The Charles Shipman Payson Building is the most recent expansion of the Portland Museum of Art

Portland Museum of Art

The Portland Museum of Art is an art museum in Portland, Maine. Founded as the Portland Society of Art in 1882, it is located in the downtown area known as The Arts District, and is the largest and oldest public art institution in the U.S...

 (PMA) in Portland, Maine

Portland, Maine

Portland is the largest city in Maine and is the county seat of Cumberland County. The 2010 city population was 66,194, growing 3 percent since the census of 2000...

, located on the corner of High Street and Congress Square

Congress Street (Portland, Maine)

Congress Street is the main street in Portland, Maine. Congress stretches from Portland's southwestern border with South Portland through a number of neighborhoods before ending overlooking the Eastern Promenade on Munjoy Hill...

. Henry N. Cobb

Henry N. Cobb

Henry N. Cobb is an American architect and founding partner with I.M. Pei of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, an international architectural firm based in New York City....

 (of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners

Pei Cobb Freed & Partners

Pei Cobb Freed & Partners is an architectural firm that was founded in 1955 by I. M. Pei as I. M. Pei & Associates, in 1966 called I. M. Pei & Partners, and received its current name and organization in 1989. The founders were I. M. Pei, Henry N. Cobb, and Eason H. Leonard. Pei and Leonard retired...

) designed the Payson Building, which introduced over five times more gallery space than in the adjacent, historic PMA buildings (McLellan-Sweat House, Charles Quincy Clapp House, and L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Galleries

L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Galleries

The L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Galleries are a series of art galleries that are part of Portland Museum of Art, which is located in the Arts District at Portland, Maine.-History:...

). The building opened in 1983, after Mr. Payson donated 17 Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art....

 paintings and ten million dollars to the museum. Similar in theme to these Homer paintings, the Payson building contains a collection of contemporary paintings and short-term exhibitions created by Maine artists, focusing on regional themes.

Exterior design details

Cobb’s largest challenge was to create a building that provided an enjoyable and powerful location to view art, while relating to the diverse conditions of its awkwardly shaped urban site. The tall brick buildings enclosing the other sides of Congress Square required the Payson building to contain a unified, strong, large-scale presence. Conversely the smaller, historic PMA buildings on the Spring Street side of the build site required the Payson Building to have a smaller-building form that would accommodate these historic neighbors. Cobb’s solution was to design a wide façade made of red brick and gray granite lintels with semicircle openings. This forceful façade has the street presence of a Renaissance palazzo, enclosing the public square. Behind the façade Cobb gradually reduced both the height and length of the building until the building terminated in the back left corner, one fourth as wide and tall as the main façade. By stepping the building back and down in this way, Cobb was successfully able to grant primacy to the neighboring historic buildings.

Cobb chose to comprise the structure of the Payson Building of a concrete frame with concrete block infill, rendering the façade essentially a “curtain wall.” This led to criticism from other architects that Cobb gave the building a false, billboard-like, front. Cobb claims, however, that the façade symbolically represents the interior. The circular insets and cutouts are metaphors that recall the square interior galleries and the rectangular brick insets signify the rectangular interior circulation spaces.

Interior design details

Behind the controversial façade lie many galleries with clean white walls and pine floors with granite stripping set into the floor. This granite marks off twenty-foot by twenty-foot spaces, thought by Cobb to be the smallest desirable gallery space. Around these square spaces, granite strips also delineate rectangular circulation spaces around each square. Over certain granite strips, Cobb placed walls with wide cutout doors to shape various sized gallery spaces.

To reflect and accommodate the diversity of the Homer paintings, Cobb not only strategically placed walls to create different sized gallery spaces, but also varied the ceiling height from 12.5 to 25 to 37.5 feet (3.8–11.4 m) high. These diverse gallery spaces were intentionally designed to provide no clear path through the museum. Cobb claimed that this layout reflected the lack of ordering grand boulevards and grids in the modest cites of New England. Further, Cobb’s layout of the galleries allows a visitor standing in one gallery to see glimpses of several other galleries, often on multiple levels, through the wide gallery doors. This gives the visitor a sense of adventure and anticipation as he or she travels through the galleries.

Perhaps the most compelling feature of the galleries is the lighting, rivaling that of Louis Kahn

Louis Kahn

Louis Isadore Kahn was an American architect, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. After working in various capacities for several firms in Philadelphia, he founded his own atelier in 1935...

’s Kimball Gallery. The galleries are lit with cascading domed ceilings, which are filled with daylight from superimposed octagonal clerestory

Clerestory

Clerestory is an architectural term that historically denoted an upper level of a Roman basilica or of the nave of a Romanesque or Gothic church, the walls of which rise above the rooflines of the lower aisles and are pierced with windows. In modern usage, clerestory refers to any high windows...

 lanterns based on the Dulwich College Art Gallery by John Soane

John Soane

Sir John Soane, RA was an English architect who specialised in the Neo-Classical style. His architectural works are distinguished by their clean lines, massing of simple form, decisive detailing, careful proportions and skilful use of light sources...

. Clerestories permit maximum sunlight to enter the gallery while avoiding direct rays hitting the gallery walls. This natural light is accompanied by incandescent track lighting, although this artificial lighting is often left off during the day. The shifting light entering the museum animates, diffuses, and shapes the galleries below, celebrating the museum's collections with “Portland Light.”

Historical inspirations

In designing the Payson Building, many significant works of modern architecture influenced Cobb. The façades of Kahn’s Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad also known as Karnavati is the largest city in Gujarat, India. It is the former capital of Gujarat and is also the judicial capital of Gujarat as the Gujarat High Court has its seat in Ahmedabad...

, India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 (semicircle openings, large sections of plain brick) and Kahn’s Phillips Exeter Academy Library

Phillips Exeter Academy Library

The Phillips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, New Hampshire, U.S., with 160,000 volumes on nine levels and a shelf capacity of 250,000 volumes, is the largest secondary school library in the world...

 arcade in New Hampshire

New Hampshire

New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state was named after the southern English county of Hampshire. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Canadian...

 partially inspired the façade of the Payson building. The famous lighting from the Dulwich Picture Gallery

Dulwich Picture Gallery

Dulwich Picture Gallery is an art gallery in Dulwich, South London. England's first purpose-built public art gallery, it was designed by Regency architect Sir John Soane and opened to the public in 1817. Soane arranged the exhibition spaces as a series of interlinked rooms illuminated naturally...

, the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth

Fort Worth, Texas

Fort Worth is the 16th-largest city in the United States of America and the fifth-largest city in the state of Texas. Located in North Central Texas, just southeast of the Texas Panhandle, the city is a cultural gateway into the American West and covers nearly in Tarrant, Parker, Denton, and...

, and the lanterns of Ely Cathedral

Ely Cathedral

Ely Cathedral is the principal church of the Diocese of Ely, in Cambridgeshire, England, and is the seat of the Bishop of Ely and a suffragan bishop, the Bishop of Huntingdon...

 inspired lighting for the Payson Building. Further influences include a portico by Ledoux

Ledoux

Ledoux or LeDoux is a surname, and may refer to:* Chris LeDoux* Christene LeDoux* Claude Nicolas Ledoux 18th century French architect.* Claude Ledoux * Harold LeDoux* Jesse LeDoux* Joseph E. LeDoux* Patrice Ledoux* Paul Ledoux...

, the Doge’s Palace in Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

, and other precedents.

Regionalism

Beyond these more famous influences, Cobb also had a strong desire to link the Payson building to Maine. He remarked, “The Portland Museum is a regional museum in a region that is itself a museum, so I believe I had an obligation to connect the new building to the city and the region.” To express the museum’s connection to Maine, Cobb used locally made materials common to Maine (water-struck brick

Brick

A brick is a block of ceramic material used in masonry construction, usually laid using various kinds of mortar. It has been regarded as one of the longest lasting and strongest building materials used throughout history.-History:...

, pine

Pine

Pines are trees in the genus Pinus ,in the family Pinaceae. They make up the monotypic subfamily Pinoideae. There are about 115 species of pine, although different authorities accept between 105 and 125 species.-Etymology:...

, and granite

Granite

Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...

) as his chief design materials. These materials call to the vernacular architecture of Portland, defined by the brick commercial buildings and warehouses of the Old Port

Old Port

The Old Port is a district of Portland, Maine, known for its cobblestone streets, 19th century brick buildings and fishing piers. The district is filled with boutiques, restaurants and bars...

 and the Federal style brick buildings near the museum. Furthermore, from the ground looking up at the Payson building, one is struck with how the façade’s semicircular openings encase the air and light of Maine, making it part of the building. A similar effect is achieved with the building’s many octagonal clerestories. These clerestories also recall the viewing decks of the region’s lighthouses as well as the octagonal Portland Observatory

Portland Observatory

The Portland Observatory, built in 1807 at Portland, Maine, is the last surviving maritime signal tower in the United States. Using both a telescope and signal flags, two-way communication between ship and shore was possible several hours before an incoming vessel reached the...

, a major city icon. Additionally, porthole-like windows reveal views of the Fore River recalling Maine’s rich nautical history.

Sources