Glassell School opens new factory of creativity
Museum District campus provides grand public space and shines fresh light on the Cullen Sculpture Garden
Houston’s potential to be a walkable city looks ripe near the corner of Montrose and Bissonnet Street, where the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston campus meets the leafy promenades of Main Street and Hermann Park.
That vision finally may be coming to fruition with the completion of the dramatic Glassell School of Art, the MFAH’s teaching institute and the first of two major new buildings driving a $450 million capital campaign to expand and better define the 14-acre campus.
Steven Holl Architects’ muscular structure, an engineered marvel of pre-formed concrete walls and angular opaque windows, opens to the public Sunday with free tours, art-making activities and live performances. As visitors will quickly discover, all the fuss isn’t just about a building, as distinctive as it is.
The Glassell School’s L-shaped form, with a sloped, wedge-like long side that leads to a roof terrace, also creates much-needed public open space and shines fresh light on the campus’ Cullen Sculpture Garden, a green masterpiece.
Architect Chris McVoy, Holl’s senior partner, explained why that’s important. “It’s not just another building,” he said. “It’s a transformation of your experience of going to
the museum. On a campus, the shape of the space the building makes is as important as the building itself. You’re shaping outdoor spaces.”
The building cradles the new plaza, while the sloped roof invites the public up to the roof ’s garden — essentially giving the campus two new public spaces, with parking underneath.
Visitors emerge from the subterranean garage into the plaza, where they encounter a cluster of Mexican sycamore trees, a water feature with dancing “jets” and monumental sculpture. The path to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, just across Bissonnet, takes them through the sculpture garden.
“That Noguchi garden is a total, magnificent work of art,” McVoy said. “When we saw this could be a campus expansion — not just two buildings — we also saw that the Noguchi garden, with its incredible, intimate spaces and curves and mounds, could be the hinge that makes it all happen.”
Anish Kapoor’s recently acquired, mirror-like stainless steel “Cloud Column” rises like a punctuation point near the entrance to the sculpture garden, while Eduardo Chillida’s stocky granite “Song of Strength” offers a more purely physical reflection of the new building’s jagged shapes. The museum plans to add sculpture to the BBVA Compass Roof Garden in the future.
“This will take the school to a whole new level,” said MFAH board chair Rich Kinder. “When you look around the country, there’s the Art Institute of Chicago and the Savannah College of Art and Design and the Rhode Island School of Design. There’s no reason this can’t be comparable.”
Kinder and his wife, Nancy, announced Monday that they had donated a $25 million challenge grant to help the museum wrap up its capital campaign by June 2019. More than 90 percent of the funds have been raised, including an initial $50 million from the Kinders. Their name will adorn Holl’s other, elaborate new exhibition building under construction next to the Glassell.
Kinder said he wanted to support “free access” public space around the museum, which charges admission to its exhibition buildings except on Thursdays and Monday holidays.
Tuesday afternoon, sisters Andrea and Anabelle Ramon, college students from Dallas, discovered the sculpture garden during their first visit to the Museum District.
“We just wanted to see art, and it was free,” said Andrea, 23. “It’s awesome, just seeing different types of sculptures.”
They had also ventured into the museum’s main buildings, but didn’t stay because they found it too pricey.
Now, artwork at the Glassell, where there’s also a grab-andgo cafe, can also be viewed for free.
World-class facility
Joseph Havel, who has directed the Glassell School since 1987, looked like he was walking on air Tuesday morning as he admired it all.
Through two intense years of construction, Havel had been back and forth with McVoy, debating every detail, to ensure that the design of the 93,000square foot building served his students, faculty and Core Program residents.
The architects wanted to make a bold statement. Havel wanted a building that was practical and didn’t overwhelm the creativity of those inside. Finally, he felt they had achieved all that, and more.
“The building will represent something about Houston,” he said. “We really hit it. It’s not just world class in appearance; it’s world class in ideas.”
Havel, his staff and the museum’s board began laying the groundwork to expand the Glassell a decade before Holl’s team wowed the museum’s board. They had discussed simply adding floors to the old building or tucking new classrooms into a parking garage.
The new building feels remarkably human-scaled and tactile inside, although it’s more than twice the size of the structure it replaced. “The other building was ahead of its time, and this is even more so, like 2.0,” said Alfred Glassell III. “This is the future of these schools.”
His father, Alfred Glassell Jr., led the charge to build the school’s first purpose-built facility. Although the museum has offered art education almost since its inception in 1924, the much-loved, warehouse-inspired building by Houston architects Eugene Aubry and R. Nolen Willis opened in 1979. Glazed glass blocks saved from the facade now form a low wall that divides the plaza and sculpture garden — a nice gesture to the past that also helps maintain the integrity of Noguchi’s contemplative bower.
The Glassell enrolls about 8,500 students annually. Most are the children in junior school programs. About 1,200 adults participate each semester in rigorous classes with a certificate program, including 60-90 college students from the University of St. Thomas. Enrollment for the main school’s fall semester is already up by 45 percent, Havel said.
The school’s classrooms are outfitted with new technology for courses in print-making, digital art, jewelry, photography, animation, textile work and ceramics, as well as traditional drawing, painting and sculpture. A new sculpture yard out back more than doubles the school’s previous space for kilns and welding.
The 12 or so elite residents of the Core Program, emerging professionals who come for two years of intense work and career development, will have most of the top floor to themselves, with spacious private studios and their own kitchen, lounge and seminar room.
Havel has already been swamped with congratulatory emails from the global contemporary art community. The new building gives the Glassell an iconic signature, he said. “With a world-class facility and a remarkable program, we’ll be a marker for contemporary thinking.”
Art made in the building will be exhibited in a spacious second floor gallery, and Havel plans to erect temporary walls next year to define another gallery in the entry lobby.
He loves the way the central entry “forum” will encourage the public and artists to mix. “It’s almost like this whirling generator of engagements and culture right in the middle, then it kind of stretches out into quiet spaces on either end,” he said. “Just form-wise, I love that.”
More to come
During a cocktail party for 500 people on Tuesday, members of Houston’s art community were impressed by the Glassell’s new form.
“It’s amazing,” said art dealer Sonja Roesch, who had settled in near the base of the inside entry forum to eat after touring the building’s three floors.
From that vantage point, she could see into the auditorium; through the building’s glass elbow onto the plaza; toward the lobby and cafe; and upward, through the zig-zagging metal stairwells and geometric marvel of open floors that form jagged triangles up to a huge skylight.
The grand entry forum essentially creates an indoor amphitheater, with risers deep enough for sitting. They’re punctuated by several large concrete boxes that architect McVoy said are “a provocation” to artists who will use the building — and sturdy enough for whatever sculpture or space interventions they might dream up there.
Outside, a few people trekked up the gentle steps of the sloping roof to peer across treetops toward downtown, Hermann Park and the rest of the museum’s campus, where a new art conservation building by Lake|Flato is almost finished above the Fannin garage. The base of the slope has wooden amphitheater seats, anticipating outdoor performances and film screenings.
Construction is still underway on the subterranean “education plaza” where buses and cars will deliver students. The roof garden has a pergola that’s still awaiting its shade-cover of wisteria. With summer’s heat coming on, the terrace can be hot, making the splashing of the ground-level fountains sound mighty inviting.
Havel can’t wait to see the new “factory for creativity” full of students, and messy.
He was sitting in the auditorium, where the walls are narrow slats of hand-crafted, woodform concrete, and the floors and ceiling have the warm, organic appeal of wood slats and cork.
“I just love looking at this wall with its stains and its holes,” he said. “For an art school, this is just what you want. You want this sense that things are still being made and produced all the time. The accidents. If you were in a museum, you’d want those things fixed. But an art school is about process, about activity. This is about, here’s a building — what are you going to do in it? What’s culture going to be? You want a building that says, ‘Let’s roll up our sleeves and do it. We’re working and thinking; this is what we do.’ ”