The ‘New Brooks’: Museum unveils designs
Drawings promise a spectacular structure
The doors to the new museum likely won’t open until 2026, but officials this week launched a major push to introduce not just the city but the world to what some call the “Brooks on the Bluff” — the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, relocated after close to 110 years from the woodsy heart of Overton Park to a windswept perch on the Mississippi River.
“World-class.” “Iconic.” “Transformative.” Those are some of the words architects, supporters and city officials used this week to describe a project intended to have both curb appeal — hugging the sidewalk, the museum’s restaurant, courtyard, shop and lobby will be accessible from Front Street — and international allure: Designs for the museum are by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, which in 2001 was awarded architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the Pritzker Prize.
“It is critically important that we create a riverfront that reflects the community as a whole and showcases Memphis to the world,” Mayor Jim Strickland said. “We believe the time is right for this bold and ambitious project.”
Photorealistic computer-rendered drawings that go on display this weekend at the Brooks promise a spectacular structure that will fill the space
between Front and Riverside Drive and Monroe and Union that is now occupied by a fire station and a parking garage.
The idea of the display of drawings — which will be updated over the next few years, until the Overton Park museum closes and the Downtown museum opens — is “to really hammer home that this is real, this is happening,” said Jeff Rhodin, Brooks director of marketing and communications.
What will the new museum look like?
As shown in the drawings, the museum proper is like a rectangular doughnut, with a large wood-clad courtyard for a hole. The art galleries — which would dwarf the current museum’s gallery space by 9,000 square feet — flow continuously through the main floor of the rectangle in a loop. This simple plan avoids the maze-like branching and hierarchical categorizations (What goes in the main lobby? What goes in the basement?) of traditional art museums. This will encourage displays that “dissolve the usual dividing lines between mediums and eras,” according to a Brooks press release that also promises an increasing emphasis on contemporary African American art and regional art.
The parking garage is subterranean (the site changes in elevation by about 60 feet from Front to Riverside, giving designers room for parking spaces, art loading docks and other needs). Above the main lobby is a 175-seat theater with a wall-sized window that overlooks the courtyard. The outer surface of the window can function as a movie screen for outdoor events.
The depictions of people in the renderings add a hopeful element. The drawings show the museum’s free-admission spaces — the courtyard, the café, a rooftop terrace, a back view of the Mississippi River — full of diverse groups of visitors, attracted by food and coffee and the view, even on days when they don’t have time to see the art.
Most of the front of the building is transparent glass, to let passers-by see the activity within — and to encourage them to enter and become part of that activity.
“This building is about Memphis,” said Todd Walker of archimania, the Memphis firm that is collaborating with Herzog on the project. “What the building is trying to say is, ‘Come in and check us out, and see what we’re about.’”
Walker, 58, said the building’s materials extend its Memphis message: Much of the museum will be made of wood, a logical choice for a city once known as “the Hardwood Capital of the World.”
“We’ve aimed to design a welcoming civic landmark that upon approach explains itself visually and from the inside reminds the visitor where he or she is in relation to a legendary river and an historic city,” said Jacques Herzog, co-founder of Herzog & de Meuron, in a statement. “The result will be a museum that’s both in Memphis and of Memphis, a landmark that couldn’t be anywhere else.”
The road to ‘The New Brooks’
Announced in 2017 by Brooks Executive Director Emily Ballew Neff (who left the museum this year), the ambitious plan to construct a riverfront museum was greeted with excitement — supporters agreed the Brooks had outgrown its cramped and haphazardly expanded original Beaux-arts structure — but also skepticism.
Two years later, museum officials gave the project instant credibility when they announced that the Basel, Switzerland-based Herzog & de Meuron — a firm with credits that include the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami and the Tate Modern in London — had been hired to design the new Brooks.
Meanwhile, archimania (whose credits include the Hattiloo Theatre and Ballet Memphis in Overton Square) became “architect of record” for the project, to handle such local duties as overseeing the work of some two dozen consultants — lighting firms, landscape architects, and so on.
Despite these prestige hires, doubts about the project’s certainty increased among museumgoers during the height of the pandemic, as shutdowns and other disruptions delayed work on the project, which in turns put an end to the public updates.
But Mark Resnick, 65, the Brooks CEO who became acting executive director after Neff’s departure, said the pandemic delays helped planners hone their designs. The preparation led to the recent “reveals” of the designs, via private events; media stories (”Will World-class Architecture Bring Civic Pride Back to Memphis?” asked the loaded headline in The New York Times); and the display of the architect’s drawings at the Brooks, in the museum’s Chandler Gallery.
Originally referred to as “Brooks on the Bluff” but now being branded as “The New Brooks,” the project is expected to cost about $100 million, Resnick said. More than $90 million has been collected so far from more than three dozen major donors, in a capital campaign with a goal of $150 million. The new building will have an estimated 112,976 square feet of space, which is close to 30,000 more than the current Brooks.
A ‘cultural anchor’
For city promoters and Downtown developers, the “New Brooks” can be what Resnick calls a “cultural anchor.” Said Strickland, “We hope to build a city to attract people who want to live here — particularly young people.” Brooks board Vice President Barbara Hyde said the new museum would be “transformative,” in the manner of such Memphis success stories as Crosstown, Autozone Park and the National Civil Rights Museum.
A Brooks press release touts the relocated museum as “the keystone of an ambitious six-mile-long redevelopment of the Memphis riverfront that is now underway,” under the aegis of the Mayor’s Riverfront Task Force and the Memphis River Parks Partnership.
According to the press release, the riverfront project “reorients Memphis towards the river, inviting connection, and aims to contribute to the life of the city’s downtown” by way of “recreational paths and parks; a cultural corridor of museum, library, and law school; and a newly preserved historic cobblestone landing.”
In addition, the new museum should enable Memphis to attract the major exhibitions and donations that typically bypass the city, which in turn will help attract more than the 80,000 or so visitors who came to the Brooks annually during the PRE-COVID-19 era.
Said Resnick, “When you have great museum facilities, that tends to magnetize collection growth through donations and otherwise. People who have built magnificent collections and want to put them in the public realm, it’s very competitive out there, and if you don’t have a world-class facility to present them in, it’s very difficult.”
Walker said architects are designing the building with an eye to a future far beyond its opening in a few years. He said the museum will put Memphis on “the world stage.”
“It can be a real landmark right now, but can you imagine what it will be 50 or 100 years from now? We shouldn’t overlook the fact that at some point this will be a historic building, an iconic building, a historic landmark in our city.”