Space Program a Fine Addition to Gallery

NEWPORT BEACH —  Two decades ago, the Newport Harbor Art Museum proudly unveiled a stark new concrete building in Newport Center--the museum’s first home of its own after 15 years in rented spaces.

On Saturday, the building will be the focus of another public opening, this one celebrating a $1.8-million expansion and renovation that more than doubles the amount of gallery space.

Now known as the Orange County Museum of Art--the result of last year’s bitterly disputed merger between Newport Harbor and the Laguna Art Museum--the facility is to be the museum’s flagship venue, along with the original Laguna Beach museum and a satellite gallery in South Coast Plaza.

The expansion of the Newport Beach site--announced two years before merger plans began to take concrete shape--was intended to solve two long-standing problems: shortage of space to exhibit the museum’s own holdings concurrently with a special exhibition and long periods when the entire museum had to be closed while exhibitions were installed or dismantled.

The current project is a considerably scaled-down alternative to a $30-million expansion announced in 1987 that would have put the museum in an entirely new building to be designed by internationally renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano. It would have occupied a 10 1/2-acre site along Pacific Coast Highway donated by the Irvine Co.

A fatal combination of rising costs and trustee opposition to Piano’s design led to his dismissal from the project in 1990. In early 1992, stymied by the lingering economic slump, the museum’s trustees voted to postpone the campaign indefinitely, which also forced them to cede their claim on the Irvine Co. land.

Besides increased gallery space, which now totals 15,800 square feet, the renovated building includes expanded public space and a plethora of crucial structural updates. It is the repository of the museums’ combined 6,500-piece collection of California art dating from the 19th century to the present.

In place of the old, unstructured gallery space that had to be partitioned with temporary walls for exhibitions, the building now has five discrete galleries for temporary exhibitions and six more that are expected primarily to house work from the permanent collection.

Benjamin D. Kracauer of Archimuse, the New York-based museum architecture firm that designed the plan, describes the new, classically proportioned galleries as “neutral and flexible rooms.”

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A new glass-walled, steel-columned pavilion at the rear of the lobby turns the formerly cramped area into a spacious public meeting place and an extension of the outdoor sculpture garden. The lobby, known as the Irvine Gallery, now serves as the museum’s central “spine,” from which galleries open out on both sides.

To the left--past the free-standing museum store, no longer walled off from the lobby--are three modestly sized galleries for glass and ceramics objects, works on paper and individual large-scale installations.

To the right are the 11 large galleries, with 15-foot ceilings, for the permanent collection and special exhibitions. They are separated by a small “entrance gallery” with three pairs of glass doors, allowing visitors to skip a sequence of galleries or orient themselves by reading text panels about a show they’re about to see.

Kracauer says the interaction between the pavilion and the garden is meant to evoke features of the so-called Case Study houses in California. These postwar landmarks of modernist design emphasized the presence of light and the integration of indoor and outdoor spaces.

Light entering the museum through the 60-foot-tall heat-absorbing and glare-reducing glass wall facing the sculpture garden makes “a pleasant contrast with the silver artificial light of the galleries,” Kracauer says.

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The renovation, announced in September 1993, cost about $1.8 million. An additional $1.3 million was raised for the museum’s endowment fund.

Though the remodel lacks the high profile of a brand-new building designed by a famous architect, it does provide nearly the same amount of gallery space as in Piano’s plan. Additionally, the percentage of square footage devoted to gallery space (as opposed to other other building functions) is about twice as much in the remodel.

Key components of the expansion were the result of a series of staff and trustee workshops held by Archimuse, whose projects include the Equitable Gallery in New York, the Museum of Yachting in Newport, R.I., and the Knoxville (Tenn.) Museum of Art.

Kracauer’s partner, Charles B. Froom, calls the much-maligned original tilt-up structure “a good building with good bones . . . essentially a loft with tall ceilings, well-spaced columns and solid construction.

“Over the years it got turned into a banal building, because the outside was obscured by [vegetation] and because of the use of space within,” Froom said. “Part of our job was to refresh all of that.”

Though the facade has not been changed, ivy, nearby shrubbery and lettering spelling out the museum’s name were removed to emphasize the structure’s low-slung silhouette and the crisp lines of the fluted concrete. This textural interest continues inside, where a layer of Sheetrock was pulled off the lobby walls revealing more of the concrete.

Other aspects of the remodel include seismic upgrading, new electrical and air-conditioning systems and a new roof. The museum’s constant battle with leaks after heavy rainfall had caused the postponement of the current exhibition, “Joe Goode” (through April 13), a large group of atmospheric paintings by a major contemporary Los Angeles artist that was originally scheduled to open in September 1995.

The project also involved carving two art studios and a classroom out of office space in the former Newport Beach Public Library next door--now known as the Museum Education Center--which also has a new 108-seat auditorium and a vastly enlarged collection storage area. This building, vacated when the library moved into new quarters on Avocado Avenue in 1994, was donated to the museum by the Irvine Co. Administrative offices have been moved from the museum to the library building.

Phase 2 of the project, still unscheduled, calls for the two buildings to be joined by a glass structure running along the front of the museum, a larger auditorium on the eastern side of the museum and a services wing on what is now part of the parking lot.

* A community open house will be held Saturday at the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. There will be art-making workshops and demonstrations, artist videos and refreshments. In the galleries: works from the permanent collection and “Joe Goode,” paintings by a leading contemporary Southern California artist. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Free. (714) 759-1122.