A Hillside View of a Minimalist's Nature

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. -- Tadao Ando's new Stone Hill Center sits on the side of a gentle hill in the Berkshires with grass licking its concrete edges like water lapping against the shores of a quiet pond. It is a building of simple elements, a box made from the Japanese architect's minimalist materials -- concrete, wood and glass -- bisected by a wall turned at a gentle angle. Ando once wrote that the best architecture creates a spiritual threshold between man and nature. In the Stone Hill Center -- part of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute -- he has achieved his ideal.

It is only Ando's third public building in the United States, and it may not even be his best. To understand Ando, the poet, you must go to the small gallery and office space he built for the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, where long internal vistas, subtle plays of light and a magical pool of water give one the impression of a cloister set in the midst of a city locked in the Dark Ages. But to understand Ando's mind, the deceptive simplicity and hidden complexity that makes the catch-all definition of minimalism seem vapid, you have to see the Stone Hill Center.

The new arts facility is part of a larger complex of buildings on the 144-acre campus of the Clark Institute, a research and educational organization with an important collection of 18th- and 19th-century European art. The $25 million Stone Hill Center is the first of two Ando buildings that will be part of a major architectural transformation of the Clark. Accessible up forested pathways, the new building is set apart from the institute's facility, which opened in 1955 and has been expanded since.

At 32,000 square feet, the Stone Hill addition is about the size of a large hotel ballroom. Only a portion of the top floor -- a gallery space and open terrace with magnificent views of the mountains -- is open to the public. A large art conservation center and offices occupy the lower level. The public can see conservators at work by descending from the upper to the lower terrace, where the conservators can be glimpsed behind large, north-facing glass windows.

On a midsummer's day, the sun played tricks with the building's exterior. The concrete walls, which retain sharp impressions of the wooden forms that made them, looked like they were covered in weathered planking, and the red, cedar-wood cladding, which is fading to gray, looked like concrete. Sky and trees were reflected in the windows, and a man took up residence, with his dog, on a covered patio-like space just outside the galleries. The building was doing exactly what Ando wanted it to do: blending in, coexisting quietly, contentedly, with its natural surroundings.

While minimalism may be the best description of Ando's work, it isn't adequate for this building, which is highly contrived. On closer inspection, the exposed steel beams that seem to support the building aren't structural -- the real supports have been hidden inside, away from exposure to the elements. And so an extra layer of aesthetic finesse has been added merely to make the building look like an industrial box. This isn't quite as big a no-no, in minimalism, as slapping up extraneous ornament, but it does show the degree to which Ando is after an effect, whether or not form follows function.

The angled wall that cuts through the building also has surprises. Opposite the large lower-level windows, a long rectangular hole has been cut in the slab-like wall to reveal views of the Berkshires. Its shape recalls that of a widescreen television, as if nature is a show, to be seen through the magic of architecture rather than directly, without intervention or framing.

Since the days of Plato, images have suffered from a stigma, the Socratic suggestion that art is inferior to reality. Why contemplate a picture of an apple -- a man-made and imperfect imitation -- when you can look at the apple itself?

When you build a museum for art in a place that is already extraordinarily beautiful -- and when you hire an architect who considers architecture as a threshold to the natural world -- you set up a powerful conflict between images of beauty and beauty itself. And an art conservation center -- a place where science is put in service of maintaining fading images -- presents an even sharper, artificial contrast with nature. A person standing on the lower patio of the Stone Hill Center might well ask: Why are these funny people spending so much time preserving art when there is so much unadulterated nature just outside their windows?

The open hole in the angled wall is a reminder of how much carefully calculated drama has gone into creating Ando's "threshold" to nature. If you want nature, go sit in a forest. If you want a building that makes you feel close to nature (and has hot and cold water in the bathrooms, a restaurant on the terrace, meeting rooms and offices, plus ventilation and other systems necessary for art conservation), then you need an architect. And the architect is subtly reminding you, through this little frame, that he is as much an artist as the imagemakers whose work is being tended in the basement.

And yet, for all its cleverness, it's hard to love this odd, angled wall. In other Ando projects, these quirky, almost ornamental slabs of concrete have sculptural beauty. But this one feels too large, almost fortresslike. Photographs of the Stone Hill Center invariably feature this wall, and there were photographs of the new facility plastered all over the Berkshires, a popular vacation-home district for New Yorkers and Bostonians. It is clearly being offered up as the building's "signature," the thing that proves at a single glance that it is an interesting contemporary building, a building by a real architect.

Much of what is beautiful about the building would work without the angled wall. The public galleries on the upper level would still feel like little piers of art set in a river of grass. The powerful balance of upper level (public functions) and lower level (support, conservation, administration) -- a good metaphor for the tip-of-the-iceberg relation of art to the business of art -- would still be intact. The cool but sensuous texture of the building would be unchanged.

The building would, in fact, be even more minimal than it is now. But Ando isn't after minimalism in any crude sense of reductionism or raw simplicity. The reduction or abstraction he's after is one that keeps the building's whole impact focused on one idea or impression. That idea is about looking out (at nature) and looking in (at art), and how the two differ. It turns out that we have almost turned Plato on his ear. We are estranged from the reality of nature -- which needs to be framed and presented back to us through artful tricks such as the opening in Ando's wall. And we are more than willing to turn our backs on a sunny July day in the Berkshires to look at images of sunny days painted a hundred years ago. Plato would think the whole thing is perverse.

The wall, as imperfect as it may be, forces you to contemplate the paradox, and the paradox is at the root of Ando's thought.

The Stone Hill Center at the Clark Institute is on South Street in Williamstown, Mass. Summer hours, through August, are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. For more information go to http://www.clarkart.edu.