First the factual error: Matisse's "Joy of Life" or "Bonheur de Vivre" is relatively small easel painting from 1906, owned by Barnes, but not a mural commissioned specifically for his house. The mural is the much later "The Dance II."

Second: Tsien and Williams are architects who design buildings that almost always disappoint in person, mainly because they waste a lot of space, often devoting it to vast and confusing circulation spaces. The Hunter Science Center at Emma Willard feature a long, useless right-angled courtyard. The Folk Art Museum's well-like central atrium eats up more space than the galleries, and is particularly daunting for the musicians whose sound is swallowed up at the weekly Friday concerts. Unfortunately, their inventive use of materials, which I admire as much as Witold, cannot make up for this serious flaw.

The criticism heaped on the giant light cantilever, the classrooms, and the generally confusing layout by both Witold and Niccolai suggest that they are up to their old tricks. This makes them a particularly poor choice for the architects of the Barnes Foundation, because the charm of the original building was the way everything was crammed together: the walls covered in paintings that allowed for the wacky and inventive juxtapositions of form. Space was carefully used, because there wasn't much of it to begin with and Barnes wanted each space to mesh coherently with the art it contained.

I'm not even sure why the foundation bothered to keep the original arrangements of art. The idiosyncratic, radical formalism that drove Barnes to set up the collection as he did has has long been out of fashion, after formalism dead-ended with Clement Greenberg in the late 50s. The original arrangement is only instructive as a historical artifact, i.e. as the window into the mind of a particular American art collector operating in a particular era. The context of the house itself was essential for this. If we're going to drown Barnes' collection in the vast, confusing spaces of Williams and Tsien, we can stop pretending that we've done something wonderful or important by keeping the original arrangement of the art.