Expansion in Portland.(Current and coming)(Portland Art Museum)(Hesse: A Princely German Collection)

In this age of museums expanding into new buildings, it is rewarding to see more than one institution electing to move into an existing building of architectural interest rather than tearing it down and starting anew. The Portland Art Museum in Oregon is the newest kid on the block in this respect, joining museums such as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The Portland building in question is a Masonic temple constructed in 1925. This very distinctive building type is characterized by eclectic rooms that collectively form an encyclopedia of aspects of style in interior decoration.

Portland's 141,000-square-foot temple, for example, includes elaborate interiors in the Moorish, Jacobean, Greco-Roman, and Georgian revival styles. Ann Beha Architects of Boston, which is noted for its sympathetic restoration work, is the principal firm for the three-phase project that started in 1994 and has just been completed. The renovated temple has office space, a library, and a film center, in addition to exhibition space for the museum's photography collection and the Center for Modern and Contemporary Art. The nucleus of the center is the Clement Greenberg Collection of painting and sculpture, which was recently accessioned en bloc. The North Building, as it is now called, is connected to the museum's other building by a sculpture court and by an underground passageway.

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Soon after the North Building opens on October 1, the museum will host an ambitious loan exhibition opening on October 29. Entitled Hesse: A Princely German Collection, the show includes more than four hundred works drawn from the collections amassed since the Middle Ages by this important German noble family. Among the objects on view are paintings, sculpture, antiquities, silver, furniture, arms and armor, textiles, ceramics, glass, books, prints, and scientific instruments that are permanently housed in the four Hesse family castles located near Frankfurt and still owned by the family and its foundation. They are Wolfsgarten, Schloss Fasanerie, the Darmstadt Schloss Museum, and the Darmstadt Porcelain Museum. The objects have been selected by Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, the guest curator of the exhibition.

The princely state of Hesse was located in what is now the center of modern Germany. The Hesse dynasty has its origins in the thirteenth century, and by the time Philipp I (the Magnanimous), landgraf von Hesse, inherited the title in the sixteenth century, strategic alliances had made the principality one of the largest and ...