Critics cast verbal stones at Nelson's glass house. Steven Holl and Chris McVoy are trying to keep the Kansas City critics at bay (prev.), as the Atkins goes up. (w/ images). Read
The architect responds

Steven Holl on Tuesday gave this statement to The Kansas City Star by e-mail:

“The experience of a work of architecture, when it totally surrounds the body as you move through the spaces, is for me the most important experience as it is the most intimate. My old professor of architecture always demanded that a building be much more when you go into it than it is from a distance. Therefore, as none of the public can yet get into the Nelson-Atkins addition, there is no Mystery (yet). The experience of this new museum will include the immediate foreground, where the public can walk through the lenses and the landscape between them. This will be a thrilling and tactile series of spaces that ask you to touch the glass skin. If the outside experience of architecture consists of 1) immediate foreground, 2) middle view and 3) distant view, it is shortsighted of critics to begin while only seeing a distant view of a partly finished work. However, controversy is important, as it heightens awareness; it has always been important in the history of art.”