Late on a Friday afternoon, July 12, 2002, I visited Frank Stella's Manhattan studio.  The invitation had been extended some months earlier upon Mr. Stella's reading of my article about his talk at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts here in Copenhagen. 

I was very flattered . . . thrilled, really. So, after finishing that day's research on American architectural history (for a book I was deeply engaged in researching at that time), I called to see if I could just turn up. Stella wasn't there but "Sure, come on down," said his assistant, Paula.

Fifteen minutes later I was pressing the bell at the door of a nondescript 19th-century commercial building a couple of blocks off Union Square. Once inside, that first impression changed. The space is cavernous. Passing through a large vestibule, I walked into a  large room which opened into a cathedral-like space.  The stairs along the wall led up to the second floor that covered only the front half of the building.

I had to ask what the original purpose of  building had been, as I could not divine it from its present use. I was told that the building had been a livery and horse-auction business in the 19th century. The horses would be driven in through the big vestibule doors and into the grand open space. The customers would assemble upstairs in the second-floor gallery, where they could view the livestock from above. The horses were walked out into the open area and the bidding would take place. The animals had enough room to move about properly, and the customers had the advantage of seeing the whole physique of the animal in motion. In my mind's eye, I could see the horses being paraded around as I looked down from the top of the stairs.  

Automobiles replaced the horse and buggy, and the building eventually became a car-auction business. The metal proxies of a sublime species were paraded in the same space for the same kind of anxious buyers upstairs. This history seemed most fitting for the building's current use, and especially for the artist using it.  

Frank Stella loves horses. He owns and races horses.  They are beauty, energy, form and passion personified. And Stella takes big pieces of metal and shapes them into proxies of that same elemental combination which makes a racing steed so scintillating.

So there I was, imagining shiny chestnut haunches and clacking hoofs below — and suddenly I was confronted with huge, brilliantly colored, twisted metal artworks hanging off the walls all around me. On the working table was a heap of stuff; art and architecture books, paper of all kinds, volumes of the Yellow Pages, drawing pads big and small, and a group of dried grapefruit skins turned inside out standing around like baked starfishes.

Before you is a plaza that you must traverse to reach the museum entrance. But it is not like any public space you've passed through before. It is a modern version of an oriental philosopher's garden. Water, trees, plants and undulating colors, blue and white, spread out at your feet. You are pulled into the landscape by the dynamic tension of the floor's design. A series of patterns, reminicent of Stella's early work, form graceful rhythms as they connect the islands, small lakes and bridges dotting the plaza. The road to Oz comes to mind.

The visitor thus begins a journey, or, I should say, a sequence of short journeys from the islands, to the peninsulas, to the mainland of this real, physical "art world." One is invited to stop and rest on public furniture so as to contemplate the arch of a bridge over the water and the swaying willow trees. One must naturally slow down and look around at the abstract patterns, see how they move in harmony with the water and the air. If you ask me, this is a pretty cool way to get to a front door. No trick. Just treat.  When you finally arrive at the museum's entrance, refreshed and relaxed, you are ready for what your senses will now absorb.

The building is a Frank Stella 3-D wall sculpture turned on its back. Well, stow your assumptions for a moment. This is not a  Frank Gehry/Bilbao-inspired, auto-cad fabrication. It is a work of sculpture turned into architecture (instead of the other way around) rising directly out of a unique artistic personality. It has all the aspects which people either love or hate in Stella's work. What I found amazing was how well these aspects suited the discipline of building design. You wouldn't automatically make that leap by looking at what was on his studio walls that day.

The exterior is, as I said, a Stella construction facing the sky. The engineering of the structural frame is hidden beneath the sheafs of curved and sharply angled surfaces. The building has three levels which intersect much like the way the inside of caves do. The openings between the roof surfaces provide many sources of natural light, shooting down from above and speading out through the layers, diffused and altered by the asymmetrical geometries of the building's exterior forms and its interior walls.

The exhibition spaces are literally halls, spacious, curvacious and intimate. Below the outrageous roofline, the orchestration of light, form and space quietly melts into the galleries and creates an interior context within which the ART itself becomes the central experience of "being there." This is the purpose of this place, announced outside in the plaza where the experience begins and culminating deep within the building; total satisfaction guaranteed.

With his frequent collaborator, New York architect Robert Kahn, AIA, Stella submitted this building design to the 1997 international design competition for the Constantini Museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  Along with the museum’s founder and patron, Eduardo Constantini, the jury included design luminaries Mario Botta, Kenneth Frampton, Sir Norman Foster, Cesar Pelli, and MoMA’s architecture and design curator, Terrance Riley.

Though the competition was won by an Argentinian firm, Stella and Kahn’s design won an honorable mention; no small achievement in a field of internationally recognized architects. Their design has also won a 2001 NY AIA Design Award in the “project” category.

Frank Stella is not new to architectural design as an aestheic language or a hands-on medium to be experimented with. He's been at it for a long time. Over the years, Stella has collaborated with top architects and engineers such as “starchitect” Richard Meier, for instance. In 1995, Stella and Kahn shared the William B. and Charlotte Shepherd Davenport Visiting Professorship at Yale University's School of Architecture.

	Stella’s first major independent architectural work, called “Broken Jug,” was commissioned for Biscayne Bay in Miami, Florida — a 34-foot-high bandshell for public performances to be situated behind the American Airlines Arena. Its form was inspired by objects lying around his studio.
To show me where the biomorphic shape of the band shell came from, Paula picked up a flat, round, green piece of foam scored in spiral cuts, put it on her head and pulled it down into a perfect sun hat. Combined with the organic, mutated shapes of the inverted dried-out grapefruit skins and voila, we have a sinuous, tropical bandstand.	Above and left: Frank Stella Bandshell, Miami

The award-winning international engineering firm, RFR, in France worked with Stella to engineer and construct this unusual and exciting public structure. This is the same firm that built I. M. Pei's glass pyramid at the Louvre. In the summer of 2002, “Broken Jug” was in the process of being manufactured in anticipation of its permanent installation in Florida.

Unfortunately, as the fabrication of the structure reached completion, the city of Miami pulled out of its committment and cancelled the purchase. Budget constraints and the unanticipated costs of realizing the design conspired to deny the citizens of Miami a truly marvelous work of public art/architecture. The structure remains in Cherbourg, France, where it awaits a future home.

I don't know if Stella will ever find a client with sufficient vision, purpose, and resources to match his own. But if cultured society can enthusiastically support the artistic whims of superstar architects who trumpet a design "brand" to enhance the built environment, maybe we can and should invest in the architectural expressions of brilliant artists with equal respect and vigor. Maybe someone like Frank Stella.