At the top of ArtsJournal this morning is a link to LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne’s review of the new Seattle Art Museum.

The ArtsJournal teaser reads:

A Museum Where Art And Architect Cooperate
Christopher Hawthorne loves the Seattle Art Museum’s new home, mainly because it manages to properly showcase the art inside it without subsuming the architect’s skill and vision.

And then I read the review, which is a sly one. Hawthorne doesn’t love the Seattle Art Museum’s new home at all. If I’m reading correctly, he seems to find it decent, fairly good, but lacking in the sort of “real architectural cleverness and daring” that you find at the new ICA in Boston or the new Walker—buildings, he says (I haven’t been to either one, sadly), that have calm and well-proportioned galleries but are not humorless.

And I will admit, I hadn’t thought of it before, but the new SAM is humorless.

In my review of the new SAM experience, coming out today, I fail to notice the humorlessness. On the issue of art versus architecture, though, I come out siding with Hawthorne. All the discussion of the new SAM not being “look-at-me” architecture during last week’s press opening events, of the new SAM putting the art first, was tiresome hooey.

As both Hawthorne and I point out, there’s a lot of room between aggressive architecture that forces the art into a corner (and at the art world’s latest architectural bete noire, Denver Art Museum, reportedly, there are some interior corners so sharp they had to be cordoned off), and a humble servant of a building that simply fades into the background and barely registers as architecture. “There is plenty of ego, after all, in Cloepfil’s design,” Hawthorne writes. Indeed. (Check the minimalist majesty of the elevator bank, and you can start there.)

I am skeptical of the interior usefulness of Cloepfil’s brise soleil. Hawthorne questions another one of the sun shade’s stated purposes, its ability to transmit the outdoors into the museum:

The sections of the museum facing west are shaded by a stainless-steel brise-soleil system that can be manually shifted when curators want to change the lighting as they rearrange the exhibitions. But Cloepfil also uses the system to frame and restrict views and even to actively block them. It’s a game he’s played before, particularly in an impressive recent house in Sun Valley, Idaho. The result here is a museum whose views can’t begin to match those of Rem Koolhaas’ nearby public library …

But where Hawthorne really twists the knife is at the end of the piece, when he describes that it’s fashionable to diss the 1991 SAM design by Robert Venturi (the old SAM building). I call Cloepfil’s new SAM a kinder, gentler MoMA (the new MoMA in NY, by Yoshio Taniguchi). Hawthorne writes:

The truth, though, is that cycles of taste move much faster than construction in the architecture world. Planned at roughly the same time as Taniguchi’s museum and in something of the same spirit, the new SAM arrives just as many of us are feeling ready for at least a small corrective to MoMA’s upright and largely corporate approach — for a bit of humor and maybe a splash of decoration as well.

That doesn’t mean going back to the stage-set Postmodernism that Venturi and Scott Brown were turning out in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was often tinny and overly mannered. It only means that every time Cloepfil or Gates or Walsh brought up the Venturi design just to knock it, it served mostly as a reminder of what the new wing is missing.

This is provocative writing, and convincing.

I only have one thing to add: Mr. Hawthorne, you’re lucky you didn’t have to actually use the Venturi building for the last 16 years. It may be vogueish to slam it, but how can you blame us? It was a terrible building, inside and out. Was it worse for having tried at wit, and failed? Perhaps. I suppose that the prospect of another grossly failed attempt at levity and decoration may have seemed too much for this city to bear.

And so we have SAM The Serious.

The museum opens Saturday morning at 10 and stays open for 35 straight hours, until 9 pm Sunday.