Glam architects chosen for Menil project

The Menil Collection has announced a surprising choice to design the Menil Drawing Institute, the first major building on the museum's campus since 1995.

Johnston Marklee, a young Los Angeles firm led by husband-and-wife team Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, is best known for projects that are drop-dead glamorous - and vastly different from the Menil Collection's famously serene main building, galleries and grounds.

Johnston Marklee's heart-stopping Hill House, for instance, seems to grow like a crystal from the side of a Pacific Palisades cliff. The firm's designs for the high-end Mameg + Maison Martin Margiela boutiques are the definition of Beverly Hills luxe. And Los Angeles' Helios House (designed in collaboration with Office dA) may be the world's most stunning gas station: a shiny, twisty silver canopy that's lit psychedelically at night.

The Menil Drawing Institute, Lee says, "will be very different from anything we've done before." The conceptual plan that the firm pitched to the Menil's selection committee emphasized the building's context - in particular, the unassuming scale of the little gray bungalows that make up most of the campus; and the beauty of the site's sprawling old live oaks.

After examining the proposed site and inventorying its existing trees, Johnston Marklee proposed to design a single-story, metal-roofed building defined chiefly by three oak-shaded courtyards. The trees would soften the light of the fierce Texas sun; and instead of entering the building directly from the top, through skylights, that dappled light would bounce in from the sides, through windows.

Josef Helfenstein, the Menil's director, emphasizes that the concept could still change radically. But he says he and the selection committee were impressed by the concept's adept control of light - a major challenge with drawings. Exposed to much light, they yellow and crumble; but conservators also need sunlight to do their best restoration work.

The courtyard plan also makes much of the way that visitors would enter the building. After coming in from the bright outdoors, people would move to progressively darker spaces: a gradual psychological shift, and also one that allows the eyes time to adjust.

The commission would be a coup for any architectural firm, but it's particularly significant for Johnston Marklee, a firm that's been critically praised but isn't yet well known by architecture fans. The Menil's short list included another up-and-coming firm - Mexico City's Tatiana Bilbao - and two that are internationally famous: SANAA, the Tokyo-based winner of the 2010 Pritzker, architure's top prize; and David Chipperfield Architects, which created the Menil's master plan and is known for designing high-profile cultural buildings such as Berlin's Neues Museum.

All four firms, Helfenstein says, made excellent presentations. But in the end, the selection committee voted unanimously for Johnston Marklee.

The startling selection echoes Dominique de Menil's choice of Renzo Piano to build the main museum. In the early 1980s, Piano was generally considered a young Turk, best known for throwing Paris into a tizzy with the Centre Georges Pompidou, which he designed with Richard Rogers. The enormous cultural center, with its bright colors and exposed plumbing ducts, stood in startling, jarring contrast to the rest of the old city. (Houston's George R. Brown Convention Center, an obvious descendant, looks far more at home among our shiny postmodern skyline.)

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Glam architects chosen for Menil project