Heaven and Holl

We are clearly at some kind of tipping point. The simultaneous launch of Stephen Holl's Nelson-Atkins expansion in Kansas City, and Daniel Libeskind's "crystal" centrepiece to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), has given critics ample opportunity to reflect on the age of the icon being dead -- or, at least, the kind of icon ROM represents, as there is something of the icon about Holl's structures too.

The virtual unanimity of praise heaped on Nelson-Atkins by the critics has revealed another kind of unanimity, in critics' reactions to the original 1933 museum which Holl has extended. More than one critic calls it a "temple of art"; it is by turns "austere", "distant and unapproachable", "sacred and inviolate"; a "folly" with "high-minded language about art and humanity carved into its stone walls", and with a metaphorical "do not touch sign" placed upon it by the trustees. And it's not only the trustees who have put up such a sign: not one critic can contemplate an extension to the building that might have adopted the same classical, disciplined, bounded language as was used back then. Paul Goldberger in The New York Times opines that Holl's free-form, half-submerged glass lanterns which spill down the east side of the museum is a finer homage than copying could ever have been, bestowing "a kind of perpetual gravitas" on the older building.

Stuff like this is so contradictory. If the building is so goddam "austere" and "high-minded" why should the architect be praised for accentuating these qualities? And if its "gravitas" really does deserve being preserved in perpetuity why shouldn't a new extension seek a similar gravitas, using similar means, rather than slipping and sliding to avoid direct engagement?