Nelson-Atkins Museum picks architect for $160m expansion

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Artwork in Kansas Metropolis has chosen the New York-based agency Weiss Manfredi Structure Panorama Urbanism because the lead architect for the encyclopaedic museum’s future campus transformation, projected to price between $160m and $170m.

An architectural competitors launched final yr by the museum to design its enlargement attracted submissions from 182 companies in 30 nations. Idea shows by six short-listed groups—additionally together with Kengo Kuma & Associates, Renzo Piano Constructing Workshop, Selldorf Architects, Studio Gang and Why Structure—went on view on the museum and on-line in March, and public suggestions was an element within the remaining determination.

“In at this time’s world, what we wished is to have essentially the most open competitors and most clear course of potential,” says Julián Zugazagoitia, the museum’s director and chief govt. He emphasises the museum’s aspirations for brand spanking new areas that may “be extra clear, extra open to the general public, the place individuals may see themselves inside and outdoors”.

Since Zugazagoitia joined the museum in 2010, attendance has doubled to round 600,000 guests yearly, rebounding extra rapidly post-pandemic than many museums throughout the nation. The Nelson-Atkins has free admission for all.

“We’re on a monitor to achieve one million guests in a decade or so and we see that the viewers is trending youthful and extra numerous,” says Nelson-Atkins board chair Evelyn Craft Belger, who additionally led the architect choice committee. Utilizing the tagline “Constructing Belonging”, the committee envisioned an enlargement that might accommodate the rising variety of guests with schooling and occasion areas, a black field theatre, a brand new restaurant and library in addition to the museum’s rising assortment—now round 42,000 objects—with extra versatile galleries for modern artwork.

The Nelson-Atkins campus at the moment consists of the museum’s grand 1933 Beaux-Arts constructing and a up to date addition designed by Steven Holl Architects. A sequence of translucent volumes extending southeast from the unique museum, Holl’s luminous constructing opened in 2007 to nice acclaim and introduced nationwide consideration to the Nelson-Atkins. Collectively, the 2 perpendicular buildings body one nook of the museum’s 22-acre sculpture park designed by Dan Kiley, a a lot beloved and well-used inexperienced house by metropolis residents.

Whereas the Nelson-Atkins articulated that it wanted (and will afford) a 61,000 sq. ft wing, the museum didn’t specify its placement on campus within the transient given to potential architects. “There was a chance to search out totally different locations to website a brand new addition, an open-ended curiosity in seeing how every design group would possibly method their extraordinary website and likewise some extraordinary elements of the present museum,” says Michael Manfredi, associate and co-founder of the profitable agency.

Weiss Manfredi—recognized for an built-in method to structure and panorama in tasks together with the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle and Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley—was the one group among the many six finalists to place its addition to the southwest of the Beaux-Arts constructing as a mirror flank to the Holl wing. Guests will be capable of see the exercise contained in the curved glass partitions of Weiss Manfredi’s constructing, with areas opening seamlessly onto the park to the east and the road to the west.

“What was actually a pair of buildings may now change into a trio recentred across the sculpture park,” says Marion Weiss, the agency’s different associate and co-founder. In conversations with locals, the architects discovered that many individuals who come to the sculpture park by no means go into the museum. “We thought that by leveraging the park because the form of main entry,” says Manfredi, “we may do what Julián’s actually concerned with, which is increase the totally different sorts of folks that usually do not go to a museum.”

The brand new scheme clarifies the centred Beaux-Arts constructing as a dynamic level of arrival. The surgical alternative of granite with glass behind the towering columns at entrances on each its south and north facades introduces “extra transparency and invitation than is clear proper now”, say Weiss.

Weiss Manfredi’s plan makes the under-used entrance on that south facade absolutely accessible from the backyard for the primary time, with the introduction of gently arcing ramps to flank the present central stairs. The agency additionally proposed to excavate a big retaining wall and basement degree beneath the south facade, to create new glassed-fronted restaurant, library and curatorial areas opening to the park and connecting on both aspect with the 2 additions.

The museum obtained greater than 2,000 responses to the six design ideas, strongly in favour of the Weiss Manfredi proposal. “We definitely listened to it,” says Belger, “and fortunately that suggestions aligned with our selection.”

Zugazagoitia compares the campus scheme to the colonnade of St Peter’s in Rome, “how its two arms embrace a giant piazza”, he says. “This challenge provides us that sense of concord, of steadiness between the 2 expansions from Steven Holl and now Weiss Manfredi and actually honours the sculpture park and traditional Beaux-Arts façade to town.”