Sorry about the tiny picture. It is a rendering that is taken from the MiTierra website...
http://www.mitierracafe.com/
This new museum is "the first museum in the country that tells the story of the Latino experience in America". It is located in Market Square and has an anticipated yearly attendence of 400,000...
Below is the Express-News review of the design of the new museum...
Review: Design gives only a nod to tradition
http://www.mysanantonio.com/entertai...w.20ca7af.html
Mike Greenberg
Express-News Senior Critic
For such a small building, the new Museo Alameda del Smithsonian makes a mighty big statement.
The bold colors of its main stuccoed volume and the delicate, layered tracery of its entry pavilion radiate energy from its strategic downtown site.
But the building also makes a big statement about how architecture can express the reality of a living culture in a fully contemporary vocabulary, without resorting to stereotype or kitsch.
Conceived as the first affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, the Museo Alameda has as its mission "to tell the story of the Latino experience in America through art, history and culture."
An easy and obvious response to that mission would have been to tart up the building in picturesque drag — you know, graceful arches and tile roofs and rose windows, suitable for being photographed with demure señoritas, smiling behind their fans.
But that approach would have been disastrous, architecturally, and would have sent the wrong message, culturally.
The Latino experience has a deep past, but it also has a vibrant, multifaceted present and shows every sign of having a long and ever more diverse future.
Happily, the design for the Museo Alameda draws on tradition but keeps it in its proper place, as a platform for the present and future.
The design firm was Jackson & Ryan Architects, a Houston firm with strong experience in museums — the same firm handled the latest renovation of the McNay Art Museum.
The partner in charge, Jeff Ryan, worked with the Philadelphia firm Venturi, Scott Brown & Assoc. and was a partner in Morris Architects of Houston before forming his current partnership with former San Antonian Guy Jackson in 1986.
Some of the culturally specific character of the project is the architect's interpretation of ideas that came from the local community and from Henry Muñoz, the founder of the museum's parent organization, Alameda National Center for Latino Arts and Culture.
Though he is not himself an architect, Muñoz is board chairman of Kell-Muñoz Architects, and in that capacity he has expended a good deal of thought on the question of what constitutes a contemporary architecture of the Texas-Mexico borderland.
The museum building isn't entirely new. The two-story box of the main volume was originally a 1920s market building, which was badly renovated in the 1980s as an assembly hall called Centro de Artes.
To create the 40,000-square-foot museum, deep arcades on the north and south sides of the building were removed, and new structures were built projecting from the original box.
The solution was controversial. The San Antonio Conservation Society bitterly objected to the removal of the arcades. As construction of the museum advanced, passersby in Market Square could be heard to complain that the crisply modern new building didn't "fit in."
But the old market building had lost most of its historic character in its renovation in the 1980s, and the new museum actually fits the scale and rhythms of Market Square very nicely.
The museum's signature facade is on the east. The new entry pavilion is a two-story glass box, crisply detailed with aluminum mullions and butt-jointed corners, set deep within a steel cage. Steel cables stretched across the top of the cage structure can support banners or shading devices above the entry's open-air forecourt.
On the upper level, north and south of the glass box, the steel frame holds cast-aluminum openwork panels in an abstract design that refers to iconic Mexican images — the Virgin of Guadalupe, the eagle, the headdress of Quetzalcoatl — and the Smithsonian's sunburst logo. (One panel was broken during installation, and a replacement is on the way.)
A simplified version of that design was cut into stainless steel panels that form a two-story screen wall on the east. The screen wall also recalls the Mexican folk craft of punched metal work, or hojalata.
Special lighting, planned to illuminate this entry ensemble in a dramatic way at night, was not viewable in time for my deadline, but even in daylight the whole east facade is a magnet for the eye and a superb gateway to Market Square. Inside the glazed pavilion, daylight passing through the exterior screen wall, and reflecting off the shiny black sealed-concrete floor, creates a magical jewel-box effect.
Just south of the entry, facing Market Square's pedestrian promenade, a balcony-covered space is intended for use as an outdoor stage, so the museum can participate in the square's many live-music events.
At the corner of Commerce and Santa Rosa streets, a small sculpture garden is open to the elements and the public, but secluded behind a concrete block wall whose dark gray color, rough texture and smeared mortar evoke the look of volcanic stone walls. Set into the blocks near the top of the wall are little concave medallions of real volcanic rock — they're actually molcajetes.
The interior of the wall, facing the sculpture garden, incorporates benches covered in iridescent glass mosaic tile work by Oscar Alvarado.
Other finely crafted custom furniture includes the volcanic stone front desk in the entry pavilion and mesquite benches throughout the building, all by Peter Glassford.
A "piñata" lantern by Chuck Ramirez and Andy Benavides hangs in a stairwell, near a large window that frames a view of Jesse Treviño's nine-story tile mural on a wall of the Santa Rosa Children's Hospital, across Milam Square from the museum.
The main gallery spaces are on the second floor, which was added to the existing structure. The original roof trusses were left exposed. The first level is carved into several smallish spaces for a multimedia exhibit and other special purposes.
Also on the first level, in new construction projecting out from the original stucco box, is the museum shop. It is designed by artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz, who made a big splash nationally in the 1990s with installations — and an actual shop called Infinito Botánica — that were based on the traditional Mexican botánica. The museum store's foyer is a Mondini-Ruiz botánica installation.
Back-of-house functions seem to be adequately addressed, especially given that the museum has no permanent collection, except for a few pieces.
The new construction includes secure and climate-controlled access for semitrailers — essential for accreditation and for the loading of temporary exhibits, including works from the Smithsonian.
The only quibbles about the architecture concern stretches of blank wall along the Commerce Street facade and on a part of the rear exposed to Market Square. A little surface articulation would have been nice, but at least there's some landscaping along the Commerce Street sidewalk.
Although the museum's modernist architectural idiom contrasts with Market Square's early-20th-century brick commercial buildings, the museum's setbacks and other articulations approximate the rhythms of the historic structures across the way. Its balcony railing clearly responds to its older counterparts, as do the shade canopies above the store windows.
Those canopies have a story to tell. They consist of thin, light aluminum louvers set inside heavy welded steel-beam frames.
The aluminum louvers are manufactured products that speak of the present. But the frame that holds them and gives them meaning evokes the building crafts of a rich regional tradition.
Thus a modest architectural detail subtly encapsulates the Museo Alameda's mission.
Hybrid Mode