Museum Plaza Proposal
To support the capital and operational costs of a 3,700 m² (40,000 sf) art institute, a development of over 141,800 m² (1,530,000 sf) is needed. To avoid over-saturating Louisville’s market with any single commercial program, its uses are necessarily mixed, including luxury condominiums, hotel, offices, loft apartments, and retail.
The economic and dimensional imperatives of the project are resisted by the physical constraints of Museum Plaza’s site. Located within the Ohio River’s 100-year flood plain, between a levee wall and an interstate highway, the site is a disparate set of parcels with no immediate relationship to Louisville’s Central Business District. The site is further complicated by a subterranean electrical utility right-of-way and several arterial streets.
Convention would typically position the public program-both cultural and commercial-at street level and the profit-making towers above. This strategy is not possible at Museum Plaza, as the site would cut off any ground-level public program and position the towers implausibly close to each other.
To liberate these conditions, the plinth of public program (the “Island”) is elevated 24 stories aloft and the towers evenly distributed above and below.
The luxury condos and offices above and the hotel and loft apartments below are profit machines: their areas, plans, and views are dictated by the market, optimizing financing and maximizing rents and sale prices. The towers’ independence allows each to be designed and financed on its own terms, and renders the unusualness of the overall massing less consequential.
In contrast to the towers, the Island houses all the unique and public elements of the development, both cultural and commercial. By isolating the project’s uniqueness within the Island, difficulties such as exiting, circulation, and security are also contained. Creation of construction documents for the rest of the building is thereby accelerated, and construction started over a year before the Island’s design is complete.
The two normative gallery typologies-the white box and (since Bilbao) the articulated box-challenge their institutions’ operational budgets. With the white box, institutions must spend copious funds to invent unique environments for each new show. With the articulated box, institutions must spend copious funds to quiet the architecture’s voice for each new show. Museum Plaza’s galleries combine the white box’s flexibility with the uniqueness of the articulated box. Two large, easily repartitioned galleries are stacked in the middle of the Island.
Seemingly banal, the galleries are rendered unique by several remarkable views-one up between the towers, one down 24 floors to the park beneath-and a revolutionary design for the galleries’ perimeter walls.
Many living artists do not want to operate within institutional walls. Preferring to operate on real life, on real community, on real activity, artists increasingly shun the very institutions that are trying to house them. Museum Plaza overcomes this conundrum by bleeding culture and commerce together without compromising the galleries’ performance. A simple dot matrix, when rendered in color (including white), is perceived by the brain as opaque; when rendered in black, the brain perceives the matrix as transparent. By applying this basic optical effect to the galleries’ perimeter walls, art permeates into the everyday activities of the restaurant, cocktail bar, spa, gym, and swimming pool. Yet, the galleries maintain the pristine quality of a white box for the art patron. The galleries’ translucency allows art to perform in a whole new way-to both “see” and be seen-generating a new kind of energy and interaction between the art and the viewer.
By applying this basic optical effect to the galleries’ perimeter walls, art permeates into the everyday activities of the restaurant, cocktail bar, spa, gym, and swimming pool. Yet, the galleries maintain the pristine quality of a white box for the art patron. The galleries’ translucency allows art to perform in a whole new way-to both “see” and be seen-generating a new kind of energy and interaction between the art and the viewer.And the non-ticketed spaces, including shop, education, auditorium, and event space, serve as the main circulation for the entire Island, reinforcing the mix between culture and commerce.
The Loop’s ultimate architectural manifestation is a plate, bent to tie the cores together and to reach the cardinal points of the galleries and commercial areas.
The central galleries and their glass walls create a space for art that is not an enclosed temple, separate from life and commerce, but one which allows a range of interactions with art, from the peripheral to the engaged.
In most large developments, culture is an afterthought, a bone thrown to mollify a municipality. Museum Plaza invents the program for, and then realizes, a vehicle that literally and metaphorically places art at its center, challenging the art institute’s typology in the process.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development could approve a $100 million loan for the stalled, 62-story Museum Plaza skyscraper in downtown Louisville if developers secure a commitment for construction financing.
If HUD approves the loan, it would be a big step toward getting the $465 million mixed-use project off the ground and creating thousands of jobs in the community.
Loan expected to help developers with financing
The state of Kentucky in July applied for the HUD loan on behalf of the Museum Plaza partners as a way to help fund construction of the project, planned for Seventh and Main streets.Specifically, the Kentucky Department for Local Government applied for the HUD Section 108 Loan, which would be granted based on plans for creating permanent and temporary jobs for as many as 7,000 people in Jefferson and surrounding counties.
The HUD response is “a very positive step forward” and should help the developers as they seek additional financing, Greenberg said. “Work remains to done before we can get the financing. We’re confident we will get it completed.”
Partners have invested $50 million
The Museum Plaza project, announced more than five years ago, is being developed by husband and wife art collectors Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown, developer Steve Poe and Greenberg.Brown’s family founded Brown-Forman Corp.(NYSE: BFB), and she and Wilson are partners in 21c Museum Hotels and Kentucky Bison Co.
Greenberg, a lawyer with Frost Brown Todd LLC, said that the partners already have invested $50 million of their own money in the development of Museum Plaza.
He added that they’ve made “tremendous progress” moving the project forward during “extremely challenging times.”
The proposal for Museum Plaza, which is planned for a site roughly bounded by West Main, Sixth, Seventh streets and River Road, calls for a contemporary art museum, a Westin and a limited-service hotel, 300,000 square feet of Class A office space, shops and condominiums.
Plans also call for a public park and an 850-space parking garage.
Construction work stopped in 2008
Ground was broken on the project more than three years ago, but site work was halted in 2008 because of delays in securing permanent financing for the project. It originally was slated to be completed in late 2010.According to previous Business First reports, other funding for the project is to include:
• $90 million covered by bonds repaid through Tax Increment Financing district proceeds;
• $45 million from Louisville-Jefferson County Metro Government;
• $26.5 million from the University of Louisville, which has discussed locating its fine arts and possibly its graduate business school programs in the Museum Plaza complex;
• $15 million from bonds supported by philanthropic contributions from arts patrons.
The project is expected to create 4,500 construction jobs and 2,300 “permanent” jobs for workers in the building after it’s completed.
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