Tadao Ando’s New Work at the Clark Institute

Top, the Clark Art Institute construction site in Williamstown, Mass.; below, a rendering of the visitor center and reflecting pool. CreditTop, Richard Pare; below, Tadao Ando Architect & Associates

On the snow-covered, bitterly cold museum construction site here, word went out to the assembled crowd: The helicopter had landed.

The Japanese architect Tadao Ando was making one of his twice-yearly, 7,000-mile trips from Osaka to New York to the Berkshires for a project that had gone on longer than anyone, including Mr. Ando, had expected at the outset: the dozen-year, $145 million expansion of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, which is finally scheduled to open in July.

Mr. Ando does not like to leave Japan for very long, and, initially, he didn’t know where Williamstown was. He signed on because of the natural beauty of the site and what he called the masterpieces in the Clark’s collection.

The Clark, which opened in 1955, founded by an heir to the Singer sewing fortune, is a revered jewel-box museum with a stellar group of European and American works by masters like Degas, Sargent and Monet. The original neo-Classical-style white marble building was joined by a 1970s Brutalist structure, the Manton Research Center. The New York architect Annabelle Selldorf is renovating both of the existing older structures, and the landscape firm Reed Hilderbrand is reconfiguring the grounds.

The architect Tadao Ando, center, visiting the Clark. CreditNathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

The many-faceted master plan also called for a new visitor, exhibition and conference center designed by Mr. Ando, who has built very rarely in the United States, notably the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and thePulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis.

And his arrivals are hotly anticipated. A winner of the Pritzker Prize, he is renowned for instilling a thoughtful air of calm in his simply arranged structures of thick-walled concrete and is treated with great reverence at the Clark, especially since he completed the widely acclaimed Stone Hill Center on a wooded hillside here in 2008. It houses two art galleries and a series of conservation labs with magnificent views of the Taconic Range and the Green Mountains.

Trailed by a dozen workers and museum staff members, Mr. Ando immediately made the rounds to inspect the progress on his latest Clark building, a low-slung visitor center set on a three-tiered reflecting pool that provides a focal point for the whole campus. After approving various details — in particular the lack of porousness in the concrete — he pronounced the progress a success.

A rendering of the visitor center and reflecting pool of the Clark Art Institute.CreditTadao Ando Architect & Associates

Then came the banter. He and Michael Conforti, the Clark’s director, have been involved in an odd-couple relationship since 2001, when, after a long selection process and a long courtship, Mr. Conforti persuaded him to take on the project. In an era when huge new museum projects are par for the course, the interplay at the Clark demonstrates how the give and take between designer and client turns divergent ideas into a synthesis of bricks and mortar — or in this case, concrete and granite.

“He’s a visionary,” Mr. Conforti said of Mr. Ando. “We needed an architectural vocabulary that could unify the campus without copying the two styles of building we already have.”

But no one ever said hiring a starchitect would make life easy.

The Clark visitor center’s granite and concrete walls.CreditRichard Pare

“The director is very critical,” Mr. Ando burst out at one point, through a translator who shadowed him on his visit. He had a large smile on his face as he continued: “He is a strong man. He has an opinion, and he sticks to it.”

Mr. Conforti followed up by saying, “It’s been an energetic relationship.”

The back and forth between the proudly self-taught Mr. Ando — who was once a boxer — and Mr. Conforti, a Harvard Ph.D. who has been running the Clark for 20 years, has pushed the project to be more ambitious than it might otherwise have been.

The interior of the Clark visitor center.CreditTucker Bair

The telling details are two walls of red granite at the entrance, as well as the tiered reflecting pools in back. The first was Mr. Conforti’s idea and the second, Mr. Ando’s. Neither of them was thrilled with the other’s suggestion at first, but they learned to embrace both elements in the process of working together.

Mr. Ando’s close friend Kazuhito Yoshii, a New York art dealer, was trailing along during Mr. Ando’s recent Clark visit and has witnessed the interplay many times.

“It’s a long-term relationship. It’s like a marriage,” Mr. Yoshii said....Continue Reading

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