceal windows, radiators and pipes along an outside wall with “burlap-covered pivoting plywood louvers which, when closed, form a solid exhibition wall and, when open, admit a controllable amount of daylight” [“Remodeling Rejvenates Art Museum,” Architectural Record 117 (February 1955): 178]. The Modern Art Society called its new gallery complex “the Contemporary Arts Center”, a name that was officially adopted for the entire institution within the year.

The CAC presented some 70 exhibitions in this space, including shows of sculpture by Georges Braque, Alexander Calder and David Smith; ceramics by Gertrud and Otto Natzler; and paintings by Amadeo Modigliani and William Zorach. The space was well-suited to graphic works (as was the exhibition budget)—there were many print shows and, adventuresome for the period, exhibitions of photographs by Eugene Atget, lmogen Cunningham, Arnold Newman and Aaron Siskind, among others.

In 1962 the Cincinnati Art Museum decided it needed the CAC space for its own purposes, prompting a change that would have a profound influence on the Center’s program and philosophy. Until that time, it had been an active and progressive program. It was curatorially 28 independent if fiscally beholden to a particularly conservative museum (one local collector remembers CAM director Phillip Adams publicly declaring, “Anyone who likes Modern Art must have a hole in his head.”) One gets the sense, however, of a club for intellectuals hungry to learn about and debate current aesthetic issues, while comfortably ensconced in a kind of tiny basement rec room for art and design.

Now the Center was forced downtown, into much more immediate contact with the characteristic urban forces of commerce, politics, and shifting social relationships. At the same time, art and society were beginning to feel the first tremors of what would become the cataclysm of change that was the 1960s. Where Robert H. Luck, CAC director in 1954, would write that his organization’s purpose was “to stimulate interest in contemporary art,” William A. Leonard, named as director ten years later, pledged “to bring new life into the Contemporary Arts Center, to the point where it won’t be an exaggeration to say that Cincinnati is indeed one of the cities setting the cultural pace for North America.” [Robert H. Luck, “Cincinnati: The Contemporary Arts Center,” Arts Digest 29, no.1 (March l, 1954): 18. Leonard is quoted in Eleanor Bell, “Arts Center Getting New Director, Home,” Cincinnati Post & Times-Star, September 5, 1964.]

After two years in a succession of temporary homes (including spare rooms at the Taft Museum and spaces at 608 Main Street and in the Carew Tower, a landmark Cincinnati skyscraper) the Center on November 5, 1964, opened a 4,000-square-foot (372 m²) gallery on the fourth floor of the Woman’s Exchange Building at 113 W. Fourth Street. With Leonard at the helm, the Center embraced the socially engaged art of the period, beginning with a series of “Assassinations” by Robert Osborn and including a 1968 exhibition on the theme of Richard J. Daley’s performance as mayor of Chicago. Important early exhibitions of works by John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Stanley, Wayne Thiebaud and Andy Warhol alternated with group shows with titles like Slick Stuff and Air Art.

Little more than two years after opening its “new permanent” home on Fourth Street, the CAC announced that it would again move, for the first time to a museum structure built for its own purposes. Part of a huge “Core Renewal Project” undertaken downtown, the 12,000-square-foot (1115 m²) gallery/office/meeting room complex would be built on the second level of a building that would house specialty shops on the ground floor. Unlike previous moves, which had been reported on the arts pages of the local newspapers, this one was heralded by an editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer as “a matter of intense satisfaction for a wide group of Cincinnatians” [“The Arts Center’s New Home,” March 10, 1967].

The new center opened at 115 East Fifth Street on September 13, 1970. It was designed by Harry Weese, who was selected—amidst popular acclaim of his then-new Metro Subway System in Washington, DC—by the developers of the larger project. It is difficult today to see past the unfortunate effects of wear and alterations on a space that must have been a stunning late-Modern jewellbox, with its light-filled atrium and grand stair (later replaced by escalators), every surface coated in white travertine marble or glistening metal or glass.

The two exhibition halls originally consisted of a cruciform space under a dome with an oculus skylight, and a high rectangular gallery of 4,400 square feet (409 m²). Offices and a meeting room with kitchen (the CAC staff sometimes served Sunday brunch) surrounded the domed area. It was functional and elegant, and it served the Center well for more than thirty years.

The history of CAC programs at the Fifth Street location is long—more than 400 exhibitions and hundreds of events—and extraordinarily diverse. Such artists and designers as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Chris Burden, Peter Eisenman, Nancy Graves, Tim Hawkinson, Barry Leva, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Sandy Rosen, Ettore Sotsass, Richard Tuttle and Kara Walker were presented early in their careers. The Center also organized major surveys and installations by Carl Andre, Louise Bourgeoise, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, David Mach, Robert Therrien, TODT, Alan Wexler, Robert Wilson, Jackie Winsor and others.

The primary hallmark of the second half of the CAC’s career, however, has been its engagement with the Cincinnati community in ways that have expanded its mission beyond the aesthetic. In the civic arena, the impact of the Mapplethorpe exhibition is merely the most famous example; programs have also influenced such areas as city planning and the creation of public monuments. The Center hired architects in the 1970s, for example, to design public playgrounds, and in 1998 it launched wide discussion of the city’s built environment with the exhibition Unbuilt Cincinnati. In 1988 it chose Andrew Leicester to design a major public monument (Cincinnati Gateway, the entrance to Bicentennial Commons), the key feature of which—a winged pig—first created a political furor but has now become the unofficial city mascot.

More essentially, the introduction to the region of performance art, installation and participatory projects has re-shaped, to no small degree, the community’s expectations regarding the visual art experience. The Center’s role today is as the cultural research and development center of its community, and the building that houses it has finally been created to suit that function.

* * *

The most important art museum building of the twentieth century is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, unveiled in New York in 1959. To an architecture expert, this may not seem a radical statement; to many artists and curators, however, it would smack of heresy.

The widespread opinion of art professionals is that spaces for art should serve as backdrops, neutral settings within which viewers contemplate objects without distraction. A building that demands of its users, as the Guggenheim does, physical accommodation to unconventional space (floors are not level and walls are not plumb, the procession through the building is closely prescribed, etc.) can hardly be said to be neutral. And yet there are few spaces as exhilarating, both physically and psychically, as the Guggenheim rotunda.

The “backdrop” building has its place, certainly. The standardized, rectilinear enfilade of galleries—and the techniques and traditions of museum exhibition that have developed over two centuries to deal with them—are practical for museum workers and familiar to visitors. For large institutions with varied collections and broad constituencies, it is hard to imagine a more successful model.

But what happens when the building itself is a great work of advanced are—as we hope to have created in the Rosenthal Center, as the Guggenheim has proven to be? Another definition of success might be a spatial and formal experience that is dynamic rather than merely useful: that announces to all who enter that this is a place for experiment, a place to leave behind assumptions and conventions, a place that lays us open to the surprises and challenges that are necessarily presented by new art. This new definition might also include such gestures of welcome and integration as Hadid’s “urban carpet” and Wright’s spiral, both of which sweep the audience, physically and symbolically, into the museum. Or the achievement of fluid space activated by human presence and motion.

Today, museum visitors are often asked by artists to be participants in an art experience as well as “viewers”, and works of art are likely to be “objects” only in a metaphorical sense. In the case of such work, the architectural typology of the presentation space has an entirely different relationship to art from that of, say, a beaux-arts building to neoclassical painting.

Indeed, depending on the work, the best place for an artist to exhibit might be a living room, a busy urban intersection or a quiet forest clearing. In that case, either the museum setting must artificially reproduce the existing work’s original context, or the artist must create a new work in response to the particulars of a specific museum building. These are matters that should concern all museums; they are, however, of particular significance in the contemporary art arena.

In discussing her building for the CAC, Zaha Hadid has said, “‘Neutral space’ is a wishful oxymoron. All space is colored by individual memory and experience.” What the CAC set out to create, and what Hadid has accomplished, is a place that has the potential to carve out new memories and generate authentic experience in an age that offers little opportunity for such encounters.