The highly anticipated new satellite location of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center has finally opened this week in Sheboygan, Wisconsin following almost a year of Covid-related delays.

Dubbed “The Art Preserve,” the fantastic new 56,000-square-foot facility will serve as the home for the Center’s 25,000-object collection. 

Tres Birds was instrumental in developing a plan that would respond to the Center’s focus on in-situ art environments. First, the design team had to structure the three-story exhibition space in a way that could allow exhibitions to recreate elements of the original spaces that the works were created in. The result is a tripartite structure whose “stick, earth, stone” elements are meant to embody the sterling natural environment of the surrounding Sheboygan River Basin. 

Visible storage and an entryway obscured by timber planks welcome visitors under the new building’s concrete panel facade and into a grotto-like area on the first floor designed to showcase the devotional works of famous Wisconsinites who worked in the genre. A masonry block staircase flanked with Hobo signals leads to a second-floor filled with recreated dwellings and storage racks full of self-made objects. 

The third and final floor is set up to display transfigured sculptural arrangements as well as Emery Blagdon’s bizarre Healing Machine, an amalgam of found materials that the Nebraska-born farmsteader believed would transmit energies into space directly from the floor of his rural barn. 

Arup worked with the Denver-based firm to ensure that the new building was as environmentally friendly as possible. 

Per the architect: "The building is designed to shade itself. The plan of the building undulates in reaction to the hillside on the site, the trees on the hillside, and the annual path of the sun. Direct sunlight is kept to a minimum to protect the art. The building’s shape engages the hillside in a non-rectilinear fashion. This was done to have moments where the building protrudes into nature and then recesses so that nature can enter. Tres Birds was tasked with creating a space that provides different experiences and inspires a sense of wonder. This was achieved by creating unexpected corners, spaces, differing proportions of rooms, and specific views to the natural world outside."