The Wall Street Journal-20080206-Found -- and Lost -- in Translation

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Found -- and Lost -- in Translation

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It is conventional wisdom that some good wines don't travel well and that much about a specific art or culture gets lost in translation, so what happens to architecture when it goes global? Does sheer size and superstar style override context and culture? The surreal towers rising from the deserts of Abu Dhabi and Dubai owe no debt to the terroir, and Beijing's new construction conveys nothing local. Nor is it supposed to. This is helicopter architecture, dropped down anywhere, delivering extreme, iconic images totally detached from place or past, dedicated to billion-dollar deals and million-dollar condos. Its purpose is to knock your socks off.

To question the epidemic of torqued and tortured towers lurching toward new height records or take issue with the deathless cliche that this is progress and therefore a good thing is seen as an uncool act of Luddite incomprehension. Well, I question it -- or rather I question its unquestioning acceptance. Those mad scientists of architecture, the structural engineers, can make anything stand up. But just because you can build it doesn't mean you should. The records being set are for tasteless techno-kitsch.

There is another kind of global architecture with less impact on the skyline and more importance to the art of building -- the international work of talented architects transferring their ideas from one culture to another. A lot can happen in the translation. What can be built routinely in one country may present insurmountable problems and daunting costs in another; program and personnel changes, cultural clashes, even the way the building's design is understood and used, can lead to seriously compromised results.

There is still, for example, the vexing matter of how Yoshio Taniguchi's precisely scaled, elegantly sensuous, subtly spiritual museums in Japan became the scaleless, affectless and spiritless new Museum of Modern Art. Any analysis of what went wrong must go beyond details lost in the construction to the museum's move from the art of our time -- the title of a defining early show by its founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr. -- to the art of the deal and the high- end world of real-estate transactions and development schemes, including the selection of celebrity superstar Jean Nouvel for a shock-and-awe skyscraper addition that endorses overzoning, overdesign and overexpansion at the cost of whatever is left of the museum's original character, mission and meaning.

Two new buildings by equally celebrated Japanese architects, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the firm SANAA (a name derived from the initials of Sejima and Nishizawa Associated Architects), tell a different story. The just-opened New Museum of Contemporary Art on New York's Bowery and the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio, completed in 2006, are the firm's first structures in this country.

Sejima and Nishizawa's work in Japan is a model of serene, delicate perfection, of meticulous detailing and exacting execution. Their characteristic minimalist precision could not be replicated for the New Museum, which had a severely restricted budget, nor did it seem an appropriate response to its temporal, changing and often edgy programs. The Toledo Glass Pavilion, constructed first, was designed in the architects' reductionist style and required costly craft and technology. Lessons learned there about the problems involved were apparently applied in the later building.

In New York's overhyped, overheated art world, the New Museum has just about everything that has been lost to bigness, bureaucracy and glitz. A simple and rational design, it needs no specious novelty or trendy confrontation to affirm its avant-garde credentials. It reminds us of an art scene where innovation, optimism and delight once mattered more than money, and although that illusion can't last, the appeal of the museum's small scale and intimate spaces encourages a pleasurable personal engagement whether or not you like the art, which in the inaugural show seems to consist, not inappropriately for the Bowery, largely of colorful bundled rags.

A tiny lot, 71 feet wide and 112 feet deep, forces the building upward -- its spaces are piled vertically in seven stories of stacked, off-kilter boxes. The boxes are the galleries, and the offsets provide skylight strips for the exhibition spaces inside. A sophisticated system of trusses shifts each of the off-center loads to the supporting steel struction below. In addition to this distinctive shape (no trouble with taxi drivers), the exterior of painted extruded-aluminum panels has a screen of expanded metal mesh hung 3 inches in front of the outer wall, producing a soft, layered, almost magical silhouette that changes with the light and weather. At street level, a glass front wall sunk directly into the sidewalk stresses the accessibility of a public lobby with a small gift and book shop; a working loading dock is visible on the other side of the service core.

There are the inevitable imperfections of a stringent budget and common materials used in uncommon ways. Concrete gallery floors laid in a single inexpensive pour without expansion joints have already developed random cracks, and exposed steel treated with textured fireproofing to suggest abstract sculpture stretches credulity. None of this matters; superperfectionism seems stale and out of date.

The Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum raises glass architecture to a whole new level. Curved glass walls composed of 13-foot-high panels fitted into floor and ceiling grooves create an effect of pristine transparency. Invisible supports and hidden mechanical services further the illusion. The exterior wall has two layers of glass with an insulating air pocket between; the sinuous inner wall forms the undulating interior spaces that contain the museum's superb glass collection and two hot shops with glass-blowing furnaces where glass artists work. The pure white glass for this ethereal structure was shipped to China for fabrication, a process in which it is cut and shaped to fit the building's unusual configurations, and returned to Toledo for erection.

Then why is the experience of this building disappointing? Something has clearly happened somewhere in the translation. Apparently as costs rose, and directors changed partway through the process, compromises were made. Interior hangings that were to be made by the gifted Dutch fabric designer Petra Blaise were scrapped for what look like shower curtains, or the depressing hangings between hospital beds, installed on the outside of the building and drawn against the light. They are the ultimate illusion breakers. Instead of display cases designed by the architects, as is customary in a building like this, the installation was done by an outside firm, one would assume as another cost-cutting measure. The standard casework is a bruising aesthetic disconnect. The spectacular objects on display barely disguise a pervasive insensitivity.

What was lost here can be found in a small museum in Japan, where a long, low structure set lightly against a wooded hill stands opposite Kazuyo Sejima's ancestral family home, now a national landmark. The objects of art and history taken from the house are displayed in glass cases that echo the museum's crystalline simplicity. A section of a clear glass wall has a row of small, round, cushioned stools facing a view of the old wooden house, inviting contemplation. A similar space for reflection exists in Toledo, with busy little X-shaped stools scattered about that suggest kiddy rest time rather than repose; it feels like an afterthought.

There were three immediate advantages in New York that contributed to the success of the New Museum: a client in tune with the architects' intentions throughout the process, the lessons of the flawed Toledo experience, and the traditional Japanese skill in building on tiny bits of land. There is a Sejima and Nishizawa house in Tokyo on a site so small that the miniature dwelling on its minuscule lot cantilevers upward to arrange itself miraculously on not much more than the landings around a central stair. This modest, artfully compressed verticality transfers well to the museum's Bowery site, where the solution seems equally miraculous. The setting of fast-eroding pot-and-pan stores, down-and-out humanity, rescue missions, hope, despair and grunge is a storied New York mix. Until pricey condos take over completely, the New Museum is a perfect fit.

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Ms. Huxtable is the Journal's architecture critic.