Downtown art museum’s veiled design: ‘It is exceeding our expectations’
Seen from the top of the Cotton Exchange Building, the intersection at Union Avenue and Front Street in Downtown Memphis is the proposed site of the $110 million Brooks Museum of Art. (Jim Weber/Daily Memphian file)
One of the biggest secrets in Memphis was supposed to have been revealed a half-year ago, but its holder keeps tight-lipped and a tight grip.
Not only did Emily Ballew Neff politely decline to show drawings to The Daily Memphian, she refused even to describe them.
“No, I can’t share the images,” the executive director of Memphis Brooks Museum of Art said on Sept. 11.
“I’m not being coy. We’re not ready for that yet.”
“That” is the unveiling of architectural design concepts for the Brooks’ future home atop the Downtown river bluff. One local architect once likened the building’s importance to that of an ancient city’s secular temple.
Mayor Jim Strickland is one of the few who has seen renderings.
“The design for this project is definitely one of kind,” he said in an email to The Daily Memphian. “Once completed, it will be another great asset to the city and a strong addition to the Memphis skyline.”
Said Neff, “I can say it is exceeding our expectations. … We don’t want it to look like a spaceship landed on the Mississippi River. It needs to look like it belongs and that everybody is welcome. And it succeeds in that, we believe.”
The $110 million project is to fill the block bounded by Front, Riverside, Union and Monroe.
A celebratory grand reveal of the design concept had been scheduled for March 25 at the Halloran Centre.
The pandemic and social distancing put that event in long-term limbo, but the design work has continued.
“There are aspects of it that provide these views of the city,” Neff said. “There’s one part of it that I call ‘Fall In Love With Memphis All Over Again’ because it just really embraces who we are and what we can be. It’s a very transparent building in that regard.
“And it provides some extraordinary views of our city. And not just towards the river. That’s very important, obviously, but it’s not just that.”
She described the process as collaborative and still a work-in-progress for the prestigious Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, the Memphis-based architects of record archimania, and Brooks officials and volunteer leaders.
It’s as if bits and pieces of the building’s draft designs digitally fling back and forth the 7,700 miles between Basel, Switzerland and Memphis.
Earlier this year, Neff told a Daily Memphian podcast that the design concept might go public by late August or September. But on Friday, Sept. 11, she said, “I’m going to have to beg a little bit more time just because it’s a very big, ambitious, transformative project with a lot of details. But it’s moving along very positively.”
Herzog & de Meuron has won architecture’s most prestigious award, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, but the design team is not imposing a signature style on the Memphis museum.
“They are so site-specific and so attuned to the history of a place, the geography, the geology, the culture,” Neff said. “And I know it sounds highfalutin, but it’s almost like (the building) comes into being. And it’s an iterative process. It goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Because they are not asserting a certain look; they are interpreting.”
The Brooks’ building committee had met in person with the architects more often before the pandemic hit. The committee flew to Switzerland. Meetings have been held in New York.
Architects have traveled to Memphis perhaps six or eight times. “They walk the river at night. They are always getting to know the city. They’re always walking around looking at buildings, looking at the history, talking to people, talking to random people on the street,” Neff said.
The original project schedule called for the building to be completed by 2025. Brooks officials are unsure if they can make up for time lost due to COVID-19 to keep that schedule.
Neff didn’t say specifically how much of the $110 million project budget has been raised so far, but confirmed that the total exceeds $70 million.
“A lot of people might think that given all the different crises that we’re all facing that things become mothballed, and it’s the exact opposite” for the Brooks on the Bluff project, she said.
For many people, the health, economic and social crises have shown how important the arts and culture are, Neff said.
As for what happens next and when, Neff said simply, “Stay tuned.”
Topics
Brooks Museum of Art Emily Ballew NeffTom Bailey
Tom Bailey retired in January as a business reporter at The Daily Memphian, and after 40 years in journalism. A Tupelo, Mississippi, native, he graduated from Mississippi State University. He has lived in Midtown for 36 years.
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