Newsday du lieu suivant : New York, New York • 106

MUSEUM WEST WING MESHES PAST INNOVATION Transformed Galleries BROOKLYN MUSEUM'S WEST WING RENOVATION The fruit of seven traumatic years of labor is as much about the future as itself The Brooklyn Museum Eastern Parkway By Amei Wallach STAFF WRITER Euphoria is a pale word to describe happening in the corridors of the Brooklyn Museum right now After nearly eight years of high hopes hard work financial disappointments and dashed ambitions the museum opens 5ts completed west wing today transformed for the first time in 60 years from offices and storage into serenely sophisticated galleries by the design team of Arata Isozaki Associates and James Stewart Polshek Partners By all reports the collaboration has on several occasions reached the teeth-clenching stage between Polshek the former Columbia School of Architecture dean best known for his Carnegie Hall renovation and Isozaki the photogenic Japanese designer best known in this country for his Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles and his Walt Disney World office complex in Florida But that tension is not in the least apparent in these galleries which mesh respect for the past with an idealistic fervor for the lastest in high-tech innovation In many respects despite its high finish the west wing is emphatically a work in progress It serves as an object lesson in what the museum could become if the world were different if the subways ran with more reliability if traffic on Flatbush Avenue always jammed if Manhattan glamor and money find it so difficult cross the East River if only there were a visual arts way to generate the Brooklyn Academy of cutting edge vivacity Nowaday Bruor Gilbert Architect Arata Isozaki is among collaborators on the newly designed west wing of the Brooklyn Museum open today PART 2 NY new y0HK newsqay Friday December 3 Symbolically it puts The Brooklyn right back where it was in 1887 when the west wing stood alone the first structure completed in the McKim Mead White plan for the grandly classical museum It is because McKim Mead plan was never completely realized that it seemed necessary in 1986 to hold a competition for the best architectural master plan that could make sense of what The Brooklyn already had More than 100 international architects were interested The Isozaki Polshek team won with a plan that The master plan of the renovations for the Brooklyn Museum showing a longitudinal north-south section view After nearly eight years the museum opens its completed west wing today transformed for the first time in 60 years hind is a perfect square of a room with a pyramided ceiling almost impossible to make art look good in a square room but Leon Polk Smith's minimal meditations in shaped painting actually make sense there In the fourth floor temporary exhibition galleries through Feb 27 is the Arata Isozaki retrospective which has been touring the country and Japan for the past two years Isozaki himself designed its Brooklyn incarnation weeding out all photographs of finished projects so that what we have here are absolutely beautiful wood models and working drawings and prints The emphasis is on the handmade and the process of creation as though to demonstrate to the Brooklyn how it can be done Isozaki was 14 when the atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki is my very strong he said this week as he toured the exhibition in crumpled black tie bv his friend the designer Issey Miyake In many ways his architecture has been about how you build on the rubble to develop from ruins how to reorganize and create as he said The Brooklyn is hardly in ruins but it has its shabby and chronically depressed side And the new west wing simply serves to point that up Just as a new paint job can make last year's curtains look dreary the light-splashed new techno-galleries point out the shabbiness around them without making the mjor statement necessary at the core The galleries are only going to work in the long run if they are indeed a part of the pro- was off center and ironic that juxtaposed architectural forms and soaring spaces and was topped with a nuclear-age tower to echo the classical domes already in place Even then it seemed unlikely that a $250 million master plan could survive in Brooklyn And then of course the economy crashed And the $31 million from the city with a great deal of help from friends like Gerald and Iris Cantor Marty and Robert Rubin and Brooke Astor was just about enough to build an auditorium and rennovate the west wing The auditorium which opened two years ago is clearly brilliant jewel of the restoration process in part because it is self-contained In Japan Isozaki is often attacked as too Western for the witty way in which he borrows Western forms from classical and modernist architecture But his aesthetics are Japanese his way of wresting impossible harmonies out of asymmetries and odd juxtapositions And his touch is apparent in the 450-seat auditorium with its complexly undulating ceiling its paneled walls like shoji screens The team chose not to touch the actual original shape of the west wing galleries meaning that The Brooklyn is stuck with finding ways to mount contemporary art on the fifth floor Egyptian on the third and special exhibitions on the fourth in spaces that are difficult to work with at best You enter high glass-and-metal gridded doors to a long vaulted gallery with blond wood floors grey granite kick board and mechanicals above After the long gallery comes a space actually welcoming to art de cess the creative spark that makes tomorrow happen aL-l spite the fact that it retains its original 19th Century staircase and be- Sid A 'AiuBrMsfFaciacrta -i (00 (-51 mrtu ahimtim.