Architects' zeal for detail matched founder's

When the letter arrived in 2007 inviting Tod Williams and Billie Tsien to enter a select competition to design a new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the husband-and-wife architectural team were momentarily stumped. Yes, they were well known among the cognoscenti, who admired their artisanal devotion to their projects. Yes, their new Folk Art Museum in Manhattan had just opened to rave reviews, raising their profile. And, yes, they had just made a good impression in Philadelphia with their elegant design for a small engineering building at the University of Pennsylvania.

The problem was that Williams and Tsien had never visited the Barnes Foundation and its fabulous art collection in suburban Merion.

Embarrassed by the lapse, the pair "hightailed it out there," recalled Williams, now 68. "I'd known about it since I was at college" at Princeton University, he admitted, but "it always seemed like a hassle to get to." He chided himself for his "intellectual laziness" and quickly acquired a pair of tickets to visit the galleries.

The Barnes worked its usual magic on Williams and Tsien. At the entrance, Jacques Lipchitz's stylized ceramic bas-relief stopped them in their tracks. They were left dizzy by the sensory overload of Matisses and van Goghs and Renoirs. And yet the element that intrigued them most was the one that perplexes many visitors: the antique hinges and brass implements that founder Albert C. Barnes had salted among the paintings. Albert Barnes, they realized at once, was a kindred spirit.

Barnes was a modernist who was intensely drawn to handcrafted objects. So are Williams and Tsien, who practice what might be called slow architecture. They pursue just a few projects at a time, so they can pay close attention to the details, etching and scoring and hammering every surface of their buildings as if they were crafting fine leather bindings or handmade paper. While they don't apply ornamentation in the same way that a neoclassical architect might have, they enliven their simple forms with the strategic use of rich color, unusual glazes, metalwork, and lavishly textured masonry.

Bigger names were considered for the coveted Barnes commission, including Rafael Moneo and Thom Mayne, but the board decided instead to go with the pair's small New York-based firm. It wasn't just their sensibility about craft and detail; the board also felt "they understood the complexity of the project better than anyone else," Aileen Kennedy Roberts, who chairs the building committee, has said.

Without a doubt, the $150 million Barnes building, which opens to the public May 19, was more complex than most museum projects. It was no secret to Williams and Tsien that the foundation's decision to relocate to Philadelphia was a controversial one, decried in the world's art press as a desecration of Albert Barnes' unique vision.

Because of promises made during the lengthy court battle, designing the new Barnes was a herculean assignment fraught with character-testing obstacles. For starters, the architects were obliged to re-create the interiors of the Merion galleries, inch-for-inch, inside the new building. Not just room dimensions, either. All the paintings, metalwork, and other objects would be placed in precisely the same arrangement as they had been in Merion. The imposition of that single requirement would ripple through the rest of the design, and would profoundly dictate the look and function of the new building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

For most modern architects, the idea of replicating any building, even one as fine as Paul Cret's exquisitely proportioned 1920s gallery, is anathema. Some art-world figures were appalled to hear that Barnes' antiquated, salon-style hanging scheme would also be replicated, although others saw it as crucial to understanding the collector's intentions. Yet for the Barnes to succeed in its new location, the board understood that the building had to be a serious work of architecture, not a pastiche.

Many argued it was an assignment that simply couldn't be done well. "A faux Barnes is going to be a disaster, a compromise that will satisfy no one," said Lee Rosenbaum, who writes the CultureGrrl blog for the Arts Journal, and has been critical of the move.

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Architects' zeal for detail matched founder's