Museum in Kansas City

Architects: Steven Holl Architects, New York; Steven Holl, Chris McVoy
Assistants: Martin Cox, Richard Tobias (project architects)
Site Architects: Berkebile Nelson Immenschuh McDowell Architects, Kansas City

Up to a few years ago, the Nelson Atkins Museum, ossified in a neoclassical palace-like building dating from 1933, looked like any traditional, conservative museum of art. Eight years ago, an architectural competition was held to create an extension for 20th-century and contemporary art. Steven Holl saw in this an opportunity to open the museum not only to new visitors, but also to the cultural life of the city. In contrast to the five other competitors invited to participate with him, Holl did not design the new wing as a monolithic volume set to the north of the main entrance face of the existing structure. He treated it as an elongated architectural landscape laid out along the eastern boundary of the site.

Concealed largely beneath planted areas, the roughly 16,000 m2 extension now forms an integral part of the sculpture park and is recognizable in the form of five glass cubes rising boldly from the topography of the site. Because of their ability to deflect daylight into the interior of the museum, Holl likes to refer to these glass cubes as “lenses”. Viewed from the outside, the new structure may, at first glance, seem like an assembly of independent volumes. Internally, though, one finds a continuous, unified sequence of spaces that follow the gently sloping landscape. The starting point is formed by the largest of the lenses, namely the entrance structure. On the one hand, this demarcates the space to the north of the main entrance, beneath which the new basement garage is located. At the same time, it marks the starting point of an extensive promenade architecturale, which presents visitors with the alternative of making their way downwards via a sequence of long ramps, or proceeding through the exhibition spaces, which are slightly set off from each other in level. Both routes are structured by a careful staging of space and lighting within the lenses.

It soon becomes clear that the T-shaped wall elements arching out at the top contain not just ventilation ducts or the load-bearing steel roof structure. With the aid of these elements, daylight is drawn in from all points of the compass and deflected into the darker internal spaces. The corresponding glazed facades consist of an outer layer with translucent U-section vertical glass elements and an inner layer of single glazing. This two-layer construction has advantages not only in terms of the building physics; it also provides comprehensive protection against damaging UV radiation. Depending on the time of day and position, direct sunlight is diffused, deflected, reflected, diffracted or absorbed by sandblasted and etched glass, and by glazing with various textures. Whereas U-section glass elements usually have a green tinge because of the iron-oxide added to them, in the Nelson -Atkins Museum this has been greately -reduced. As a result, the building has a gleaming white glass skin that creates an -almost supernatural, mystical lighting mood, especially in the circulation areas laid out next to the external facade. A similar effect occurs in the opposite direction, when the lenses — conceived as “instruments of light” — begin to gleam like abstract sculptures at dusk.

Steven Holl describes the different properties of the old and new structures with the image of “stone and feather”. A solid, introverted temple of the muses with fixed routes is now contrasted with a finely articulated museum flooded with light and possessing a number of emotional stimuli, a building with open sequences of space and intensive links with the park outside.

The fact that the sculpture garden and the museum are accessible to the public free of charge was certainly conducive to the New York architects’ open concept. Despite the bold contrasts and the fact that the extension disrupts the symmetric layout of the old structure and the gardens, ultimately the existing building is enormously enhanced in status — perhaps because it now has the appearance of a time-honoured exhibition piece itself alongside Steven Holl’s modern architecture.

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This article is an excerpt from DETAIL — Review of Architecture

   

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