A collaboration in concrete: the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, housed in Tadao Ando's first public structure in the U.S., brings a dialogue between art and architecture to the city's revitalized downtown - Report From St. Louis

The working relationship of the three participants in the panel discussion that marked the opening last October of St. Louis's Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (PFA) was the readiest key to understanding the unique nature of the new institution. Moderated by board member Angelica Zander Rudenstine, the conversation included architect Tadao Ando of Osaka along with artists Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra of New York. Ando designed the building, and Kelly and Serra were each commissioned to produce a major work for display there.

In itself, there was nothing unusual about people of differing disciplines sharing a stage at the inauguration of a major art facility. What sticks in memory, however, is the manner in which these three men had earlier approached their respective--or, more precisely, their communal--tasks. Kelly ostensibly conceived his wall piece, Blue Black, a two-panel work of painted honeycomb aluminum, to fit the setting Ando had created for him. But before the work was finally hung, Kelly made adjustments in the proportions of the architect's design to suit his own purposes. Similarly Serra, for whose sculpture a full-scale courtyard had been specially constructed, managed to fix the final measurements of that space.

It is extremely rare for painters or sculptors to actively participate in the design of a building awaiting their work. In this instance, they were able to do so largely because the $17-million cost of the project was met not by a corporate sponsor but solely by a couple, Emily Rauh Pulitzer and her late husband, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., who were inclined to serve the artists to an exceptional degree. Emily Pulitzer has made her position clear: "I think that all too often, an architect designs a building, and then art is put into it in ways that damage the effect of the art and of the building as well." Yet she admits that the collaborative process was not always easy: "It couldn't be. As Ando has said, each party wanted his work to be enhanced, not compromised." (1) Almost a year has passed since the Pulitzer Foundation opened its doors, a span long enough to warrant an assessment of the success attained by this unusual interplay of art and architecture.

Emily Pulitzer should feel justified. The building--encompassing 27,000 square feet of interior space and a 16,000-square-foot exterior court--looks as good now as it did last year, both in itself and as a setting for the art; it shows. A by-appointment study center more than a conventional museum, the PFA houses galleries and a library but no shop, cafe or public auditorium. (2) Except for occasional temporary exhibitions, the work on view consists of examples drawn from the Pulitzers' own collection. While Kelly and Serra have been granted pride of place in the finished institution, the highest honors belong to the architect. The PFA is Ando's first public building in the U.S., and since it bears a close resemblance to his work in Japan, which helped to win him the Pritzker Prize in 1995, it enables us to judge him at his best.

The first impressions made by the exterior of the building are the hard rectilinearity of the composition and the sobering gray of the concrete, both traits especially notable in the extended wall that shields the main mass from the street. A cantilevered roof is visible just beyond the barrier. The wall conceals the entryway to a lobby, where the viewer begins to get some sense of the long U-shaped interior plan. At center stretches a shallow open-air reflecting pool lined with gravel and flanked by parallel wings, one slightly taller than the other. Moving to the left, visitors enter the higher wing's main gallery, which, echoing the pool, is far longer than it is wide. The space, hung with paintings and large drawings by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Guston, Kelly and Serra, divides at one end into a balcony and a monumental staircase. The stairs descend to a two-story cove, top-lit, its rear wall given over exclusively to Kelly's narrow, 28-foot-high wall piece, which has been brightly visible along the 170-foot length of the gallery. Here the remarkable cooperation between artist and architect makes itself felt. The balcony leads to a door that the viewer sees as a rectangle consistent with--indeed, almost a part of--the shapes of the wall piece. It was the height of this door that Kelly altered, with Ando's approval. Ando, for his part, bathes the space around the wall piece in indirect illumination, a masterly confirmation of his reputation for employing natural light as a constructive element in his architecture.

At this point, two small galleries are within immediate reach, one built directly above the other. On the upper level, the Cube Gallery, so called because of its shape, features two paintings by Rothko, one by Serra and a bench designed by Ando. Below it is the Cubist Gallery, filled with canvases by Picasso, Braque, and Gris as well as sculptures by Matisse and Giacometti. The visitor's route then doubles back to the great staircase, the painting gallery and the lobby again. The last of these spaces, with its multiple perspectives, is the most visually varied in the foundation. A glass partition faces a concrete wall with a cantilevered staircase that leads upward to a sitting area overlooking the roof terrace of the lower, or office, wing. The terrace is planted with dwarf bamboo, akin in its lightness to the reflecting pool's water and in bold contrast with the pervasive concrete, the material most frequently associated with Ando.