Selldorf Architects reveal new design for the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts

It’s been a busy few years for Selldorf Architects, the award-winning New York practice helmed by US400 architect Annabelle Selldorf, with museum projects including The Frick, The National Gallery and The Louvre in the books or on the boards.

The Clark Art Institute, a renowned museum and research institute located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is also set to receive the Selldorf treatment, via a new 15,000 sq ft wing, slated to open in 2028.

The addition will include 12 dedicated galleries to house more than 300 works of art donated by Aso O. Tavitian, a self-made entrepreneur who amassed a formidable collection of European art between 2004 up until his death in 2020. Tavitian also allowed for a $45 million gift to fund construction and support his collection’s curation and care.

‘Before Aso Tavidian's untimely passing, we had a discussion with him about who would be the ideal architect of the wing. Annabelle Selldorf was the person that he wanted, and the person that we wanted,’ said museum director Esther Bell during a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

The architects, who had renovated the Clark’s Manton Research Center a decade ago, faced a challenging task: how to unite a 1970s red granite gallery wing with the Clark's original marble building, a 1950s neoclassical design by Daniel Perry. (Tadao Ando also has two structures on the 140-acre campus). Previously, the buildings had been connected in a ‘shall we say, inelegant way,’ via a bridge, Annabelle Selldorf said. ‘It never felt like it was a gracious transition between one and the other.’

‘They’re personalities,’ the architect added, ‘So, what is one to do but to create a companion?’

That architectural 'companion' was revealed Wednesday for the first time. The insertion is Selldorf's brand of quiet elegance, appearing as a simple rectilinear volume nestled between two existing buildings. The facade, however, is a pixelated array of Calacatta Malva marble, whose rich indigo veining helps create a visual transition between the all-white ‘50s building and the speckled red-and-blue granite one from the '70s. The move, ‘creates a kind of mosaic but also brings together colouration and a sympathy in two directions,’ Selldorf explained.

The gallery interiors will be similarly straight-forward, with white oak flooring and bronze-framed windows, all the better to show off a new landscape, designed by Reed Hildebrand, and Tavitian’s treasures, which include four centuries of arresting Renaissance, Netherlandish, Baroque and 18th-century French artworks by Anthony van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Elizabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun and more. The works are the subject of an exhibition, now on view at the Clark through February 2027.

‘There's simply nothing more fun and interesting than to work with the curators, get to know the art, look at it first on small images on the computer, and then see the real thing,' Selldorf said. 'I think we're going to make really extraordinarily beautiful spaces for galleries in these 12 rooms.'