Newsmakers: Studio Ma’s Christiana Moss on Building Museums for a Hotter, More Expensive World

The Western Spirit Museum in Scottsdale, Arizona, was a strange proposition for architect Christiana Moss when she first began designing it. There was a site, provided by the city, but not much money. There wasn’t even a permanent collection. The building would have to come together, as Moss puts it, like “stone soup.” 

It worked. Designed by Moss’s Phoenix-based firm Studio Ma, the museum, also known as Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West, opened in 2015 and became a Smithsonian Affiliate in its first year. But perhaps more importantly, it began attracting collections—lots of them. What was originally conceived largely as a lending institution now holds more than 3,000 works and historical objects, and its growing collection has created that most familiar of museum problems: where to put everything. 

This March, the museum opened the Louis Sands IV Center, a $12 million expansion also designed by Studio Ma. The roughly 12,000-square-foot addition brought the museum to 55,000 square feet and opened with four exhibitions drawn from major private collections, including the first public presentation of works from the Eddie Basha Collection. 

For Moss, one of Studio Ma’s three founding principal of Studio Ma, the project is also a useful demonstration of what museums are asking architects to do now. The original building was constructed using tilt-up concrete, the inexpensive method more commonly associated with strip malls and big-box stores. Studio Ma used it to deliver the museum a building that cost roughly one-third the price of comparable structures, then turned the constraints of the Arizona desert into part of the architecture itself. Deep ribs shade the facade from the sun; glass is used sparingly; a courtyard brings daylight into the building; and water collected from the mechanical system and seasonal rains makes its way visibly through the museum. 

That approach feels particularly relevant at a moment when museums are being asked to do more with less. Moss still believes museums should be beautiful, even iconic. But the “Bilbao effect,” the idea that took hold after Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao opened in 1997 that a spectacular museum building could become a destination in itself and even transform a city around it, is harder to sustain. Moss argues that architects working today also have to think about energy, operating costs, adaptability, and what happens to a building decades after the ribbon is cut. “You have to kind of prove the business case of it,” she said.

ARTnews spoke with Moss about building a museum like a big-box store, designing for the desert, what she learned by returning to the same building a decade later, and how museums are beginning to rethink what architecture should do for them.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: You designed the original Western Spirit Museum in 2015 and have now returned for the expansion. What did you learn from watching the building operate for a decade?

Christiana Moss: When we started they had no collection. It was really designed initially to be almost a lending museum. There was very little specificity to the design of the galleries because it was meant to be extremely flexible. Then, as they acquired more work, it became clear that they needed spaces that accommodated more specific types of objects and paintings. That became part of the design challenge for the expansion.

The expansion was essentially designed around Eddie Basha’s collection of Western art. He had a really exquisite collection, really preeminent, and he gifted it to the museum. Another donor stepped up and paid for the building to house the collection. So between the two of them, it was a huge gift, and the addition was designed specifically around that collection.

So in a way you designed two different museums: the first without a collection and the second around one.

That’s true. Now, storage is the next challenge. What’s amazing about the trajectory of the museum is that it was envisioned as a place that would tell the story of the West and become a preeminent Western art museum. In terms of attracting collectors to gift their collections, it has been hugely successful. Its collection is growing by leaps and bounds because people are really drawn to it, both local collectors and national collectors.

You described the museum once as a “stone soup building.” What did you mean by that?

When we started, they had no collection. The site was gifted by the city, and there was really no budget. The city of Scottsdale went out for a bond and received funding for the core and shell of the museum. Then the foundation, which operates the museum, raised the money for the interior, while the building was being constructed. And even before we finished, they had already received a gifted collection. So it really did come together piece by piece.

The construction method you used, tilt-up concrete, is something we normally associate with commercial buildings. How did you turn that into a museum?

Because this was a municipally funded project, we had an extremely challenging budget. For the core and shell, we had $190 per square foot for phase one. We did it as a design-build contract, so we worked directly with the contractor through the design, and we were told that the only way we could afford it was if we built it like a big-box building, like a Walmart. We had to use the same construction methodologies as a Sam’s Club, which meant tilt-up concrete and steel joists. We said, “Okay, great. We’ll do that.”

We realized the way to give it character and really make it feel like it was of its place was to be rough about the materiality. We made very exaggerated, deep ribs in the concrete. We call it self-shading. It shades the building as much as possible, which is a good thing to do in the desert. The ribs also evoke the ribs of the saguaro [cactus].

And some of the appearance of that concrete happened by accident?

We had thought the ribs would come out fairly cleanly. But when the contractor went to remove the formwork, it got stuck and they started to crack. When we saw the result, we were like, “This is beautiful. Just let it crack.” It made it much more organic and rougher. That texture was kind of an accident, and yet it became one of the most defining characteristics of the building.

Museums need an enormous amount of climate control because of the objects inside them. Is that model changing?

There has been some evolution toward having a slightly wider range of tolerance. There are standards that have been developed to make museums more energy efficient. But it really begins with the fact that we have sensitive objects. Making your envelope as insulated as possible and reducing the amount of direct solar heat gain is huge in terms of reducing the energy needed to keep the museum within the appropriate temperature and humidity range.

It helps a lot when you have good passive design: shade it, self-shade it. Put glass only on the north face of the building and only in areas of circulation. Being really responsible and careful about the use of glass helped tremendously. We’re running at something like 35–40 percent of the energy usage of a typical museum.

Are museums asking different questions of architects than they were 10 or 15 years ago?

I think there’s a huge responsibility of stewardship, and of making institutions more resilient in the face of changing economic conditions. Doing more with less is just becoming a theme. Achieving something that’s iconic while doing it in a responsible, cost-effective way is something we find clients coming to us for more and more. We feel a deep sense of responsibility toward coming up with ideas that are truly sustainable and resilient so that the institutions thrive.

For a while, the dominant idea seemed to be the Bilbao effect: build a museum that is as much of an attraction as what’s inside. Are we moving away from that?

I think we still believe in having wonderful, exciting experiences, always. But they have to be rooted in a sense of fiscal responsibility. You have to prove the business case of it, and the metrics, in order to make that level of investment. Responsibly reusing buildings and doing really effective adaptive reuse is part of that. I think people are feeling that sense of responsibility even more now than they did before.

Water is very visible at the Museum of the West, despite being in a place where water is scarce. Why?

It was really important for the story of water to be part of the museum. We collect the condensation from the mechanical system. During monsoon season, when we have excess moisture, we utilize that, along with the water from rain events. We collect it and channel it to the courtyard. There’s a feature called the weeping wall on the north face of the courtyard, and that water gets displayed and drips across this Cor-Ten steel wall. It’s symbolic of the tensions around water in the Southwest. Then you can see it move through the courtyard through a series of runnels, into a planted area, underneath the building, and into the plaza out front. It’s about using the building as a vehicle through which to tell stories of its place. Scarcity, especially around water, has always been part of our story.

You have several museum projects coming that are still under wraps. Without naming names, are you seeing ideas repeated across them that tell you where museum design is going?

I think connecting more to nature and the interplay of art and nature is becoming a theme of the work. I would also say that making space for technology, having more of a dialogue with technology, without compromising your individual experience of a piece of art is another theme. I had this amazing experience touring the Princeton University Art Museum with a European curator. I felt like in one afternoon I took a whole semester of art history. If people could have access to that kind of incredible learning within a shorter period of time, that’s huge. The ability to channel the knowledge of curators and translate that for people using technology could be mind-blowing. But we also have to allow you to see art and be in the space of art without screens and mediation. Balancing that is going to be a wonderful design challenge.