Fish. A River. A Building.

(Editor’s note: This is the second of two articles by Patrick on Chattanooga.)

The Hunter Museum would make a trip to Chattanooga a joy even if there were no new Tennessee Aquarium. Perched nobly on a windy bluff, a ten-minute jog up the hills that make Chatty such a topographical glory, the Hunter is my favorite regional museum.

Albert Paley—the great forger of iron curlicues—joined the stately mansion that was the UrHunter Museum to the new addition with a forged fence so glorious in its serpentine curvings that it may be the best jointure in the history of American architecture.

Philly has a place of honor at the Hunter’s front door: Alexander Calder’s “Pregnant Whale,” a witty stabile in yellow, white, red and black. There’s also another Paley nearby, “Garden Gate.”

So I was prepared to expect something grand when I flew down to Chattanooga for opening day of the Aquarium. But not a world-class masterpiece. By Peter Chermayeff, founding member in 1962 of the Cambridge Seven, who have had their slide rule’s way with the aquaria of Boston, Baltimore, Osaka.

It’s William Blake’s “minute particulars” that make this one such an effective work of architecture. This $45 million facelift for where Market Street runs into the Tennessee River is chock full of inventive ideas.

Begin with the cladding. It’s like Venturi’s PoMo multicolored brick at Princeton, but it’s softer in brown, beige and almost yellow. When you get up to it, you realize why: The aggregate simulates fossils embedded in stone. Sun and clouds play an unending game with its surfaces.

The shape of the structure is two huge trapezoids separated (and joined!) by a vertically rectangular reflective glass wall. It’s Kaleidoscope City. What a way to end the main drag of a town that once was on the visual ropes.

I had the dumb Irish luck (yet again) to be ogling these traipsing trapezoidals when Peter C. hisself ambled by. I laid a pop quiz type question at him: How did this job—coping with a river bluff—differ from Baltimore, where you had an inner harbor to deal with?

Oh me, oh my! Did that ever unleash a brilliant improvised lecture on the architecture of unification—buildings which draw pre-existing parts together to form a more visually satisfying whole.

He pointed to the left where they’re promoting a future Hilton hotel and to the right, where they’ve already broken ground for a visitors’ center. Then local artist Ted Sanderson ambled by, and I collared him, a bit skeptically: I’d heard that the siting he and a young SITES architect had devised for Chermayeff’s building cost $10 million.

Ten MegaBig Ones for landscaping? Five minutes into his explanation—Ross Landing was to be the civic navel from now unto eternity—I was humbly eating Moon Pie. The locals got $20 million worth of ideas and verve for their money.

You walk across a raised wavy concrete ramp and suddenly realize you’re reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “American Dream” speech about Lookout Mountain, that very bastion of Confederate Rebbery. Walk over here and you’re reading a mini-anthology of Cherokee lamentations.

Slowly, it dawned on me that all the concrete squares with Sequoah’s and other sentiments on them were cracked. I thought to myself, what damned cracker vandalistic gall. Except they were cracked on purpose to remind us of what we did to the Indians. Broke our word on every occasion.

Those two siters have given us unending sights for sorely deadened eyes that will last until 2042, when they’re going to open the time capsule they planted on May Day—with an organic chemist’s analysis of the toxicity of the Tennessee River water. Concrete softened with the gentle imprints of fossil leaves. Bricks and slabs of different textures. Trees of every ilk.

And we haven’t even entered the building yet! Inside, superb architectural detailings almost distract you away from the fauna. First you ascend to the top floor on an escalator topped by a series of TV’s playing burbling brook images and sounds. As you walk off the escalator, bingo, there’s the Big T before your very eyes.

You can ogle up and down the river—there are three bridges. Next comes a brilliant series of illuminated maps which tell you what the Big T has been up—and down—to, the Ohio River in Paducah, Ky., where it quickly empties into the Mississippi at Cairo, Ill.

What a perambulating old meandering snake of a river. It pokes its nosey waves into the nooks and crannies of ten states. Begins as an itty bitty creek—and there’s a lovely visual bordering that simply lists the quirky names of all those tiny feeders—and ends as a really big one, worthy of emptying into the Mississippi.

Here’s where the thrills begin. You slowly down-ramp, with sidebar excursions into every dimension of this big river system. I thought they were cheating on their promise to be the world’s first fresh water aquarium when I saw a squid murkily disporting itself. I said to a docent, there ain’t no such animal in fresh water. He patiently explained I had reached the Gulf of Mexico. His eyes said, “Dumb Yank.”

You remember the old tune which went “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly?” Well, they do it together at the Tennessee Aquarium. A particularly saucy duck was monsooning on the customers as she preened her feathers and practiced vertical takeoffs. And though I’ve groused all my life, at T.A. May Day I saw my first grouse, sulking in a tree—then flying away.

There’re rattlers and alligators and water moccasins, piranhas and barracudas to appeal to the crudest macho in us. Only the otters disappointed the crowds on opening day—secretive, always “out to lunch.” And I’ve only, so to speak, scratched the surface of the water. I’m a quick study when it comes to museums, but I was astonished to discover that I had spent four solid hours sucking up to this mess of fish and fun. And I was ready for more, but they were putting away the animals for the night by putting us out.

The next morning, I did what I usually do before breakfast: I cruised for architecture. Man, does Chattanooga have it. And the zany ups and downs and ins and outs of its topography make them even more interesting.

Go Choo Choo some spring or summer soon.

From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large