Menil Drawing Institute a marvel of light and lines
$40 million building adds to a broad transformation of the Museum District
The new Menil Drawing Institute looks like a stealth jet of a building from Richmond Avenue, so sleek and low-slung that passers-by might not notice it across the expanse of grass where the Richmont Square Apartments once stood.
Inside, architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee have delivered a marvel of light, shadow and lines defined by the slant of a razorthin metal roof and recessed walls of dark gray cypress and glass. In some areas, the ceiling is punctuated by deep, diagonal angles that suggest folded paper above the white oak floors. Virtually every element of the building and most of the furniture is custom-designed, but purposefully simple.
While modest in scale, the $40 million building has monumental ambitions.
Saturday’s opening comes a year later than expected, due partly to the
demands of the structure’s precise, complex design and construction. The project also overcame obstacles with changes in top leadership.
Josef Helfenstein, the former Menil Collection director who shepherded the design process and the early years of a $115 million capital campaign, left a few months after the groundbreaking. Thomas Rhoads kept things going during 18 months as an interim director before Rebecca Rabinow took the helm in July 2016. And during all of that, two curators of drawing who came and left.
The trouble and the wait have been worth it. Not since the opening of Yoshio Taniguchi’s Asia Society Texas Center six years ago has Houston seen architecture this refined. The recently opened Glassell School of Art designed by Steven Holl is just as purposeful and functional, but more intentionally raw.
The MDI, as it is called, gives Houston the first free-standing building designed for the acquisition, study, conservation, storage and display of modern and contemporary drawings — a broadlydefined genre that encompasses numerous media, including sculpture that could be considered “drawing in space.” Rabinow loves that the architecure is function-driven to serve those purposes.
“We’ve been sticklers and are proud of it,” she said during a walk-through on Tuesday. Rabinow said she felt “zero regrets” for the construction delays. “I’m very proud of this board of trustees, that they agreed to slightly delay the opening in order to take the time to get everything right. Because when you walk into this building, it shows.”
With any museum construction, she added, “a delay of a year is not considered a long delay by any stretch.” It’s almost a Menil tradition, actually. Renzo Piano’s main museum building on the campus was also a year late when it opened in 1987.
Those standards even extend into the public restrooms, which appeared complete but more ordinary last fall, when they were lined with glossy marble that had horizontal veins. But that was not the wall material specified in the plans, so those rooms were gutted and redone with the specified unglazed, vertical “waterfall” marble. That understated flourish does look genius now — those are the only walls in the building that have a permanent, vivid pattern, keeping visitors focused on drawing even when they take a restroom break.
Though, only the front sections of the building will be open to the public. “It’s an institute in the truest sense,” Rabinow said.
All visitors can access a large gallery that’s now hung with its first show, “Jasper Johns: The Condition of Being Here,” and a light-filled, linear foyer that the architects call “the living room.”
Most of Saturday’s events — including talks, live music and drawing activities — will happen outdoors, in new park spaces by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates that created paths and sight lines between the art buildings across the 30-acre campus. Rabinow said as much thought went into the landscape as the architecture.
The sculptures bookending the building lead viewers’ eyes from skyward to below ground: “Menil Curve,” a sliver of white steel, rounds upward near the building’s west entrance; it’s the last public commission the late Ellsworth Kelly completed during his lifetime. Meanwhile, Michael Heizer’s relocated land sculptures “Rift” and “Dissipate” zigzag through an expanse of rosecolored aragonite gravel near the building’s east entrance.
The landscape is also integrated into the new structure, which is built around three serene courtyards designed to modulate light in specific ways; each 70-by-70 feet but with different designs and strategically-chosen plant materials.
The MDI’s unveiling is part of a broad transformation taking place across Houston’s entire Museum District, one of the nation’s largest concentrations of cultural institutions. Including projects at the Holocaust Museum Houston and the Houston Zoo, improvements totaling about $800 million are either underway or planned.
The most dramatic work is happening just a mile away, where the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s campus continues to expand dramatically. The new Kinder Exhibition Building now taking shape at the corner of Main and Bissonnet will have a skin of lighted glass tubes. In every way, that one aims to be an attention-grabbing, signature edifice for the city.
Architectural historian Stephen Fox, a Rice University professor, said the city is fortunate to be getting new museum buildings that demonstrate debates about what contemporary architecture should be — subtle or spectacular. “Houston is phenomenally fortunate to have buildings of this caliber,” Fox said. “It’s tremendously inspiring that the Menil Collection and the MFAH still believe in architecture.”
It’s always hard to design next to a building everyone loves, Fox said. Holl’s design for the Glassell and the Kinder respond to the MFAH’s architectural legacy, especially its Mies van der Rohe building and the sculpture garden designed by Isamu Noguchi.
In keeping with the Menil’s aesthetic, the MDI “demonstrates great cleverness and refinement without calling attention to itself,” Fox said. “Its essential lightness of being brings a sense of complexity to your experience of this very simple building.”
Even the furnishings within the Los Angeles-based firm JohnstonMarklee’s new building honor the traditions of Menil Collection founders Dominique and John de Menil. For example, the brown, octagonal ottoman in the restroom alcove echoes the ottomon in the main museum’s foyer, which itself echoes an ottoman Charles James designed for the Menil house on San Felipe.
Similar thought went into the donor plaques, which harken to the ground-hugging earlier donor piece underneath Heizer’s hanging “Charmstone” at the main museum’s entrance. The latest campaign’s donors’ names appear in a bar along a sidewalk — although Rabinow felt that decision was more risky. The names of patrons who gave $1 million or more are raised; the names of those who gave $100,000 to $999,999 are etched.
Rabinow is struck by “how poetically stunning” Piano’s once tucked-away Cy Twombly Gallery appears, now that visitors can see its floating roof from a new park along its south side. The magnificent live oak at the Twombly Gallery’s entrance has new prominence as the campus center. Campus-wide, the Menil has planted 226 trees and thousands of plants since 2014.
The discreet signage on the MDI also designates it as the Louisa Stude Sarofim Building, honoring the lead patron who has been Menil Collection founder Dominique de Menil’s chosen successor for almost 21 years. It’s worth noting that one of the last exhibitions de Menil helped curate was a drawing show, and that she collected drawings. But the MDI was born about a decade after she died, partly to execute a massive Jasper Johns catalogue raisonne that will finally publish later this month.
Rabinow said the de Menils knew their campus would evolve and needed to be open to change. “It was intended to be alive, and they needed to trust that whoever would steward its future would continue to augment the vision,” she said.
With the MDI and all around it, that vision could not be better preserved.