The Sheldon: Philip Johnson's Prairie Temple

On the University of Nebraska campus in Lincoln stands one of the finest small art museums in the United States, housed in a building that is itself a work of art. The Sheldon Museum of Art opened in nineteen sixty-three in a building designed by Philip Johnson, one of the twentieth century's most influential architects.

The Sheldon family's gift to the university came with an unusual stipulation: the building must be designed by an architect of international reputation, selected by competition. The finalists included Marcel Breuer and Richard Neutra, two giants of modernist architecture. Philip Johnson won. What he delivered was a departure from the spare glass-box International Style he had practiced earlier in his career. The Sheldon's exterior is a series of sculptural concrete pillars topped by thirty flattened arches, each one massive and Roman in feeling, sitting on the Nebraska prairie like a classical temple dropped from another civilization.

Johnson spoke at the dedication himself. He considered the building among his best work, a building that does not apologize for beauty, does not flatten itself into utility, and refuses to pretend that a museum is just a storage container for art.

The collection inside is equally serious. Strong in American painting and sculpture from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth, the Sheldon holds works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, and dozens of other artists who defined what American art could be. It also holds a significant collection of monumental sculpture in the adjacent Sculpture Garden.

For most drivers on Interstate Eighty, Lincoln means the Cornhuskers and the Capitol dome visible from the highway. The Sheldon is the thing worth getting off the interstate for, a building that makes the argument, quietly and in travertine, that the Great Plains deserve world-class architecture.