“It looked like a lead weight,” fellow cofounder Stephen Cassell concurs. Their goal, he says, was to underscore Rothko’s idea of “a powerful individual experience that is the marriage between” architecture and art. “A lot of what we were doing was removing obstacles to that.”
The skylight is one poignant part of an ambitious $30 million plan by ARO to expand the chapel’s campus. Also new is a modestly sized welcome center that sits across the street, behind the sacred space, tucked into the tranquil neighborhood of bungalows that are almost uniformly painted in what’s known as “De Menil gray,” according to Cassell. (The Renzo Piano–designed Menil Collection, where the De Menils deposited their storied art holdings, is a block from the chapel; the two institutions own many of those surrounding houses.)
The verdant grounds surrounding the Rothko Chapel.
Photo: Elizabeth Felicella“Our responsibility was to not overwhelm the exceptional character of the chapel building, and to maintain its relationship with the residential context,” Yarinsky says, discussing the careful scale and the massing of their additions. Those include a finished building for the chapel’s mechanics, making it much quieter inside, and one for programming that will go up in a future construction phase, for which fundraising is under way. Meanwhile, the landscape architects Nelson Byrd Woltz have been working with ARO to develop the parkland around the chapel, adding tree groves and “areas to sit and decompress” from a visit, Cassell says.
Yarinsky points out that the dynamics between the chapel and its reflecting pool, with Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk (1963–67) sculpture, dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr., at its center, “embody the mission of the chapel of contemplation and action.” For the De Menils, who were devout Catholics, art had a profound ethical dimension, and so a newly illuminated Rothko Chapel carries special meaning. Describing Rothko’s paintings under the fresh lighting conditions, Cassell says, “There are subtleties to the brushstroke, to the color, to the reflectivity of the paint, that you really didn’t see in the inadequate light. I think the paintings will have more subtle depth to them and more to discover over time. Which, you know, is the reason you're there.”
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September 23, 2020 at 12:27AM
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The Ambitious Restoration of Houston’s Rothko Chapel Is Now Complete - Architectural Digest
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