Fifty years at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston.
One of challenges that many postmodern artists have faced over the last 50 years is how to create something new that transcends human imagination and yet remains fresh and innovative in light of all of the radical and transformative art produced post World War II.
Today in 2022, the Birkerts building at 5216 Montrose Boulevard still stands in its elemental and enigmatic majesty, with its steel exterior and parallelogram shape marking the Houston landscape in a way that few other buildings do.Architect Gunnar Birkerts was born in Riga, Latvia in 1925. Considered one of the architectural gems of Europe, Riga has one of the world’s highest concentrations of art nouveau buildings, mostly constructed around the turn of the 20th century.
Birkerts would eventually form Gunnar Birkerts and Associates in 1963 and go on to design some of the world’s most fascinating structures, including the famed Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. His reputation in America was certainly solidified by 1970, when the Contemporary Art Museum Trustees in Houston selected his design for construction at 5216 Montrose Boulevard.
By the 1960s, the collection and organization had outgrown the A-frame building and began planning for a new space that could accommodate more art and could architecturally represent the innovative and evolving interests of the organization.Gunnar Birkerts spent quite a deal of time in Houston during the latter part of 1971, when the foundation for the museum was being poured and the frame was being erected. The entire construction period was less than 16 months from start to finish.
And while the opening exhibit at CAMH created quite a stir in the Texas art world, Lefty Adler’s position as senior curator was terminated by the beginning of 1973 and he moved on to greener pastures in San Diego, taking a lead role at La Jolla’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
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