The New York Times-20080124-Architect-s Next Prize- Michigan Museum

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Architect's Next Prize: Michigan Museum

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A Baghdad-born, London-based architect might not be the most obvious candidate for a commission in the heart of Middle America. But Zaha Hadid, who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004, has been chosen to design the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Ms. Hadid, known for bold, unconventional forms, was selected last week in a competition that began in June, when the Broads gave $26 million toward the $40 million museum, which will house modern and contemporary art. The other finalists were Morphosis of Santa Monica, Calif.; Coop Himmelb(l)au of Vienna and Los Angeles; Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects of New York; and Randall Stout Architects of Los Angeles.

She came up with the most innovative design, said Eli Broad, a financier, art collector and philanthropist who earned his undergraduate degree at Michigan State. It will get people talking and wanting to visit.

The museum, which is expected to open in 2010, will be Ms. Hadid's first university building and only her second project in the United States, after the 2003 Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati.

Lou Anna K. Simon, the president of Michigan State, said the university wanted to symbolize our trajectory into the future, because of the nature of the architecture and the architect we selected.

Mr. Broad is known as a challenging client, with strong opinions and a reputation for hands-on involvement with architects, including Frank Gehry on the Grand Avenue Project in Los Angeles and Renzo Piano on the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which opens next month at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In an interview in New York last week Ms. Hadid, 57, said that so far she had had easy relations with Mr. Broad. He and Edythe were charming, supportive and very enthusiastic, she said.

The university said that $18.5 million of Mr. Broad's contribution would go toward the museum building, and that the remainder would be used for acquisitions and an endowment. The university has raised about $30 million of its own for the project.

The 41,000-square-foot building -- at the corner of Grand River Avenue and Farm Lane at the Collingwood Campus entrance -- is horizontal in form and oriented on an east-west axis.

We really wanted the museum to be a crossroads -- between the city and the campus, and between the various facilities of M.S.U., Ms. Hadid said, explaining that her design weaves together the patterns in the existing urban fabric with the site's circulation routes and visual pathways.

The museum -- three levels including the basement -- will be constructed of steel and concrete with an aluminum and glass exterior. It is designed to appear emerging out of the landscape, with an outdoor sculpture garden to the east.

The gallery space is very compact, Ms. Hadid said, with each room forming a single exhibition area. Natural light will filter in through a louver system, part of the building's exterior.

The museum will be the new home of the university's art collection, which is currently housed on campus in the Kresge Art Center. The center, part of the university's College of Arts and Letters, will continue to hold the art and art history department and provide classroom, studio and exhibition spaces.

We wanted to think about the architecture of the museum as an inhabited sculpture, Dr. Simon said. We wanted the museum to be a great work of art that would house great works of art.

The museum's more than 18,000 square feet of exhibition space will be devoted to new media, photography, works on paper and the permanent collection in addition to modern and contemporary works. The building will also include a black-box theater, an education center, offices, a gift shop and a cafe.

Mr. Broad said that he expected to lend works from his own collection for exhibition in the new museum. (He announced earlier this month that he would not donate his contemporary art to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where much of it is on view, but instead would lend pieces to many museums.)

The Michigan building is more angular than some of Ms. Hadid's recent projects, which include the steel swoosh of the 2002 Bergisel Ski Jump; the soaring Nordpark Cable Railway Stations, completed last month in Innsbruck, Austria; the boomerang-shaped BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany; and a slithering performing arts center in Abu Dhabi that she has described as a system of entwined branches with four concert halls trapped inside them like fruit.

Reviewing the architect's first major retrospective in the United States, Zaha Hadid: 30 Years in Architecture at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2006, Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote in The New York Times, Ms. Hadid is finally getting commissions worthy of her talent, except in New York of course. (She came close. The art dealer Kenny Schachter hired Ms. Hadid in 2004 to design a fin-shaped building on Charles Street in the West Village, but he later sold the property.)

Since winning the Pritzker -- architecture's highest honor -- Ms. Hadid has more than doubled the size of her firm, to 250 people. She teaches regularly at the Yale School of Architecture and lately has been busy with commissions throughout the Middle East, Europe and Asia. But she said she looked forward to working in Michigan.

I would like to do more work in America, Ms. Hadid said. So I have to come a lot more often.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: Zaha Hadid (pg. E1); A rendering of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, to open in 2010 at Michigan State University in East Lansing. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS)(pg. E5)