The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, has shared new renderings and construction photos to go along with the announcement of the impending completion of a two-year, $100 million expansion project designed by Snøhetta and Alley Poyner Macchietto Architecture.
The design establishes the new Rhonda & Howard Hawks Pavilion on campus while adding another 40% worth of gallery spaces to house the museum’s fast-growing collection. Joslyn’s CEO Jack Becker complimented the firms’ "sensitive and imaginative approach" in planning the 42,000-square-foot extension, which is one part of the broad-ranging reinvestment the state and other private entities are making into downtown over the next decades.
A pink-colored aggregate was added to pre-cast panels on the pavilion’s exterior, referencing the marble materials used in the facades of the Joslyn’s other existing structures from 1931 and 1994. This trio of buildings welcomes the public via a new entrance made at Davenport Street, brought together finally with a sweeping glass atrium that functions like a synapse to hold the structures into place against the collection of outdoor “rooms” and a raised sculpture garden, which weaves the site into one cohesive whole.
The main volume is balanced on top of two granite walls outlining the building footprint. Snøhetta says the pavilion’s "weightless effect" provides a visual metaphor that is equally reminiscent of the Great Plains landscape and the horizontal language typical of Prairie School designs.
Its "stacked stone" facade also offers a visual connection to the steps on Norman Foster's adjacent addition to the east. Once inside the pavilion, a transparent first-floor space gives way to the careful arrangement of daylight-infused galleries above as serviced by a gently sloping ADA-accessible walkway.
A curving staircase also guides visitors through the atrium and into the newly re-installed collection that spans nearly 5,000 years and includes a recent major contemporary art acquisition and selections from a special bequest to the museum from the Omaha-born artist Ed Ruscha.
The project brief also called for a renovation of the café and office spaces in the Art Deco Joslyn Memorial building. Overall, this is meant to be a unifying project that makes possible an important new presentation of the Joslyn's collections to more diverse audiences for generations.
This latest redesign follows Snøhetta’s expansion of the Blanton Museum of Art, which was completed last October and allowed Founding Principal Craig Dykers and his colleagues Elaine Molinar and John Newman to imagine a new cultural gateway to their alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin.
Speaking of the Joslyn expansion in a press release, Dykers said: "Our goal has been to provide a harmonious place for guests, art, and gathering that will become a vessel for inspiration and creativity to flourish."
The institution's new graphic identity from Pentagram will also debut in April. The Joslyn Art Museum officially reopens to the public on September 10.
6 Comments
Using precast concrete for an addition to a fine marble museum complex is so 1960's.
The attempt to join the original building is forced and unconvincing. Why do this? It doesn't integrate, rather throws both constructions off to disadvantage.
Snohetta are formalists first and foremost - a sketch becomes a parti (and the project's future logo) and renders sell that silhouette to donors and clients.
The Norman Foster addition (1994?)—the block on the right, separated by a glass atrium. It uses the same marble. The solution is simple, obvious even, but still tactful and carefully executed. It won't excite anyone, or bring attention to Foster & co. Likely, we wouldn't have had much to say.
And I think it is fine. Something similar could have been repeated in the recent addition. It could have had a large glazed front for the open interior area, divided by square pillars to pick up the columns of the original. The lawn would have been framed nicely.
Cf. the Snohetta. There may be a larger point about what drives design now, and civic institutions.
https://homepages.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/foster/josext.html
There's a widespread dogma in US museum design right now where curves and lots of glass supposedly mitigate the elitism that museum directors feel is present in museum architecture built before 2020 or so.
We saw the same at Buffalo's AKG. One consequence of all the glass, as is the case with LACMA, is that a lot of interior space is taken up that can't be used for exhibition.
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