The Sheldon Museum and Philip Johnson's Best Building

The building stands at the edge of the University of Nebraska campus, at Twelfth and R Streets, and if you do not know what you are looking at, you might mistake it for a small palace that arrived from somewhere else. The travertine is Italian. The proportions are not modest. The man who designed it called it the best building he had ever done.

Philip Johnson was already one of the most celebrated architects in America in the late nineteen fifties when he was commissioned to design a museum for the University of Nebraska. The project was funded by a bequest from two siblings, Mary Frances Sheldon and Adams Bromley Sheldon. The museum would bear their name.

Johnson's design departed from the clean glass-and-steel International Style he had championed earlier in his career. The Sheldon, completed in nineteen sixty-three, reaches toward something older: a grand hall with a suspended staircase, interior proportions that make the act of looking at art feel ceremonial rather than casual. The travertine exterior catches Nebraska light in ways that shift through the day. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand thirteen.

The collection inside runs to more than twelve thousand works, with a concentration on American art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The museum runs approximately twenty exhibitions per year and has maintained free admission, which means that any Lincolnite who wants to spend an afternoon with Georgia O'Keeffe or Richard Diebenkorn can do so without paying.

Johnson said the Sheldon was the best building he ever designed. He designed the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. He designed the Glass House in Connecticut that became one of the most photographed houses in America. And he said this one, on a university campus in the middle of the Great Plains, was the best. That claim is worth sitting with for a moment.