By MARK HIGGINS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The Bellevue Art Museum has become an accurate marker of its home and where it is in its march toward becoming a bonafide city.

When the museum opened its doors in 1975, Bellevue was mostly a bedroom community of Seattle, so having an art museum housed in a former wedding and funeral chapel bespoke its modest self-image. When the museum moved into its present space on the third floor of Bellevue Square in 1983, Bellevue was beginning to flex its mercantile muscle and the newly expanded mall was, almost by default, the heart and center of the car-flung city.

But now Bellevue has become an increasingly confident place of sophisticated plans and urban growth. Having its art museum in a shopping center has begun to seem as small-town outdated as having it in a former wedding/funeral chapel.

Bellevue is now a place of big dreams and the art museum is poised to play its part with a new presence. In the past nine months, the museum has announced plans to construct a new $20 million building on Bellevue Way, just across from Bellevue Square, and contributors have come forward with pledges of $8.5 million.

The ambitious goal is to open the 40,000-square-foot museum in July 2000, at the time of the annual Pacific Northwest Arts and Crafts Fair, the hugely popular midsummer event that spawned the museum.

Community momentum for the new museum is already strong, snaring early donations from major corporations and foundations (Boeing, Kreielsheimer), drawing the support of many of Bellevue's most well-known community leaders (developer Kemper Freeman Jr. is campaign chairman), as well as emerging philathropists (former Microsoft president Jon Shirley and his wife, Mary, paid $2 million for the half-acre site and donated it to the museum).

So strong is the momentum that supporters profess to be undaunted by the July 2000 target date.

As Anna Littlewood, longtime museum trustee and the immediate past president of the board, puts it: "Given the millions of hours that volunteers have put in since the fair opened in 1947, and given the thousands of hours that staff, volunteers and trustees have put into this project in the last five years, this will happen.

"We sincerely hope this will happen in the year 2000 at the opening of the fair. . . . What I think now is that it could be a few weeks on either side of that date."

The museum's drive for a new building is coming at a time of maturing cultural opportunities and programs in Bellevue and throughout the Eastside.

The Bellevue Philarmonic Orchestra has been infused with a new energy this season under the batons of five alternating finalists hoping to take over as the group's new conductor next year. The Belle Arts chamber music series has settled into its new home in the theater of the Meydenbauer Center, which has plans for expansion. And Meydenbauer has become the site of a yearlong series of children's theatrical events, called Ikea Family Stage.

But these are also the days when art museum projects, in this country and around the world, have become the equivalent of what cathedrals were in the Middle Ages: nothing less than the civic signature. That hope is underscored by the selection of noted architect Steven Holl of New York City to design the museum.

Within days of chosing Holl, the museum heard from a counterpart in Basel, Switzerland, which is planning an exhibition on museum building in the waning days of the twentieth century. It wanted to include the new Bellevue Art Museum because of Holl's prominence.

Holl is best known in this area for his sparkling new Chapel of Saint Ignatius at Seattle University, one of the most acclaimed Seattle buildings in recent years. He also recently completed a modern-art museum in Helsinki and a museum in suburban Detroit at the prestigious Cranbrook Institute.

But the University of Washington graduate's first job in architecture was in an office only 200 feet from the site for the new Bellevue Art Museum. That's an example of the sort of synchronicity and timing that the museum project seems to possess, to the delight of its supporters.

"For many reasons, I do believe this is the right project at the right time," says museum director Diane Douglas. "It strikes a chord of being reflective of the community today. And it's not the same-old-same-old museum -- it's certainly not the Seattle Art Museum on this side of the lake.

"Secondly, given the growth of the community, people in Bellevue are ready to sink their teeth into the whole city, its identity, its personality. The new Bellevue Art Museum is part of Bellevue growing up. That's certainly much larger than we are, but we are part of this civic moment."

Douglas arrived in Bellevue in 1991 from Chicago and has seen the museum reinvent itself, as she puts it, "in almost every way." Swept away is the traditional art-museum focus on buying and building a permanent collection of art. In its place has come an emphasis on education and interaction with art -- more on the model of science and children's museums, supplemented by changing exhibitions in the galleries.

As Douglas summarizes, "We're much more experimental than most art museums, which are usually places to take a passive look at art."

The Bellevue Art Museum's unusual program will likely have a large impact on its design. Holl is an architect who prides himself on working on a building "from the inside out," letting its purpose and uses, in large measure, determine what shape the building will take.

That is one reason why even sketchy conceptual drawings for the new museum are not available yet from the architect. Holl has challenged museum supporters to first refine what the museum should be accomplishing.

The site should also have a significant impact. Although the building is next to busy Bellevue Way and across from Bellevue Square, perhaps more important is its location on the south side of Northeast Sixth Street, a little-used roadway of varying widths that Bellevue has long been trying to establish as a six-block "pedestrian corridor."

Making the museum welcoming from the street and the walkway is one of the prime design objects. That is why the three- or four-story museum will not be surrounded by what was long a Bellevue fixture -- vast expanses of land turned to asphalt for parking. Instead, it will have underground parking and a great deal of openness on its first floor, along with a cafe.

As architect Holl emphasized upon his selection: "We envision a unique facility which will act as a cultural catalyst in this central Bellevue location. With wondrous spaces washed in magnificent light, this facility has a chance to be unique in its relation to artists and the public. At street level, we envision spaces that will draw the visitor into a world of creative enthusiasm."