In late 2015, I was visiting some friends in Richmond, Virginia. I remember it being cold, and I recall thinking how incredible it was that a place could go from being so hot to so bitter cold and back again, and how all my memories of Richmond seemed like different cities depending on the season. Being architects, we decided to bundle up and go for a walk to look at buildings, and to see the new project everyone was talking about.
Arriving at the crossroads of West Broad and North Belvidere, a site which marked a conspicuously frayed edge of Virginia Commonwealth University, we witnessed with genuine curiosity an unusually fluid framework standing in stark contrast to its masonry surroundings. Even in that early phase of construction, as a skeletal diagram of itself, the icon that would become a new public anchor of the university was already offering a glimpse of civic grandeur unlike anything in the city. Without its cladding, the raw iron bones seemed proudly poised for some greater purpose. On display was a choreography of new, challenging proportions, at odds with traditional construction. The intuition of design made manifest with ingenuity in assembly. With a soaring rhythm of steel members twisting like a flying beam in stop-motion, the sophisticated structural gestures of the building signaled the arrival of a catalyst of contemporary culture on the national stage—to many Richmonders, a long overdue prerequisite in a small city finally becoming more recognized for its innovation in art and design.
Now, four months in, and just at the close of its inaugural show, Declaration, the completed Institute for Contemporary Art seems much less like a risk. It feels natural—a foundational platform for the neighborhoods it bridges. In a climate of sensitivity to the perils of gentrification and private funding, the curators’ statement for the exhibition is sensitively framed as a question to its neighbors: “What can the ICA contribute to its context?” Having recently become a resident of the city myself, I’ve come to appreciate that gesture of collaboration. Across the intersection to the east, the vibrant Jackson Ward community continues its long tradition as a bastion of African American heritage and entrepreneurship, blossoming again in recent years with a thriving mix of small business owners and a young creative class that have defined the new Arts District. In that context of local enterprise, what could a gleaming $41 million institutional building say with its first impression?
As bold a statement as the building makes, the design for the museum by Steven Holl (NA 2012) creates space to let the artists inside speak for themselves—and speak simultaneously. With the ICA sitting as a new lantern of connectivity on what was once the deep racial and socioeconomic divide that is Broad Street, the first exhibited works reinforce the theme of inclusivity, too. Among the many new pieces commissioned for the show, Detroit artist Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.’s collective printmaking project, Passin’ on to others, was produced in collaboration with barbershops and salons around Richmond. Local phrases, exclamations, and aphorisms from business patrons and stylists were passed on to Kennedy Jr. to be displayed as graphic typeset posters greeting visitors in the first level gallery. It’s a triumphant catalog of expression. In the same room, Betty Tompkins’s piece WOMEN Words solicited input from around the world for descriptions of women, resulting in a charged collection of word paintings that hits hard as both triggering and empowering. Coming full circle, the grand narrative of the museum itself has inspired works of diversity. In his piece entitled whether there was a bell or whether I knocked, sound installation artist Stephen Vitiello used a cavernous corner of the upstairs gallery as an instrument to randomly combine the recordings of 18 voices (from his international colleagues to Richmond youth) narrating “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the short story by Jorge Luis Borges which inspired Steven Holl’s design for the museum.
In that story, the ideas of chance, choice, and fate come into question. Borges writes of a man who learns that a series of fragmented narratives and a mythical inhabitable space could be one in the same—that a built work (a labyrinth) could be a container of simultaneous storylines and parallel lives. With such an abstract concept, it seems difficult to imagine realizing such an interconnected place. Leave it to Steven Holl to capture the phenomenon of multiple experiences, envisioning multifaceted volumes to allow inhabitants to participate in parallel.
Designs from the desk of the renowned architect are often encapsulated in a small conceptual watercolor painting, a sketch that brings out emotional and experiential references tied to memory and place. The ICA being no different, the diagram consists of a two-part scheme: a forward facing faceted volume which begins to peel away in torsion, and a collection of long stacked masses emanating from it in skewed directions—a branching cue from Borges, interpreted as “forking time.” At the intersection of the volumes, the torqued corner volumes slip up into a thin vertical wall, a threshold that Holl calls “the plane of the present.” With such a clear line in the sand, the design begs the questions: “Where are we right now?” and “What stems from this moment?” In a city loaded with racial tensions dating back to its regime as the capital of the Confederacy, one can’t help but draw parallels to this optimistic positioning of the building as a launching point between turbulent past and radiant future.
On that first visit of mine, the museum’s structure hinted at dynamic motion. But the real proof of the building’s trajectory is the way inhabitants pass through it. The sheltering, torqueing, and scattering moves all challenge the notion of a static body—the building dares you to move with it. Holl’s writings on architecture often discuss the infinitely varied experience of a place from different perspectives, the phenomenon of parallax. The ICA seems like an experiment in that idea: that the speed at which we experience architecture is an intangible aspect of design that’s often only discovered or validated after a work is made present on its site. Fully clad in large-format zinc panels and frosted glass, the scale of the building becomes unfamiliar—a disorienting trait that acts to homogenize the disparate forms into a monolith. In motion, the project invites a gaze up at its amorphous shapes, and a roving eye animates its asymptotic gestures. Roof edges contort into taut walls, and the silhouettes of cantilevered galleries fuse in and out of a dusk silhouette.
In the gathering evening, the project begins to glow from multiple vantage points. By car, the distant site beckons with the signature soft warmth that Holl’s studio has perfected with such projects as the Cité de l’Océan et du Surf in Biarritz, France; the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, and Maggie’s Centre Barts in London. At speed, the museum’s translucent proportions morph and stack on themselves as you drive by. On foot or bicycle, as many VCU students experience it, the slower pace seems to allow for the most intuitive reading of the building’s beguiling contours. You can slow down, and stop, moving back and forth as if to test your depth perception.
One of the most subtle moments, though, is a stationary transformation seen at any angle, but most impactful at the edge of the reflecting pool in the garden ceremoniously known as the “Thinking Field.” At an almost imperceptibly slow rate to match the darkening sky, façades which seemed solid in the height of the day become gradually lit as individual beacons of contemporary thought, the outstretched illuminated monitors at the leading edges of forking time. Fissures at the intersecting façades reveal themselves as shards of light, casting welcoming pools onto the bluestone plaza. It’s a poetic masterstroke that brings a sense of habitation to that corner, if only in the sense that the impact of those works inside carry on after dark.
The building leaves you in appreciation of its multitudes. It is contradictory—arbitrary at times—but embracing of chance and the fateful alignment of ideas. With its myriad readings, ways to approach, and free admission, the barrier for entry is low considering the high caliber of experience. And the institution remains open to interpretation. A takeaway worksheet for visitors seemed to get it right: it invited a self-guided scavenger hunt to find as many different angles and unique corners of the building as possible. And why not? Maybe sometimes successful architecture doesn’t need a particular form, but a character that changes with the user. Hopefully Richmond continues to embrace this spirit of openness, inclusivity, and elevation, and, like Holl’s creation for the city, the ideas branch with time.
Steven Holl’s Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University opened to the public on April 21, 2018.
Ryan Patterson is a Virginia-based architectural designer, photographer, and filmmaker. Working across a range of cinematic and constructed works, his lens on surrounding phenomena is a continual search for site-specific meaning and human connection to places. Patterson lives and works in Richmond.
