“We want people to get lost!” New Princeton Museum Survives Scandal to Present Labyrinthine Art Ambush | Build

A A cluster of jagged concrete bunkers has descended into the heart of Princeton University’s leafy campus in New Jersey, sending tremors through Uxbridge’s fairytale land of Gothic turrets and spiers. The empty, blank facade of the new addition gives little away from the outside. It is wrapped in rows of vertical gray ribs, which contrast with the arched windows of the stately stone halls surrounding it, and has the appearance of a secure storage facility, watched over by a single cyclopean window.

The vault-like quality is appropriate. This massive new bastion is a repository for the university’s astonishing collection of arts and antiquities – a 117,000-piece space that includes everything from Etruscan urns and medieval staircases to Expressionist paintings and contemporary sculptures. Previously existing in a patchwork of expansions and additions accumulated over decades, the collection can now shine in its own purpose-built castle.

The building may need a thicker skin, and not just to deter Louvre imitators. The Princeton University Art Museum is the first major project by Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye to open since 2023, when three women accused him of sexual assault and harassment. Adjaye denied the accusations and no charges were brought against him, but the scandal turned his meteoric rise into a dramatic fall from grace. Many projects around the world have been cancelled. But Princeton kept pressing.

“The work is about 60% complete,” says museum director James Steward. “So we couldn’t completely demolish the building.” Instead, the university distanced itself from Adjaye Associates and handed day-to-day coordination to Cooper Robertson, specialist museum architects, who have been closely involved from the beginning. Adjaye was not on site nor invited to attend the opening — which, in a strange turn, will take place on Halloween.

These allegations have cast a pall over one of the best art museums built anywhere in recent years. For once, the absence of the famous creator allows attention to be drawn to those who led the project after Adjaye stepped down – chief among them Mark McQuaid, Adjaye’s former associate director; Erin Flynn, partner at Cooper Robertson; and Ron McCoy, interior architect at Princeton. Together they have conjured a place of rare materials and craftsmanship that relishes its theatrical spatial effects and sensual material details, and stands at the historic center of Princeton’s campus with a timeless air.

As you approach the complex, which is partly hidden in an alcove, the sharp facades of the nine soaring exhibition wings seem to soften at ground level, with balconies and ramps leading you into the museum on all four sides. The main entrance, below a low overhang, opens into a dramatic four-storey space, where a massive mosaic figure by artist Nick Cave leans forward in a boisterous gesture of welcome. Visitors pass through this pharaonic valley, arriving at a lower and darker entrance space, before arriving at a lofty welcoming gallery where daylight streams in through the upper windows, and a grand staircase leads up to the galleries, mirroring a 15th-century limestone staircase from Majorca, displayed on the opposite wall.

“We wanted it to feel like an open road,” says Juliana Oakes Dueck, the building’s chief curator, standing at the intersection of two roads that traverse the building, north to south and east to west, following the line of pre-existing paths across the campus. “If students happen to see some work along the way, and are interested in the arts, that’s a bonus.”

Beneath her feet, protected by a glass floor, is a 3rd-century Roman mosaic pavement. Excavated at a site near Antioch in the 1930s by a team of Princeton archaeologists, it depicts a drinking contest that could have been straight out of a student bar. Nearby is a vibrant pink and green abstract painting by Frank Stella, who painted it the year he graduated.

Continuing along the “Art Corridor”, you reach the Great Hall, a triple-height space where massive concrete piers protrude above, supporting two-metre-deep glulam wooden beams that frame the skylights above. Corner glazing offers enticing views of the ceramic collection awaiting upstairs, while sliding oak panels can screen windows for events, where retractable seating and a stage cleverly slide out. The space has inescapable echoes of Louis Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art, only enhanced. Sandblasted concrete gives a strong geological quality, and the sheer size of the structural components lends strong heft. There are hints of Ivy League supremacy: This is Kahn using the overweight formula.

On the upper floor, the sequence of galleries is masterfully judged, alternating size, height and color to avoid overwhelming the museum, and banish that all-too-familiar feeling of wandering through endless, indistinguishable white rooms. “This is not a white-cube museum since at least the 1980s,” says Steward, who has been the museum’s director since 2009 and co-curates about 150 exhibitions. “We used color as a way to deal with the design flaws in the previous building.”

Each of the 32 galleries features different colours, ranging from pale green to deep blue, with some walls upholstered in richly patterned fabrics, echoing the stately drawing halls where some of the works once hung. The immaculate display cases designed by Gobion of Milan allow for dense collections of objects, from netsuke sculptures to snuff bottles. Behind the scenes, mechanics are cleverly positioned in the V-shaped rafters that span the ceilings, carrying air handling and lighting paths, while daylight is brought in via reflective solar tubes, spreading an even effect across the rooms.

Three chapel-like spaces are located at the corners of the building, offering visitors a more meditative experience with certain works. Lined entirely in wood, with built-in furniture and picture windows framing campus views, these secluded rooms provide welcome moments of respite between the nine gallery areas. It is a beautiful place to sit during your travels between Africa, Asia and the ancient Mediterranean across the Americas. Whereas the previous museum had an unfortunate separation of the upper and lower floors, with many visitors not having access to the African and Asian galleries below, the new building puts everything on one level, almost doubling the exhibition space in the process. With no clear system or hierarchy, the idea is that you roam at will.

“We want people to get lost productively,” Steward says. “We hope visitors will have chance encounters on their way from point A to point B. We have placed our temporary exhibition space, the restaurant, as far away from the front door as possible, to force people to encounter different things on the way.”

There are plenty of details to admire, from the hall with its ribbed walls covered in pink felt, to the chain curtains that close off the galleries after opening hours (common areas will be open until 10.45pm each night). Then there are endless study rooms and seating nooks built into the walls, inside and out, as well as terraces that extend out into the landscape, providing a venue for outdoor events in the warmer months. The impressive build quality – particularly unusual in the United States – is the product of countless prototypes and material testing, McQuaid says, and is a testament to the client’s exacting standards and the precision of the contractor, L.F. Driscoll.

David Adjaye’s institutional work has, on a large scale, often been disappointing. His idea shops in London are flimsy exercises in public library glamour—and now they’re showing their age. His National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., has a dazzling exterior, but a clumsy and disappointing interior. Likewise, his Sugar Hill residence in Harlem, New York, prioritizes its eye-catching envelope at the expense of the homes within. As they grew in size, Adjaye’s projects often gave the impression of someone in a hurry.

Whatever the reason the Princeton Museum came out on top—perhaps a group of experienced architects, cooperating contractors, and a model client—it is clear that its success is due to more than one man, whose name still hangs above the office door.