The work titled Austin is a building on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin designed by the celebrated painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly and completed in 2017. Kelly’s largest and most architectural work, Austin is composed of two barrel vaults intersecting in a cross. The exterior is rendered in a white limestone, and the heavy oak door leads to a vaulted interior of white plaster and gray stone flooring. The front and side façades are punctured by stained-glass windows: to the east the “tumbling squares” motif, to the south a grid of nine squares over the entry door, and to the west the radial “starburst” motif. These panes throw shards of color across the walls and floor as the sun moves throughout the day. Fourteen square black-and-white panels—the Stations of the Cross—hang on the walls, and a cedar totem stands in the apse opposite the entry. The space is reverberant and awash in color from the windows; at night the building glows from within.

Rick Archer, founder and design principal at Overland Partners Architecture + Urban Design, was the architect of record for Austin, working closely with Ellsworth Kelly, the Blanton Museum, University of Texas, and the many individuals and entities who helped realize the project. Archer and his team prepared models, mock-ups, sketches, and drawings to allow Kelly to make key decisions and searched the globe for the right materials and artisans to bring the artist’s vision to life. Ellsworth Kelly passed away in December of 2015 at the age of ninety-two, a few months after construction on Austin began, having approved the final designs. Austin was opened to the public in February of 2018. Rick Archer was interviewed by Bruce Buescher.

 

Image: How did you meet Kelly?

Rick Archer: I came to know Ellsworth through Hiram Butler, a gallerist in Houston, whom I had worked with on projects with James Turrell. Hiram had run into Kelly at a funeral and asked him about the chapel he had designed in the 1980s for a private collector in California. He told Hiram it had never been realized. When Hiram asked whether he would be willing to see the project built, if a home could be found, Kelly expressed interest but had one caveat: that it not go to a religious institution.

Hiram and I both graduated from the University of Texas, which has a vibrant public art program called Landmarks. It occurred to us that maybe they would be interested. We met with then-president Bill Powers, and after we presented the idea he immediately said, “It is quite possible that fifty years from now, no one will remember what I accomplished at this university except bringing this master work of contemporary art to Austin.”

After that, Hiram and I engaged Tom Butler of Linbeck (a construction firm whose portfolio includes James Turrell skyspaces), because we knew we’d have to think about constructability from the very beginning, and we all flew to Spencertown, New York, to meet with Ellsworth. His studio is housed in a building by Richard Gluckman, simple and spare on the outside, with white interior (a particular white), mostly skylit, with a gallery space, studio, office, and library. I remember being struck by his gentility, kindness, and humility. He was eighty-nine at the time and on oxygen, but that didn’t diminish his vigor or energy. He had a sparkle in his eye and was an absolutely delightful person to be around.

In the large studio space there was a whole wall just spattered with paint. I remember being captivated by seeing the detritus of his work.

Image: Which is interesting, because his finished work is so clean and crisp.

RA: Totally. You might imagine someone sitting in a room being very precise and not dropping any paint. It was quite the contrary, although everything else in the studio and gallery was immaculate. He was wearing khakis and a white button-down shirt, not what I expected from an artist—no beret, no billowing black shirt—which is consistent with his personality, just very simple and straightforward. There was absolutely no conversation about Ellsworth and a lot of conversation about his art.

In his library were folios of Renaissance painters and Romanesque architecture. Over the time we worked together, he would pull out those books to show me things that had inspired what he was doing.

He had built a model of the space—I’m going to call it the chapel because I don’t know what else to call it.

Image: Was that term used through the process?

RA: When it was explicitly brought up, his husband Jack Shear would say, “It’s not a chapel,” and Ellsworth shared that narrative. It was clear that no one wanted it to be seen as a religious space.

Anyway, he had the model out. It was made of white museum board, paper thin, with colored cellophane windows. We pretty quickly got into the specifics of Kelly’s vision and the challenges of turning it into a building, the first being that the walls needed thickness, which would have ramifications for the composition. I had my computer with me, and I began to overlay diagrams of what would happen when we thickened the walls. I stayed up late that evening putting together a presentation to share with Ellsworth the next day, and that became the routine for subsequent visits to Spencertown: I would arrive, we would meet to talk about the development of the work, and I would go back to the inn and work late into the evening so the next morning we’d have something more to talk about.

Image: You’re often in the role of designer. Can you talk about what it was like to step back and help realize someone else’s vision?

RA: Ellsworth was very clear that it was my job to work through the technical and architectural challenges and bring solutions to him, and it was his job to be the designer. I remember at one point I needed some decisions from him about the width of the mortar joints, and he said, “Rick, I’ll stare at two canvases for six weeks to determine whether they should be one sixteenth or three thirty-seconds of an inch apart, and you need me to make thousands of decisions very quickly.” I said, “Yeah, I do.” He said, “I had no idea buildings had so many decisions. I don’t know that I can make them all.” I said, “Well, someone is going to have to make them. Do you trust me?” And he said yes. I committed to bring to him anything I thought would be of concern to him. And we did. Our firm made hundreds of photorealistic renderings showing every detail of the space to get his approval.

I felt a lot of weight to get it right, and because Kelly’s health was declining, there was pressure to get it done quickly. The university was rightfully concerned that if the finished design didn’t have his signature, the work wouldn’t have provenance and they would have spent a whole lot of money for nothing. We got the construction drawings signed and approved, as it turned out, a week before his death.

Image: Can you give an example of how this working relationship between artist and architect unfolded throughout the project?

RA: For the stone façade, I didn’t feel comfortable dictating the stone pattern, but I knew there needed to be a pattern. Initially we laid out a Cartesian grid and began to course the stone to line up with the nine-square window, but Ellsworth didn’t like that. He pulled out his books of Romanesque architecture and said he wanted the stone to feel like the randomly coursed ashlar in those buildings. We ended up deciding that the height of the rows would be consistent, so the windows would end up in the right place, but that the stones would be random in width. I said to Ellsworth, “We can say it’s random, but it can’t actually be random; we’re going to have to dimension these stones.” Ellsworth wanted the mason to determine the layout during construction, but the stones needed to be fabricated in Europe; there are no two pieces alike on the building.

So I asked Ellsworth how he wanted to determine the size of the pieces. He showed me some of his works where he would roll dice to determine what color to use, or where he would paint lines and then cut them and shift them to break up the uniformity. He wanted the building to have that kind of quality. He said, “I really want this randomness that’s not decided by humans.” I suggested that we could write a computer script to randomize the pieces and decide what went where, and he loved that idea. It was a modern-day rolling of the dice.

Image: This is consistent with Kelly’s interest in removing the artist’s hand from the work.

RA: He once took me up to a yellow painting and said, “You don’t see a brushstroke, and that’s intentional. I don’t want you to see the artist. I want you to see yellow.”

Image: It’s interesting that he spent a whole career dedicated to color and it wasn’t until the end of his career that he worked with light.

RA: Yes, I think he had probably been thinking about it all along, but in Austin he finally had a medium—not just glass but a space where he could explore the patterns of the light and color. I really do believe it’s his magnum opus. It draws together all the things he was thinking about, including treating the wall itself as the work. Now the work is the entire space, the entire building.

Image: Can you talk a little about the stained-glass windows?

RA: We worked very closely with Franz Mayer, a glass fabricator out of Munich, Germany. It became important to Ellsworth that the glass not be recessed on the interior or exterior, so that necessitated glass flush with both sides of the wall. There are three layers of glass outside and

three inside, a total of six layers, and they’re not all the same color. The outermost and innermost panes are clear, tempered, protective layers, and then there are two pairs of panes between those protective layers. Each half of the pair is a different hue, and that combination is mirrored in the other pair, so you get the same color quality looking from the outside and inside. We could not get any one piece of glass to represent the exact hue Ellsworth was looking for. We built a full-scale mockup that was sixteen inches deep, the thickness of the wall, so we could look at how the light would really behave.

Image: Austin was inspired by the Romanesque architecture Kelly had encountered in Europe as a GI, and it follows the cruciform plan of those buildings, but he distilled it to pure forms, removing almost all the ornamentation typical of that period. Yet he kept the Stations of the Cross, placed the totem where there would typically be an altar, and used stained-glass windows. Did he intend for these elements to have religious significance?

RA: I think that he was always trying to carve back to the essence of an idea. At the same time, he was very clear about the literal reference. He would pull out the books of Romanesque architecture and say he wanted the stone to have this kind of pattern, and the door to look like those old doors. The “tumbling squares” motif for the east window came right out of Chartres Cathedral: you could literally fill it in with the rest of the Chartres rose window and get exactly the same proportion.

When it came to the fourteen stations, he looked at paintings from the Renaissance period and then would abstract something for the panel. In “Veronica’s Veil,” the square is divided diagonally into black and white sections, and the white area is precisely the shape of the veil in the Bernardo Strozzi painting Saint Veronica that Ellsworth was looking at.

So while he wasn’t using any of these things for their religious significance, he was not veiling the reference. He was captivated by the composition, the form, not by the meaning. In fact, one of the things I struggled with throughout the project was that Ellsworth worked without ascribing meaning to anything he was doing. I look for meaning everywhere, almost to a fault, and it made me really start asking, “Am I trying to ascribe meaning where it might be okay to just let it be what it is?” Sometimes as people of faith, we feel it’s our job to figure it out. He was actually much more comfortable with mystery. I found that very refreshing and frankly kind of liberating.

Image: Were there other aspects of the project in which this question of meaning came up?

RA: It really surfaced during the making of the Stations of the Cross panels. Ellsworth had originally intended to make them from steel, and they were to be painted by Carlson & Co. art fabricators out of California. But remember, this project was a first in several ways for Ellsworth. He was working on a building, a stone building, and working with glass and light for the first time. So I said, “Why don’t we do something different? What would you think about making these panels out of stone?” He immediately loved the idea but said, “The only problem is I don’t know anything about stone. You’re going to have to find it for me.” And I said, “Great, we do that all the time.” But I didn’t realize how weighty this task was to become.

We found the black granite in Belgium—very clear, not a lot of speckly, shiny stuff. We sampled finishes on that and felt confident we had found the right material. But where would we find the white stone to represent Christ? I began thinking about where I had experienced the Passion of Jesus Christ depicted in stone. And it was obvious: the Michelangelo’s Pietà.

We knew we had to find a good white Carrara marble, a classic statuary marble, and I really wanted it to be from the same quarry as that Pietà, so that there would be a profound material link between what I think is the most important piece of Christian art and this non-Christian representation of the Passion. The only problem was, that quarry had been closed for a couple hundred years. Working with the stone broker, we were able to get the quarry reopened.

I remember bringing a sample back to Ellsworth with a lot of enthusiasm. It was beautiful, such a velvety soft white, and he picked it up and said, “I love it. This is perfect.” And I immediately said, “It’s from the same quarry as the Pietà.” And his response was, “So?” I was a little deflated, and then as I thought about it, that’s a really beautiful response. What he cared about was that the material perfectly represented what he was trying to do, but he was not trying to ascribe meaning to it, any more than he did to, say, yellow.

So while in some ways his response deflated me, it actually gave me hope. And when I see the stations in Austin, I see those connections that Ellsworth didn’t, and most people don’t, but they mattered to me. That became one of those little treasures that I carry with me. I just had an opportunity to be with the Pietà again in Rome, and I saw it a little differently this time.

Image: When I visited Austin, it slowed me down, not unlike my experience of cathedrals in Europe. It reoriented me to light and material. I had a feeling of time passing differently. Do you think this is something he intended?

RA: It could be. I will say that the sense you just described, I had when I was with Ellsworth. Being around him, it felt as if time stood still, which was both beautiful and sometimes uncomfortable—the same thing you feel in those sacred spaces. He never seemed in a hurry. He always took the time to think about what needed to be done. He didn’t rush to conclusions. He let time and space just exist in order to let solutions or ideas or feeling emerge.

The only thing I remember him saying about what he hoped the space would evoke was, “I hope when people go in here, they will experience joy.” We had a conversation comparing it to the Rothko Chapel, which does not express joy, and the Matisse Chapel, which does. He knew that light was a major theme in Austin. In some ways it is in the Rothko Chapel too—but there it’s maybe more about the absence of light. And the Matisse Chapel is about the windows. But I think Ellsworth was able to extract the essence of color from the light. The movement of light around the space and against the walls and across the panels I find just transfixing. You want to slow down so you don’t miss what you’re seeing.

And yet he wasn’t trying to create a pristine environment set apart from the world. You’re not diminished to a viewer passively looking at an exhibit. Seeing and hearing people moving around, moving through the light, you feel like you’re vital to the life of the space.

The engineering consultant, Arup, provided audio modeling so people from the Blanton Museum could hear what the space might sound like, because they were thinking about hosting concerts and things like that. We took the audio file to Ellsworth, and he listened in a headset. It’s a very lively space acoustically: When there’s a bus full of school kids in there, it’s cacophonous. And he said, “That’s perfect. That sounds like what I remember the churches being like. I don’t want you to do anything to fix it.”

Image: In The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton writes:

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

I wonder if you can reflect on this relative to Austin and its power to touch people.

RA: When I hear that, the first thing I ask is, was Ellsworth sad? I never got that from him; without a doubt he had experienced a lot of pain, but he always seemed like he wanted to convert that pain into something of value. That may have been one of his greatest gifts as an artist: You don’t get weighed down by his work; you feel lifted by it.

I remember one of my colleagues told me that his brother, who had been suicidal for many years, had gone to the space on the day of the opening. He actually called my colleague from the space and said, “I’ve never had this experience in my life; I’ve experienced profound joy.” I recently asked my colleague how his brother is doing, and he said that that experience changed his life. To play armchair psychologist, I think his profound sadness allowed him to experience the depth of the joy the place delivered, and therefore he was receptive to the transformation it brought. Ellsworth would have delighted in that story, because that was his one hope.

Image: Another quote, this one from Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, about the life and work of Robert Irwin:

Irwin paused for a moment, lost in thought—this man who shuns metaphors and yet is so gifted by them: “it’s like you’re on a swing,” he finally said, “and you swing way up to the top and for a split second you can see over the wall, you can see all that light, but you’re already on your way back into the world. So you swing harder and you get a little higher and you see a little more, but back down into the world you go. To recognize something and then live there takes a tremendous conversion of your being. You don’t just swing up there and say, ‘oh, that’s nice,’ and stay there, hanging in midair. Hanging in midair can be nice…but the world always draws you back.”

When I’m in spaces like this, I experience a bit of transcendence. And then I leave and get back in the car and go to work or go home and deal with all the things of life. But I wonder if maybe Ellsworth was more consistently in that kind of state.

RA: Well, he did tell me a story, sitting around his dinner table, about Agnes Martin, who was one of his best friends. She spoke a lot about inspiration and was a major influence on many artists of Ellsworth’s period. As a young man he was roundly criticized by the intelligentsia, because at the time abstract expressionism was in vogue, and as far as they could see he was not expressing anything. He was about to give up; he was despondent; the way he described it, he sounded depressed. Agnes came alongside him and said, “Don’t stop doing what you’re doing. Keep doing it, and eventually the world will catch up with you.” Maybe that was the low point of the swing for him, but Ellsworth created slow art, and the picture I have of him is that he was on a slow swing. As he neared the end of his life, he peeked up over the wall and saw this work as it was coming into fruition, and then left this world.

Image: Did this project make you think differently about art and architecture and life broadly?

RA: I just spent a month in Rome at the American Academy, and my goal in going there was to reconnect with that part of me that is passionate about art, because that was the genesis of my foray into architecture. I found myself reflecting on my time with Ellsworth and also on James Turrell and Mako Fujimura—how they have shaped the way I look at the world. I was meditating on the question, “What remains?” I feel this chapel is a meditation on that question. What would remain if we stripped away all the extraneous stuff, if we just got down to the essence of what mattered? It’s interesting that an artist who doesn’t ascribe meaning to anything is actually the one who takes us to the place of understanding what really matters.

Even though Ellsworth was not a person of faith, working with him was a spiritual journey for me. He gave me permission to have parts of my life that don’t make sense yet, that don’t have meaning, and to believe that that’s not only okay but good. I think Ellsworth and his work allowed me to live in that space.

 

 

 

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Bruce Buescher is an architect, artist, and musician. He has been involved in the design and construction of award-winning buildings in Massachusetts and Texas. He lives in San Antonio with his wife and daughters and is a project manager at Tobin Smith Architect.

 

 

 

Ellsworth Kelly. Austin, 1986/2015. Artist-designed building with colored glass windows, black-and-white marble panels, and redwood totem. 63 x 76 x 28 x feet. The Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.

All photos but one are by Kate Russell and courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art. Austin is a gift of the artist and Jack Shear, with funding generously provided by Jeanne and Michael Klein, Judy and Charles Tate, the Scurlock Foundation, Suzanne Deal Booth and David G. Booth, and the Longhorn Network. Additional funding provided by the Brown Foundation of Houston, Leslie and Jack S. Blanton Jr., Elizabeth and Peter Wareing, Sally and Tom Dunning, the Lowe Foundation, Eugene McDermott Foundation, Stedman West Foundation, and Walton Family Foundation, with further support from Sarah and Ernest Butler, Buena Vista Foundation, the Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder Foundation, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Janet and Wilson Allen, Judy and David Beck, Kelli and Eddy S. Blanton, Charles Butt, Mrs. Donald G. Fisher, Amanda and Glenn Fuhrman, Glenstone/Emily and Mitch Rales, Stephanie and David Goodman, Agnes Gund, Stacy and Joel Hock, Lora Reynolds and Quincy Lee, Helen and Chuck Schwab, Ellen and Steve Susman, and other donors. All photos © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.