The centerpiece of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas, is a vast room that rises in a graceful arc of laminated-wood roof beams and swells outward with canted walls of glass as it vaults a pond. An elaborate network of cables, pipes, and metal fittings suspends this spectacular copper-roofed contrivance from beefy anchors at either end, thanks to the engineers at Buro Happold. Sloping glass walls draw in the pond's reflections, while stripes of sunshine pour through skylights. This space is just the appetizer—it's a restaurant called Eleven—before the grand buffet of paintings and sculpture that fills up America's newest art museum.

The architect is Moshe Safdie, a maestro of spectacle, who seems to be everywhere in recent months. In Kansas City, Missouri, just 200 miles north of Bentonville, his Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts opened last fall. There, a vast lobby walled and roofed in glass and big enough to host a cotillion unites two performing-arts venues. In Washington, D.C., a cluster of overlapping, translucent quarter spheres flutters above the three-level atrium of the U.S. Institute of Peace. It opened in September (see sidebar).

Safdie's work can be as hard to resist as a fattening dessert: You never get the anonymous mediocrity that has come to define our straitened times. In an era that's supposed to have set aside fanciful architectural spectacles for earnest social uplift, Safdie can seem to be a populist outlier. He recognizes that the theatrical gesture can ennoble public and institutional gathering places like the Peace Institute and the Kauffman Center. But he can also infuriate because too often, he's ham-handed.

Of his new projects, Crystal Bridges is the most appealing because he attempts, if not entirely successfully, to let a lovely forested ravine speak louder than his building.

Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress and second-richest woman in the United States, acquired an astonishing survey of four centuries of American art in just six years, with the help of veteran scholar John Wilmerding (see sidebar). The museum will not say how much the collection or Safdie's 93,000-square-foot structure cost, though the Walton Family Foundation has promised the museum $1.2 billion in additional funds. Clearly, the stakes were high—for Walton and for Bentonville, Walmart's hometown. Walton has said she wanted to build appreciation for America's artistic heritage in a region with little art on display. She sought out Safdie after she saw his 1994 Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Inspired by the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, where a stunning natural setting is integral to viewing art, Walton and Safdie looked at a ridgetop site before deciding to set the museum in a ravine in the stream-laced woodland just north of Bentonville's central town square. Safdie dammed the stream to form the two-level pond and arranged the museum in eight pavilions that follow the ravine's contours. Yet the complex is too big for this setting—it doubled in size since his first design—and lacks the delicacy of, say, the late, great architect Fay Jones, who lived and worked in nearby Fayetteville and whose famous woodland chapels are as diaphanous as the forest. Safdie did not weave his pavilions into the landscape. He wedged them so tightly together that the forest becomes just a backdrop.

You could walk through Crystal Bridges thinking that architecture is the main event. Before you have set foot in a gallery, you have descended three levels in a glass-fronted elevator, crossed a circular courtyard, entered a high, daylit lobby, and gazed into the extraordinary restaurant-bridge. Safdie is canny enough to recognize that he had to create a destination, not just a museum—that, besides a great collection, visitors might need the lure of a fantastic architectural experience and a lush natural setting.

Safdie separates Crystal Bridges's large gallery-suites with glassy linking structures and daylit lounges that open onto views across the pond or into the landscape. He cuts in little balconies and courtyards. These vistas invite contemplation while echoing the museum's extraordinary landscape paintings by such masters as Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole.

Safdie's work is full of references: to Louis Kahn in the cast concrete forms; to Mario Botta's way with striped walls; to traditional Japanese building in the laminated wood beams. But he only assembles these elements; there's no transformation of the whole that draws out deeper meanings. And the expressive exterior bravura at times overwhelms the art-viewing experience. As he shaped the pavilions around the pond and wedged them into the hillside, Safdie produced exhibition spaces with long, curved walls that unfurl a daunting array of paintings at once. A cavernous gallery devoted to Modern art dwarfs even the most monumental works.

But the real clunker comes along halfway through the chronological circuit, when you leave a series of windowless galleries to cross the pond on a glass bridge that is the twin to the restaurant bridge. The bridges are Safdie's most original contributions, but they are unsuited for art display. So Safdie had to build white boxes inside the glass bridge to provide walls to hang art on and ceiling scrims to control light (See page 85). It's a ridiculous feat, the architect ostentatiously solving a problem of his own making.

Visitors may well take away the sensuous memory of those “crystal bridges,” the theatrical entrance sequence, and the pleasing alternation of galleries and views of the woods. But the art-viewing experience is merely serviceable. It's too bad that Safdie could not truly unite his collection of forms into an extraordinary, deeply realized whole.

James S. Russell is the architecture critic at Bloomberg News. His book, The Agile City: Building Well Being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change, was recently published by Island Press.