The design plans for the new Parrish Art Museum have at long last been made public from cutting-edge design firm Herzog & de Meuron, Swiss architects chosen for their ability to get underneath the skin of the community and use this information as the driving force behind their design. The museum initially considered more than 80 different architects and from all accounts, the museum board is very pleased with the final design. What initially appears to be a haphazard cluster of small buildings is actually a well-researched, environmentally sensitive and historically appropriate project that will house the museum’s complete collection (much of which has previously languished in storage). Set for completion in 2009, the new museum will replace the 25,000 square foot structure on Jobs Lane in Southampton with a 64,000 square foot building on 14 acres just off Montauk Highway in Water Mill.

After designing one of this century’s most talked about structures for the Tate Modern in London and in 2001 winning the Pritzker Architecture Prize, (architecture’s most esteemed accolade), Herzog & de Meuron has become one of the most recognized names in contemporary architecture. The Parrish project is the firm’s third museum in the United States with the major expansion to the Walker Art Center completed last year and the new $165 million M.H. de Young Museum in San Francisco which they built from the ground up.

“The Parrish will finally be able to tell the important story of the East End’s artists’ colony,” said Trudy Kramer, Director of the Parrish, about the new design concept. “It will also speak to the community’s influence on the development of modern art nationwide and internationally, and do so in broad context.”

The Hamptons art community revolves around studios where art is created and the architects looked at past and present Hamptons art colonies to understand what brings the artists here. The reasons are of course the space and, more importantly, the light. So, the primary challenge for the design became twofold: how to effectively bring the Long Island light into the galleries and how to make a museum that reflects the spaces that artists work in.

On eastern Long Island there is a lighting effect called the “big sky phenomenon,” which is caused when a small body of land is surrounded by water on two sides. Because of the way in which the light reflects off the water, the sky appears bigger than in most places in the world and the quality of light more intense. The artists here know this and build their studios around collecting this light. After seeing the plans for the new Parrish, artist Chuck Close was quoted in the New York Times saying that work he paints while in Long Island is often disappointing in the city; that once it’s removed from the Long Island sun “there are all kinds of colors you can’t see.” He added the new Parrish will be a place where it is “exciting to see paintings [works created on Long Island, which make up a vast portion of the museum’s collection] that we thought we knew. I think they are just going to sing in the new spaces.”

What Close refers to is a series of single-story structures inspired by the converted barns the artists on Long Island use as studios. These studio-like galleries are referred to by the architects as light collectors, and the idea is that all the galleries will be lit during daylight hours, entirely by natural light. While each of the mini-structures has a different shape and orientation on the site, Herzog & de Meuron will bring in the northern light by slicing off north facing pieces of the roofs and walls in each of the respective spaces and replacing these pieces with glass panels.

The series of “studios” are oriented by four “anchor galleries” inspired by the architects’ visits to the studios of Ross Bleckner, Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning and Roy Lichtenstein. Like actual artists’ work spaces, each of the anchor galleries will examine in depth the work of a single artist. They will not only represent anchor points in the museum’s collection, but also be orientation locations on the site and within the museum. An equally important piece of the design is the treatment of the natural components of the site. All of the planting on the lot will be indigenous and reference the meadows and dune habitats of the East End. The skylights and expansive windows will be designed to create a seamless transition between the gallery spaces and the outside environment.

The parking for the museum, often a design problem, will be cut down below the surface into trenches that arc around the museum, hiding the cars from view from the street. As of now, the architects are still making a decision about what materials will comprise the facings of the museum’s exterior structures. At the moment they are leaning toward sand-casting panels or using material that appear to be sand-casted. This became a strong interest to the designers after visiting the studio of deceased artist Constantino Nivola and observing how his sand-casted sculptures have weathered and been absorbed into the landscape around his Amagansett studio.

During his speech at the ceremony for the Pritzker, Jacques Herzog pronounced: “We are not interested in making prophetic statements about the future of architecture,” and while the new Parrish looks like it will be the most interesting architectural project on the East End, somehow his statement still exemplifies the approach they will take to the Parrish. It will not be a Frank Gehry monument to new architecture dropped into the Long Island landscape, but a functioning art center that incorporates gallery spaces, education facilities and media centers into a building that will assimilate itself into the Long Island landscape and, even more importantly, become emblematic of the Hamptons as an art community.