THE NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ARTSteven Holl Architects - June 9, 2007

Nash Waters and Courland Newcombe

THE NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ARTSteven Holl Architects - June 9, 2007

Nash Waters and Courtland Newcombe

THE NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ARTKansas City, Missouri, United States - 1999-June 9, 2007

PROGRAM: Museum addition and renovationSIZE: 165,000 sfCONSTRUCTION COST: $85,900,000STATUS: Completed

INTRODUCTION

Steven Holl’s addition, projecting into the urban landscape and intersecting the sculpture park with several entry points, parallels the museum’s expanding role as a cultural activity center integrated into the life of the city. The new building’s spaces provide social platforms for the city’s cultural programs and merge exhibition and circulation with multiple routes, allowing varying levels of experiencing the art. The gallery level opens to the sculpture park periodically as it steps down into the landscape; and the garden in turn continues up over the galleries, forming an indoor/outdoor museum porous to the surrounding cityscape.

THE NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ART

Steven Holl was born on December 9, 1947 in Bremerton, Washington. He graduated from the University of Washington and pursued architecture studies in Rome in 1970. In 1976 he joined the Architectural Association in London and established Steven Holl Architects in New York City. Holl later started his teaching career and has taught at Columbia University since 1981.

Considered one of America’s most important architects, Steven Holl is recognized for his ability to blend space and light with great contextual sensitivity and to utilize the unique qualities of each project to create a concept-driven design. He specializes in integrating new projects into contexts with particular cultural and historic importance.

ARCHITECTSTEVEN HOLL

Holl’s architecture has undergone a shift in emphasis, from his earlier concern with typology to his current concern with a phenomenological approach; that is, with a concern for man’s existentialist, bodily engagement with his surroundings. The shift came about partly due to his interest in the writings of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and architect-theorist Juhani Pallasmaa.

Holl writes, “It is necessary to create an equivalent linguistic space,” then

goes on to say, “words cannot substitute for authentic physical and sensory experience.”

ARCHITECTSTEVEN HOLL

Isamu Noguchi sculptures set in a trough of pebbles that flow out to join other works in the garden >

THE NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ARTHISTORICAL CONTEXT

The large financial estates of William Rochill Nelson and Mary McAfee Atkins were combined to fund what is today a world-renowned art museum, the Nelson-Atkins. It took brilliant architects, art historians, curators and community leaders to turn Nelson and Atkins’ dreams into reality.

On July 16, 1930 construction began for The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, a neoclassic structure made of limestone and designed by Kansas City architects Wight and Wight. The 22 acres of ground were also developed into a park with landscaping and paths designed to draw visitors in from the area streets, neighborhoods and shops.

Original Nelson-Atkins Building - Completed 1933

The same aspirations that created the original Nelson-Atkins building characterize the new Bloch Building as a place to engage, educate and serve the community.

Since its opening, the museum has been committed to serving the Kansas City community. Its prominent location near the Country Club Plaza and free admission to all, every day, brings nearly 350,000 visitors anually.

THE BLOCH BUILDINGSTEVEN HOLL

Steven Holl was one of six architects that were selected as finalists for the Nelson-Atkins expansion project in 1999. The six finalists were encouraged to view the north side of the Museum as the best site for the expansion. Most of the other finalists did use that as the site and designed large buildings that used the original Nelson-Atkins as a backdrop. Other finalsists included Tadao Ando, Gigon & Guyer, Christian de Portzamparc, Carlos Jimenez, and Mochado & Silvetti.

Steven Holl Architects presented a design that moved the site to the east side of the museum and ran along the slope into the Kansas City Sculpture Park instead of blocking the grand north facade of the original building.

“The idea of complimentary contrast, the Stone and the Feather, drove our design for the addition to the classical stone temple and surrounding landscape. The addition is not an object: we envisioned a new paradigm fusing landscape and architecture. In contrast to the stone building, the new lightweight architecture of glass lenses is scattered about thelandscape framing sculpture gardens.”

-Steven Holl

THE STONE:-heavy-1933-direct circulation-bounded-inward views-imported style

THE FEATHER:-light-2007-open circulation-unbounded-views to landscape-meshing of interior and exterior

THE BLOCH BUILDINGSTEVEN HOLL

This competition winning addition is composed of five interconnected structures as opposed to a single massive expansion. Traversing from the existing building across its sculpture park, the five built volumes form new spaces and angles of vision, creating new experiences of the existing museum. Circulation and exhibition merge as one can look from one level to another and from inside to outside. The curvilinear path in the sculpture garden above has its compliment in open flowing space through the continuous level of new galleries. Glass lenses bring different qualities of light to the galleries while the sculpture garden’s pathways wind through them.

THE NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ARTTHE BLOCH BUILDING

THE BLOCH BUILDINGSUSTAINABILITY

The 50,000 square foot green roof minimizes the building’s ecologogical footprint, while providing a natural storm-water management system. The green roof’s high insulation performance and the large thermal mass of the below-grade construction reduce the energy required to maintain the strict environmental criteria of the Bloch Building’s museum spaces. This construction, along with the retrofit of the original central plane has resulted in an energy use for conditioning both buildings that is less than previously needed for the original building alone.

Optimum light levels for all types of art or media installations and seasonal flexibility requirements are ensured through the use of computer-controlled screens and of special translucent insulating material embedded in the glass cavities.

The lenses are made of planks of transluscent, solar-textured and sandblasted U-profile channel glass creating a structural cavity wall that serves as a thermal barrier. The double-glass cavities of the lenses gather sun-heated air in winter or exhaust it in summer.

Aerial view of 50,000 sf green roof >Detailed wall section showing structure, lighting, and insulation construction >>

THE NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ARTTHE BLOCH BUILDING

THE PROBLEM

HOW TO PROVIDE MORE SPACE WITHOUT COMPROMISING THE ORIGINAL 1933 NELSON-ATKINS BUILDING

THE SOLUTION

ARCHITECTURE AS LANDSCAPEPHENOMENOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURE THROUGH MOVEMENT AND LIGHT

THE NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ARTTHE BLOCH BUILDING

THE BLOCH BUILDINGARCHITECTURE AS LANDSCAPE

The long, slender building runs along the east side of the existing building, most of which is underground. The five lenses emerge from the ground to create an undulating and diverse interaction between architecture and landscape.

In the interior, the galleries are contained within vaulted ceilings and ramped floors that drop with the slope of the site, while the exterior structures ascend out of the ground as sculptural elements that become part of the surrounding nature. This creates an architectural experience that engages visitors in both the interior and exterior.

In the spaces between the glass lenses is a green roof that allows visitors to wander through the sculpture park and just sit outside and relax.

Holl designed a building that is neither above nor below ground, but both at the same time, which not only allows the buidling to become a device for viewing nature, but also becomes a part of the natural landscape itself.

THE BLOCH BUILDINGARCHITECTURE AS LANDSCAPE

The aim of fusing architecture and landscape opened up possibilites of shaping interior space in relation to landform rather than to building mass. The landscape grade to each side flows in and out of sync with the floor levels, setting a varying relation between interior and landscape. This allows visitors to move down into the landscape only to unexpectedly arrive above it.

THE BLOCH BUILDINGARCHITECTURE AS LANDSCAPE

The building’s section is developed as the plan opens up and one turns a corner with bending spaces shifting in perspective as one moves through it, converging and diverging along routes within the elongated body of the building.

THE BLOCH BUILDINGARCHITECTURE AS LANDSCAPE

PHENOMENOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURELIGHT

During the day light is reflected into the galleries through the five lenses. At night, the gallery spaces light up and give off a soft glow, “like Japanese laterns illuminating the Sculpture Park,” (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art).

A large reflecting pool is located along the entry plaza that hovers above the parking garage below. It was designed in collaboration with Walter De Maria, a minimalist artist who often works on light and who on this occaission created a sculpture “One Sun/34 Moons” that is located in the pool. During the day natural light is directed into the garage below. It has a beautiful effect because the light is refracted through the water. At night there is a reverse effect as the light lifts up through the circles to illuminate the plaza.

Steven Holl aimed to intensify the infinite variations of natural light through time within the space in order to connect the visitors to the ambient exterior of the sun’s position, the season, and atmospheric conditions of the specific moment.

He wanted to give the space and the viewer dynamic light, while also satisfying the light levels set by conservation criteria. To do this, Holl established a datum 12 feet above the floor, below which the light levels meet the criteria and above which the light varies outside the range. The architectural volume is illuminated by natural light and the art lighting is supplemented with electric light for focus and control.

The lenses’ multiple layers of translucent glass gather, diffuse and refract light, at times materializing light like blocks of ice.

LIGHTPHENOMENOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURE

As the walls extend above the art zone into the natural light of the lens, their form is organically sculpted to play in the light, to mix north and south light, and to emphasize the variations of color and intensity found in daylight.

These organically sculpted “Breathing T’s” are the heart of the addition’s lenses. They are not only a light and air distributor but are also the structural concept. The Breathing T’s transport light down into the galleries along their curved undersides while carrying the glass in suspension and providing a location for HVAC ducts. A continuous service level basement below the galleries offers art delivery, storage and handling spaces, as well as flexible access to the “Breathing-Ts”.

THE BLOCH BUILDINGMOVEMENT

The free flowing plan allows for a path that is woven between the lenses in the sculpture park. This allows people to stroll freely onto the rooftop courtyards or wander back down into the galleries, or navigate a staircase between the old and new buildings to the upper plaza. This freedom of movement adds to the sense of discovery.

The flow of the plan is balanced with moments of stillness dicteated by the use of light and paths. The main lobby, for example, a long, narrow, three-story atrium crisscrossed by ramps that lead down into the galleries, prompts visitors to reflect on their choices .

The option of choosing and wandering is reinforced by the museum’s policy of free admission, uncommon among the nation’s ever hungrier art institutions. This allowed Holl to create various entrance points into the building. The relaxed ease of entering fosters a sense that the museum and the artworks inside it belong to everyone, not to a privileged set of connoisseurs.

As one descends, they can follow a slow-paced sequence through the galleries or proceed down a long, shifting ramp with carefully framed views of the nature in the park and the old museum building. One is able to bypass some galleries and re-enter the sequence at any time without sacrificing a sense of clarity.

Holl compares the experience to reading a 17th-century Chinese scroll painting, a narrative that requires a constant shift in your perspective as the drawing unfolds. The subtle shifts in the relationship to the ground outside instill a sense of weightlessness, so that one is constantly reorienting him/herself with the landscape. Circulation and exhibition merge as one can look from one level to another, from inside to outside.

Particularity rather than repitition is employed giving a unique spatial framework to each work of art and emphasizing differences in form, material, and thinking behind the works. With occaisonal views to the landcape and the original neoclassical building, the gently inclined gallery path runs along the edge of the sculpture park, bending at each lenes, and arrives at the Noguchi Court, designed specifically to hold the museum’s collection of the artist’s sculptures. The Nogochi Court doubles as a special-event space, and centers the featured exhibition galleries around it with multiple entrances for up to four separate exhibition loops. The sculpture court opens along one wall to views of the sculpture park, extending the interior intothe garden and fully merging the experience of art and landscape.

THE BLOCH BUILDINGMOVEMENT

He has created a building that sensitizes visitors to the world all around them.

Holl uses materials, light and movement through space in order to produce thought and sense provoking qualities in the experience of a place. His architecture can began to be understood by its connections to its specific site and one’s experience through these elements.

“The movement of the body as it crosses through overlapping perspectives, through the landscape and the free movement threaded between the light gathering lenses of the new addition are the elemental connections between ourselves and architecture,”

Steven Holl

THE BLOCH BUILDINGMOVEMENT

THANK YOUWORKS CITED

Cecilia, Fernando Marquez. “Steven Holl Architects Selected Works 2004/2008.” Madrid: El Croquis, 2008.

Johnson, Philip. “The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art/Architecture & History” 5 Jan 2008. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Accessed 10 Nov 2011. <http://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/HistNewNA_Design.cfm>

Kipness, Jeffrey. “Stone and Feather.” New York: Prestel, 2007.

Mosco, Valerio Paolo. “Steven Holl.” Milan: Motta, 2010.

Saieh, Nico. “The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art/Steven Holl Architects.” 30 July 2008. ArchDaily. Accessed 10 Nov 2011. <http://www.archdaily.com/4369>

Webb, Michael. “Museum by Steven Holl Architects, Kansas City, USA” 21 September 2011. Architectural Review. Accessed 10 Nov 2011. <http://www.architectural-review.com/home/ararchive/ar-2007-october- museum-by-steven-holl-architects-kansas-city-usa/8618757.article>

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