In the central hall of the once-holy barn of country music, the old Country Music Hall of Fame on 16th Avenue South, it was easy to imagine the patrons as the congregation of a rural church, gathered on a Sunday morning. The light streaming through the color-stained glass sanctified the space, even though the heads were bowed not to God, but to get a better view of the exhibit labels describing Elvis’ Caddy and the relics of country’s other canonized saints. Built in 1967 and expanded a decade later by Earl Swensson Associates, the building was inspired by the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. “It was an early major architectural statement for Music Row,” says former Country Music Foundation director Bill Ivey, “and an obvious symbolic choice.”
The rustic profile of the Hall of Fame, and its siting on the perimeter of what was then primarily a residential neighborhood, reflected the anti-urban values of the music makers—good country people come to town but still longing for home. The old Hall’s location near, but not of, downtown recalled the fringe status of the early Christian basilicas of Rome, which were placed just outside the city walls at a time when the emperor had gone to Jesus, but there were still lots of pagans in high places. In the ’60s, Nashville was easing away from the slogan “Athens of the South,” but the Chamber of Commerce moniker “Music City USA” was yet to come.
The new Country Music Hall of Fame, located at the corner of Demonbreun Street and Fifth Avenue South, is sacred space of a different breed entirely. This is ambitious architecture assertively sited, placing Nashville’s musical heritage front and center in the new show area of downtown south of Broadway, and in the city’s culture. When the new facility officially opens to the public next Thursday, May 17, it will mark the completion of a long-developing transformation, from an institution that represented the more provincial Nashville of three decades ago to one that embodies our growing city of today—wide-open and modern, but proud of its heritage.
The $37 million Hall of Fame—which houses not only the plaques memorializing the members, but also a collection of over a million artifacts, a research library, and the offices of the Country Music Foundation (CMF)—was designed by Tuck Hinton Architects as an abstraction of the heritage of country music. “We wanted to tell a story in symbols,” principal designer Seab Tuck explains.
In place of the old Hall’s literal symbolism of a barn shape in modern materials to suggest country’s rural backbone, Tuck used heavy, stable materials—Tennessee’s crab orchard stone, brick, rough aggregate concrete, rust-colored steel—to symbolize the earthy soil from which country music grew. The designer shaped these materials in forms that allude to country music’s visual and aural imagery—small towns, listening to the car radio on a lonesome road, the mournful sound of a train.
Tuck says the round drum of the actual Hall of Fame was suggested by a picture of an old railroad water tower with a stone base, its “antenna” by the WSM radio tower, its stacked roof by the progression of records from 78s to 45s to 33s to CDs. The glass conservatory serves as the building’s front porch; its rust-red steel frame refers to the railroad bridges that linked the small town to the larger world. The small town’s general store was a particular source of inspiration; the great wall slicing through the building like the fin of a ’50s Caddy alludes to the false-front nature of these stores, while the billboards on the sides of the building recall the signs that plastered them. The wall’s curving shape—which presented the engineers and contractors with a major construction challenge—gestures to the flying saucer curve of the arena across the street. The rhythm of the windows in the wall echoes the black/white rhythm of a piano’s keys while providing fine views of the city to the north. And the Hall’s bass clef footprint is a building block of musical signage.
This is homespun in a large, high-style, and clearly contemporary package. No one would mistake the Hall of Fame for vernacular architecture such as that of the Ryman. The building is a self-confident, and self-conscious, assertion that country music is a key component in the life and history of our city.
The front-loaded nature of the Hall of Fame’s exterior was perhaps inevitable. Light is not kind to museum objets, so the section of the building behind the wall, which houses the collections and exhibits, is basically a big blank box. The effect is that the sides are not particularly interesting to walk along. If the murals that were originally planned for these walls—but were eliminated by budget constraints—are ever executed, they should mitigate the blankness.
The interior was shaped by an intense collaboration between the Tuck Hinton firm and Ralph Applebaum Associates, a New York-based team of museum exhibit designers. Like the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., for which the Applebaum firm is most noted, the trip through the displays begins with an elevator ride to the top exhibit level, from where the visitor makes a gradual progression downward.
Applebaum’s main insight was to place the CMF’s collection of artifacts, which are the heart of the museum, at the building’s core, in a two-story glass booth so that viewers can visually apprehend their extent and complexity. Also in this core and on view to the public are the audio restoration lab and the technology center that controls the video and audio feeds throughout the building.
Running along the glass box, but separated from it by a two-story opening, are the exhibits. On the third floor, where wood floors and exposed cables give a “backstage” look to the space, the story begins in the 1920s and runs to 1970. The second level was designed to look like a recording studio, with vinyl floors and perforated acoustical panel walls, and continues the narrative into the ’90s.
“There’s so much transparency, it’s like an aquarium,” says Diana Johnson, the Hall of Fame’s deputy director for museum services and the staff liaison with the designers and builder. “Visitors can see others moving through the space, as well as the staff working with the collections.”
The displays are placed in a regular rhythm that begins with a theme panel, such as “country goes pop” for the mid-’60s. Glass exhibit cases of artifacts—in this instance the 11 Grammys won by Roger Miller during these years, as well as the manuscript of his hit “King of the Road”—illustrate each theme, with video scrapbooks or listening stations to flesh out the material. Each section is punctuated by a spiral listening booth presenting a single song—here “King of the Road.” As the history advances, the signage and objects shift gradually from monochrome to more vibrant colors, the spiral sound booths to shinier metal finishes.
A layered system of signage—primary for broad themes, secondary for each case, and individual labels for each artifact—provides information for every level of interest, from the casual viewer to the addict. “Ralph [Applebaum] always says that there are three types of museum-goers—studiers, strollers, and streakers—and that a museum must work for each type,” Ivey says.
The old Hall of Fame was a grandma’s attic of artifacts, a fascinating collection of tchotchkes and a muddled story line. “The new exhibits are definitely more interpretive than those in the old Hall,” Johnson says. “We wrote a script like a movie script.”
“We have a compelling story to tell,” agrees Hall of Fame director Kyle Young. “To make the narrative clear, we needed a clear path, with the architecture and the exhibition design feeding each other.”
This Hall of Fame is the fourth version that Tuck has designed. Ivey says the CMF originally retained the architect in 1989 to design an expansion to the existing building. These plans changed with a phone call from then-Mayor Phil Bredesen in 1993. “I was in my car heading to the Parks Department, where I was to announce the plan for the arena,” Bredesen recalls. “As I was turning onto Church Street, it occurred to me that it would be great to have the Hall of Fame downtown, so I called Bill Ivey.”
Hizzoner’s original concept was that the public spaces of the CMF—the Hall of Fame and exhibits—would go in the arena envelope itself, with the research collections to go into a new downtown library that was already a gleam in Bredesen’s eye. After consultation with the CMF board, Ivey responded that the CMF needed a facility of its own. “The collections are central to the institution and we’d worked hard to build them,” Ivey explains. “We didn’t want to hand them off to another institution.” But the idea of going to the city center had been born.
Bredesen then suggested a site on the arena campus, which the city had already acquired. Tuck designed a triangular building for the block between McGavock and Demonbreun across from the arena. Then the Hilton Hotel deal moved onto the scene, and the Hall of Fame was shifted a block south to give the building some breathing room by means of a city park.
The new site required another new design. But Ivey felt that the exhibit plan was “too generic” and hired Applebaum to come up with something more creative. He did, and Tuck had to design another building, this time for keeps.
“Coming downtown, and into a building that almost puts us in landmark territory, was absolutely the right thing for us to do,” says Kyle Young. “In these days, when so much is plastic, people really want authentic experience. Well, now they can look out our front door to Lower Broad and the Ryman, and there it is.”
