Kansas City’s ice cool art museum

When the Nelson-Atkins
Museum of Art in Kansas
 City, US embarked on

a major expansion in 1999
 five of the six competing  architects were keen to maintain the existing museum’s magnificent frontage with its classical columns, austere presence and hill top position overlooking a vast lawn.
Aware that there was ample space at the back to house the museum’s extension, all five presented their designs along these lines. There was, though, one odd-ball:  Steven Holl.

As the sixth proposer, Holl had no interest in hiding his structure around the back. Described as “assertive by people who are trying to be complimentary and as a bull in a china shop by people who aren’t,” Holl came up with a typically upfront approach: five irregularly shaped boxes of translucent glass which he called lenses, cascading down one side of the hill, linked underground by a series of galleries – giving the old museum a thoroughly modern perspective which the Nelson-Atkins board immediately fell in love with, stating, “Steven was the only one who had a real idea.”

Opened this June, the building is described as not only one of Holl’s finest, but one of the best museum designs of the last generation. “Its boldness is no surprise but it is laudably functional with a clear layout, handsome and logically designed galleries, and a suffusion of natural light.
His five glass structures don’t mock the old building; they dance before it and engage it.” From his early drawings, Holl wanted the lenses to look like ice, deliberately disturbing the old museum’s symmetry so the new and old structures form a rectangular forecourt from which either can be entered.
While in the middle of the forecourt is a square reflecting pool with a sculpture by Californian modern artist Walter de Maria as its centrepiece.

Named the Bloch Building, Holl’s extension with its irregular shape crisscrossed by ramps, stairs and balconies, polished white plaster and floods of natural light are designed to make you keep moving from one gallery to the next.

People have commented on how Holl treats light as if it were a building material in itself and his extension is a true testament to this observation.
There’s open wonderment at the “ethereal” effect of light on the Bloch during overcast days and particularly at night when, lit from within, the translucent glass lenses are “transformed into a family of weightless objects, a composition of immense light sculptures and every surface glows with the softness of the moonlight.”