Nelson-Atkins Museum Analysis

Studio project at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), instructor David Freeland, 2015

with Johan Wijesinghe

We encounter at the Nelson-Atkins museum a middle ground of human experience. Neither monumental nor rather quaint, materially rich yet sterilely abstract, the project rides a certain division between the strata of spatial reactions architecture might elicit. In so doing, the project conceptualizes contemporary architecture as something resolutely non-iconic, all the while unique in its cultivation of space as voluminous entities through and around which we flow, explore, obfuscate and discover.

The borders between different conditions, innate to the situation around Steven Holl’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (Missouri) are sensibilities of architectural coherency, pliable geometries and manipulated boundaries.

Holl challenges the often awkward and problematic issue of museum expansion, confronting coexistence through contrast. Holl, subverts the typified approach, confiscating the immediate architectural joint of the expansion below grade tying the Beaux Arts wing to the present through de-materialization of both landscape and weightless translucent boxes (Lenses). This initiates a series of consequences in the massing of the landscape and gallery spaces alike, bending and folding in a manner both referential to the natural slope of the site and defiant in their relegation of the understanding of the existing architecture.

Where Holl eschews complete comprehension, allowing formal reading neither exclusively in terms of exterior or interior experience at any one time, the architectural prerogatives of the project create deep interior cavities into which the scheme infills gallery space. This mutual exclusivity entitles two distinct experiences: Between the path and the galleries, drawn to punctuations Gallery spaces awash in diffused light within and, beyond their walls, a distinctly playful stance of the project’s massing.

The ambitions of the project stem from choreographing light as both a way to view the art and a methodology of circulation. There the translucent boxes, as Steven Holl refers to “lenses”, the most visible part of an underground world, rising from the landscape enveloped by a park and framing sculpture courts in the in-between confronting the issue light. Experienced from the galleries, half vaulted walls funnel the a mixed spectrum of the more blue northern light and red southern light.

Within vertical spaces, a careful abstraction of the archetypal vault breaks the solidity of the architectural trope and splits its authority along two distinct sides, allowing light to enter the gallery spaces. Punches through this form provide circulation across, while the walls themselves provide space for artwork to be hung.

A play of axial shifting and misalignment occurs across the site in order to formally drive the composition and “bending” of the boxes. While a major alignment strikes the street running alongside to the East, most others are formal measures taken in without consideration to site or context, rather conceptualizing the geometrical organization of the museum as something of its own world. From ground level, this evokes something reminiscent of follies, allowing guests to stumble between each box as they explore the gradual change in landscape between the park to the South and museum complex to the North.