Amidst recent fiery community concerns, Holl and local enthusiasts are confident his expansion of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas is a bold bridge between the past and the future.
Expansion respects museum's past while embracing its future

By STEVE PAUL The Kansas City Star

One is rock; the other rolls.

One gets its strength from limestone-clad symmetries; the other makes a post-industrial statement in muted glass and unpredictable curves.

When the leaders of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art launched their expansion dream, it was the dawn of a new century.

So it's fitting that Steven Holl's architectural solution to making the Nelson bigger — an 840-foot-long building woven into the ground — is a 21st-century plan.

Just as architect Thomas Wight's formal essay in solid Indiana limestone set the original museum's course — and tied it to the past — Holl's new landscape-hugging monument is meant to embrace the future.

No one can know what we'll think of the new Bloch Building in 50 or 70 years. And that is one of its tantalizing risks.

“The old building takes solace in the classics of the past,” Holl said one day recently, wind whipping through the construction site, “which is a beautiful ideal, but ideals change.

“With this building, a 21st-century building, you can embrace the unknown and take joy in it.”

Museum trustees chose Holl's design at least in part because it did the best job among six finalists of respecting and complementing the old building. The five other designs put new structures hard by the north elevation, in essence diminishing the traditional main entrance.

Holl drilled his new building into the earth on the east side of the museum and invented a series of five odd-shaped glass pavilions to glisten above the grass.

Now that construction is well under way, opportunities to understand the challenging project are increasing. It's becoming apparent, for example, how the addition relates to and communicates with the original museum.

New technologies create new possibilities. And Holl, like many leading architects, is inclined to explore the outer edges of possibility whenever a budget and an ambitious client allow.

Among the results: his structural, glass-plank skin; the wide-open lobby space with softly curved staircase, seeming to float in the air; and the cavity wall system controlling not only light but also climate in the new space.

Holl says the main experience of his Bloch Building will involve a viewer moving through it — through the soaring unpredictable space inside the building and the sculptural space it makes outdoors.

“If you've been inside the space, you understand how incredible it's going to be,” said Doug Stockman, an architect and principal with El Dorado Inc., who recently toured the building in progress.

The four smaller glass lenses, sculptures themselves, will bring natural light into the galleries below. But their outer walls are meant also to be quiet and calm in a way that will serve as a simple backdrop to large sculptures outside and, again, to the original museum as well.

In the early 1930s the Nelson's landscape architects avoided the use of “exotic or showy” plantings or even plants with red or yellow foliage in deference to the quiet majesty of the building. “The predominating note around the gallery is a rather somber, quiet, dull green,” one noted at the time.

The lighted lenses will glow bright white at night, but in the daytime the glass walls may very well stand in that deferential spirit.

Architects are full of bravado. They have to be. The work they do puts their ego on display for all to see and experience and even dislike.

“Architecture is for the bold in spirit,” Holl wrote in Parallax, a book that sets out the kind of philosophical and scientific thinking that goes into his projects. “(I)t rises to a pledge of inspired space out of a crowd of shrugging shoulders.”

Holl believes his building preserves the integrity of the Nelson's original museum — “we saved this building forever,” he said — and creates inviting spaces for art.

But most important, he said, was how the outer simplicity hides its inner immensity.

“It's like a secret,” he said.

Art museums have become like secular cathedrals. They encourage the inner, existential search for the truth, enlightenment or even the divine that may exist within their walls.

Clearly there's something spiritual about grand architectural spaces of today, places where we can hold the world in awe. Or, as Holl says, embrace the unknown.