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William Pedersen springs from his desk and moves to a hanging diagram of his master plan for the Brooklyn Museum.
As he slowly runs his finger along the outline of the museum's proposed education wing, the Kohn Pedersen Fox partner explains the beauty of his concept for a complete renovation and expansion of the 1890s McKim, Mead & White building: "We were able to come up with a way to be monumental and low-key at the same time."
The only problem is that the design, the product of an architect who has created many of the most distinctive post-modern skyscrapers in the United States, will never be built. Instead, in a competition that attracted some of the nation's most noted architects, the Brooklyn Museum has cast its future with a flamboyant plan by Arata Isozaki & Associates and James Stewart Polshek & Partners.
In a way, that fits the museum's aspirations. Now cramped in a fragment of what the beaux-arts plan was meant to be, the Brooklyn Museum is in search of buildings to accommodate its 1.5 million pieces of art, in need of publicity to help it raise the $200 million needed to execute the entire project, and in pursuit of respect.
Attention-getting competition
"In some ways you might say the museum is catching up to the Brooklyn Academy of Music," says Robert C. Rosenberg, president of Brooklyn-based Grenadier Realty Corp. and president of the board of Brooklyn Philharmonic, the resident orchestra at BAM. "But now the museum, which has been rather dormant, has done this first-rate competition, and it will be noticed."
So will the architects who were given the chance to enter the competition and spent at the very least twice the $50,000 the museum gave each of them to help defray costs.
For the architects, the competition evoked the integrity of their profession, challenging them to apply all their artistic sensibilities to an historic architectural problem. It also created an intimate relationship between the architects and their plans, which will long outlast the three-month affair.
"Architects in general want to do museums. It's the grand prize," says Konrad Wos, a senior associate at Voorsanger & Mills Associates of Manhattan, one of the losing finalists. "An architect is concerned about process,...