Glassell School of Arts is located in the fourth largest city in the US. It is connected with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), and students can learn in both environments. There are two types of programs offered, Glassell Junior School and the Advanced Portfolio Preparation. The junior school is available to students from kindergarten to 12 th grade who upon successful completion of their course receive awards such as the Special Merit awards or Gold medal. Proceeding to Advanced Portfolio Preparation, the Show’s School Committee chooses students based on their academic, extracurricular and artistic success. This program offers students with experience and hands-on skills to develop familiarity and conformity with their work ethics in future.
The school and the Museum have played a very crucial in developing and transforming architecture, art, and design in both in Houston and the neighborhoods especially Los Angeles. Visiting MFAH was not only fun to me, but it exposed me to the legendary artists that I have ever come across. Houston has acquired a new bauble, a work of cautious yet romantic sensibility in the form of an outdoor public sculpture garden designed by Islam Noguchi (Greene, 2006). Another amazing feature is the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden, which is built at the cost of $3.2 million. The Garden accommodates as many as 30 pieces of sculptures. Noguchi, now 81 years of age, began his career more than 50 years ago as an assistant to Gutzon Borglum in the curving on Mount Rushmore and subsequently worked in Constantin Brancusi’s studio. He began the Houston project in 1978 assisted by architect Shoji Sadao (Greene, 2006).
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Landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg designed the sculpture garden. He proposed extending the area of the garden to include the south of the Glassell School of the museum. The process by which Noguchi realized the project of the MFAH is contrary to the normal conventional building practice and required a great deal of on-site manipulation, modification, and even reconstruction. MFAH is a hub and a destination for most architectures and designer in the world. Its neighborhood has benefited a great deal from the brains that are produced there (El-Dahdah, 2000). Rafael Moneo, a Spanish architecture is among the world’s renowned scholars who have benefitted and shown interest in the museum. He has the project called the Audrey Jones Beck building which seems to fulfill the desires of its curators. The beck is undeniably masterful in its ability to cluster so many rooms with such ambulatory ease. There is also an approach of reinforcing Binz to build a children museum. Bissonnet-Binz corridor instead of being used an artery, (El-Dahdah, 2000) is considered to anchor the eastern boundary of the Museum District. The children’s Museum architecture set it a precedent.
Several decisions in renovating and coming up with other sections in the MFAH have been made considering the works were done before by various architects. Tracing an example, “When Alice Pratt Brown, a museum trustee, and benefactor visited the Rose Sculpture Garden in Jerusalem, five years later she suggested that Noguchi who is the designer of that Garden is the most suitable to design the sculpture garden long envisioned by the museum.” Tests have also been used in choosing materials. Noguchi’s choice of materials and geometry depended on a little attempt to emulate the steel and glass of the museum’s north façade. Lastly, in figuring out the walls for the museum, (the Rose Sculpture Garden at the Israel Museum concrete walls configure distinct spaces that enrich the readings of the place – but they also foil a too obvious sense of unity). This is what Noguchi considers before designing walls for the sculpture garden. In an interview, he says, “For instance, it is not exactly a walled enclosure, although there are walls. It’s not exactly open, and yet anyone who cares to do so can walk right in from almost any direction.”
References
El-Dahdah, F. (2000). Shedding Light on the Beck. Houston.
Greene, A. D. (2006). Isomu Noguchi: Sculpture for Sculpture. New York.
