This Tadao Ando Project Is a Berkshires Rental

Williamstown, Mass.

The Williamstown Art Conservation Center had a great stroke of luck when its landlord, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, decided a few years back to boot it off the museum's bucolic campus in the Berkshire Mountains. The Clark was planning a major addition designed by that master of austere minimalist refinement, Japanese architect Tadao Ando, and it wanted to put the new building on the site then occupied by the independently operated regional conservation center, which for over 30 years has been healing the physical infirmities of artworks for private owners, corporations and a consortium now numbering more than 50 museums and other institutions, including the Clark.

Thanks to the Clark's ambitions and deep pockets, WACC now finds itself just a short hike from its previous home, nestled in an idyllic wooded hillside in what Thomas Branchick, the center's director, boasts is "one of the best conservation facilities in the world." WACC didn't have to pay a cent for construction of its $25 million hideaway. Its land is owned by the Clark, which picked up the building costs. Also designed by Mr. Ando, the new Stone Hill Center is arguably the most architecturally distinguished conservation facility in America, with the possible exception of the Richard Meier-designed J. Paul Getty Trust Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.

The new 32,000-square-foot building includes 12,000 square feet of state-of-the-art workspace, scientific labs and storage facilities. There are also education and meeting spaces and two small exhibition galleries for Clark-organized focus shows. Michael Conforti, the Clark's longtime director, hopes that the building will be more than a destination for art and architecture aficionados. He also envisions it as a way station for hikers and cross-country skiers on scenic Stone Hill, complete with an Ando-designed ski rack.

When the world-famous architect agreed to take on this relatively modest project after having been engaged for the Clark's expansion, WACC, behind-the-scenes by nature, suddenly became high-profile. Visitors can now peer directly into the lab's expansive north-facing windows to observe restoration in action. Regular public tours of the interior are offered.

In a departure from the smooth-as-silk poured concrete enclaves that the self-taught architect is best known for, Mr. Ando's Stone Hill Center is sheathed in delicately gray-washed horizontal cedar siding -- natural material chosen to harmonize with the rural setting. The individual planks range in tint from pale orange to gray to ivory, creating the subtle, soothing effect of an Agnes Martin painting.

Richard Pare

The Stone Hill Center, the new $25 million digs for the Williamstown Art Conservation Center.

There's also lots of concrete -- in walls that fence in (and partly block views from) a patio and outdoor terrace, and walls that conceal, like Japanese screens, the main entrance. But this is concrete unlike any Mr. Ando has used before: Echoing the exterior walls of the building, it bears the imprint of wood grain -- an effect created by molding the concrete in acid-etched pine forms.

Part of Mr. Ando's special appeal is melding inside and outside, blurring boundaries by extending the interior walls and floors outside the building. The most striking architectural element of Stone Hill Center is its exterior "7 Wall" -- a looming concrete partition, angled like the number, which appears to intersect one side of the new center and emerge from the other. This wall will be echoed by a similarly angled structure, in red granite, included in Mr. Ando's design for the Clark expansion on its primary site. The planned Ando-designed Exhibition, Visitor and Conference Center is scheduled to break ground next year and open in 2013.

Stone Hill Center's natural flow is stopped dead by its most frustrating design misstep: The white oak floors of its two small galleries extend outside the building onto an alluring porch, just beyond the expansive floor-to-ceiling windows. But there's no access to that resting spot from inside the building. Actually, there is a handy glass door leading directly out to it from the gallery wing, but it is exasperatingly labeled "Emergency Exit Only" because repeated openings would upset the climate-control balance required for the art. A vestibule would have solved this, but it might also have marred the clean lines of the architecture.

The inaugural show in the 2,500 square feet of gallery space is a greatest-hits array of works by Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent from the Clark's permanent collection. This was a last-minute substitution: The Clark had intended to install a show of borrowed works, "Through the Seasons: Japanese Art in Nature" -- a gesture to the Japanese architect. But less than two months before the opening, the plan changed, because it became clear that the platforms and cases needed for installing contemporary ceramics and 17th- and 18th-century painted screens and hanging scrolls would have interfered with visitors' perception of the new architecture. Also, because of the light-sensitivity of certain works, the picture windows would have been masked by shades.

The Clark does hope eventually to reschedule the aborted show. The Stone Hill galleries will generally serve up fare not on the Clark's main menu, such as non-Western art, contemporary work (Ellsworth Kelly is in discussion) and shows related to the activities of the conservation center.

Although they moved into their new digs only a few weeks ago, the conservators already appear to feel completely at home. There they are bringing new life to everything from large WPA murals created in 1936-37 by Arshile Gorky for Newark Airport to a walnut cabinet (c. 1875) by Daniel Pabst of Philadelphia, to 10 historic baseball gloves from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. Improvements over the old facility range from a 6½-by-10-foot table, accommodating oversized prints, to an 11-by-11-foot lead-lined room for X-raying objects -- one of only three such art-imaging chambers in the country.

The Clark has also engaged New York-based architect Annabelle Selldorf for a major renovation of its two existing buildings on the main campus and hired a young New York-based firm, WORKac, to design exhibition and storage facilities for the 29,000 square feet of raw factory space that the Clark recently leased from MASS MoCA, the lively contemporary art museum in neighboring North Adams. Landscape architects Reed Hilderbrand Associates are designers for the Clark's alterations of its natural surroundings.

Despite all this architectural ferment, Mr. Conforti asserts that "the Clark never wants to be big" . . . except, perhaps, in artistic, educational and scholarly ambition.

Ms. Rosenbaum writes on art and museums for the Journal and blogs as CultureGrrl at www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl.