The Charles Shipman Payson Building is the most recent expansion of the Portland Museum of Art (PMA) in Portland, Maine, located on the corner of High Street and Congress Square. Henry N. Cobb (of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners) designed the Payson Building, which introduced over five times more gallery space than in the adjacent, historic PMA buildings (McLellan-Sweat House, Charles Quincy Clapp House, and L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Galleries). The building opened in 1983, after Mr. Payson donated 17 Winslow Homer paintings and ten million dollars to the museum. Similar in theme to these Homer paintings, the Payson building contains a collection of contemporary paintings and short-term exhibitions created by Maine artists, focusing on regional themes. Exterior design details Cobb’s largest challenge was to create a building that provided an enjoyable and powerful location to view art, while relating to the diverse conditions of its awkwardly shaped urban site. The tall brick buildings enclosing the other sides of Congress Square required the Payson building to contain a unified, strong, large-scale presence. Conversely the smaller, historic PMA buildings on the Spring Street side of the build site required the Payson Building to have a smaller-building form that would accommodate these historic neighbors. Cobb’s solution was to design a wide façade made of red brick and gray granite lintels with semicircle openings. This forceful façade has the street presence of a Renaissance palazzo, enclosing the public square. Behind the façade Cobb gradually reduced both the height and length of the building until the building terminated in the back left corner, one fourth as wide and tall as the main façade. By stepping the building back and down in this way, Cobb was successfully able to grant primacy to the neighboring historic buildings. Cobb chose to comprise the structure of the Payson Building of a concrete frame with concrete block infill, rendering the façade essentially a “curtain wall.” This led to criticism from other architects that Cobb gave the building a false, billboard-like, front. Cobb claims, however, that the façade symbolically represents the interior. The circular insets and cutouts are metaphors that recall the square interior galleries and the rectangular brick insets signify the rectangular interior circulation spaces. Interior design details Behind the controversial façade lie many galleries with clean white walls and pine floors with granite stripping set into the floor. This granite marks off twenty-foot by twenty-foot spaces, thought