At Mass MoCA, expansive plans for the future

Mass MoCA could cover up original building features like exposed brick and support beams to hide them from view, "and put in a bunch of perfectly proportioned white boxes, and you're just in the middle of abstract Nowheresville," Thompson says later, standing in the cavernous second floor of Building 6. "We just love being able to reorient people all the time. Here's where you are. You're in a mill. You're in North Adams. You're in the Berkshires."

Since Mass MoCA opened in 1999, it has faced its share of financial struggles. It achieved more stability with the creation of its first endowment and cash reserve in 2007, and together they now total $15 million. But it has always been rich in one resource not shared so abundantly by its better-funded museum brethren: space. It already boasts an uncommonly expansive 130,000 square feet of gallery space, with staff on hand to help visiting artists fabricate large-scale work that takes advantage of it.

Now the museum aims to double in size. After the planned expansion, it will total 260,000 square feet in gallery space, in addition to performance venues and other public facilities. With the August approval of $25.4 million in state funds, Mass MoCA got an early boost for the biggest capital campaign in its history, to fund renovations of more unused buildings on the property. The campaign, which is still in its "private" phase of rounding up contributions from key supporters, aims to raise another $25 million to $35 million in private money, including $18 million earmarked for a restricted fund created for facility upkeep — the sort of security blanket the institution failed to knit for itself during earlier expansions. "We had none of that when we first opened, and it nearly cost us the museum," Thompson says.

To fill the new space, he says the museum will lean on a handful of "partnerships" with outside institutions, collectors, and artists. Most space will be filled with artwork installed on loans of 15 to 25 years, some curated by outside entities and some programmed with help from outside funding. This model builds on similar long-term deals the museum has made in recent years to display suites of large-scale artwork by Sol LeWitt and Anselm Kiefer.

"It would be insane to try to build a collection to fill all the space we have. That would cost billions and billions," says board of trustees chair Hans Morris. Instead, program partners will be able to "create [their] own little museum condominium on the Mass MoCA campus," he says.

But do such arrangements cede control over portions of the institution's identity?

"We are carefully picking our partners based on what they intend to do and what their point of view is," Thompson says. "We're not going to do a firetruck museum."

The expansion's key element will be the transformation of Building 6, which sits next to the museum's largest current gallery. Rows of windows line its brick walls. Inside, the wooden floor planks are caked with dust. The space is divided by a prolific network of structural columns, 60 to a row. Ceilings are 15 feet high. One end nestles near the confluence of two branches of the Hoosic River, which winds its way across the museum campus.

Thompson envisions a glass curtain wall on that end, offering a sweeping view. A grand staircase will cut through the center of the building, which will link to a smaller, adjacent building with more new gallery space. An existing elevated passageway will be converted for visitor use, helping to complete a continuous loop of exhibition space on the campus. (Now, visitors reach the largest gallery and then turn around to backtrack.)

The plan reflects the growing importance of music festivals in the museum's performing arts calendar. Ground-level space will be opened into an arcade with vending for concerts, plus backstage areas for visiting performers.

Jason Forney, of the Cambridge-based firm Bruner/Cott & Associates that serves as project architect, says portions of flooring in Building 6 will be removed to create double-height spaces. Other areas will be partitioned into galleries of varying shapes and sizes. "One of the things that makes us excited is having all that space. Space becomes a design asset. We try to use it to our advantage, to sculpt it in different ways," Forney says.

Thompson says the museum aims to put the construction job out for bid in the spring. If work begins in summer 2015, the new facilities could open to the public two years later. Some space initially filled with changing exhibitions would eventually be replaced by additional long-term loans.

The stated rationale for the recent earmark of state money includes the hope that Mass MoCA will help revitalize the small city of North Adams, still recovering from the region-wide decline in manufacturing jobs that opened this campus for museum use in the first place.

Buoyed in part by the popularity of Xu Bing's monumental sculpture "Phoenix," Mass MoCA says it set an attendance record of 162,000 last year. (Previously, the average annual tally was 120,000.) It predicts the building boom will inspire an additional 60,000 yearly visits.

Mayor Richard Alcombright says it remains an ongoing effort to inspire more of those visitors to spend their dollars in his city's downtown, but cites the museum's overall economic impact and a list of private investments spurred by its presence. The museum also leases renovated commercial space to some 30 businesses.

Darren Waterston, who was recently in residence at Mass MoCA for eight months while creating an ambitious, three-dimensional installation now on view, says work like his own fits in neatly with the site's industrial history.

"This building has always been used in the making of things. It's always been fabricating something. Now it's fabricating art."

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Jeremy D. Goodwin can be reached at jeremy@jeremydgoodwin.com.