Bloch Building
On June 16, 2007 the 165,000 square-foot expansion of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas, Missouri named Bloch Building will open, with an inaugural exhibition of Impressionist paintings from the building’s founders, Henry and Marion Bloch, also the exhibition of 19th-century photographs from the encyclopedic Hallmark Photographic Collection. The name “Bloch” itself is to honor Henry W. Bloch. The project is funded by raising fund for more than $200 million for the renovation and expansion and $170 million for an endowment fund.
Devised by architect Steven Holl, the building will show the museum’s collections of contemporary and African art and feature new galleries for rotating exhibitions of photography. “With a world-class building, never-before-seen works in our special exhibitions, and rejuvenated permanent collection galleries, we can’t wait to welcome visitors from all over to experience the new Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,” says Marc F. Wilson, Menefee D. and Mary Louise Blackwell, Director and CEO of the Museum.
The museum’s new part will catch visitor’s attention when they arrive and see the five jutting up crystalline twin layered shaped glass boxes pavilions, paneled in 16 foot planks made from sandblasted glass. The five levels building are 840 feet elongated through a sloping down lawn designed by the landscape specialist Dan Kiley in 1989, on the eastern side of the main Beaux Arts Nelson-Atkins building as a tribute to Isamu Noguchi sculptures. The old and new museum connected underground, also ties it a big pool designed by Holl in 2002, reflecting partial shadows of the buildings and One Sun/34 Moons house, by Walter de Maria the installation artist.
The Bloch Building will provide light-filled galleries, a new main lobby, museum store, entry plaza, cafe and the Spencer Art Reference Library, enlarging museum space by 70 percent. Qualified meeting the demand for space addition, circulation and exhibition merge as one can look from one level to another, from inside to outside. The sinuous path in the sculpture garden is the consequence of sinuous compliment in open flow through the continuous level of new galleries. Glass lenses bring sensational taste of light to the galleries while the sculpture garden harmonizes it.
The Bloch Building is an “interesting and unusual solution” targeting two challenges: accommodating more of the museum’s collection also developing to the original museum, which is the favorite of Kansas City residents. Over the construction’s process, the project has pros and cons. “As I stood in front of about a thousand people at the Unity Temple Church listening to the not-in-my-backyard types talking, I knew they didn’t get it,” Mr. Holl said recently. “They were roasting me. It was a really awkward moment.” But the stalled traffic and paralyzed eyes when passing by the new addition is the factual answers. “They didn’t know how much it was going to glow until they could see it for themselves,” Holl said.
“It’s not a building that tells you what it is or gives much away about what’s going on inside, it’s distinctive like an icon, but not one of those self-satisfied exhibitionist buildings that beg for applause,” Wilson said.
The 2001 “America’s Best Architect” by Time Magazine, Steven Holl, 59, dubs his project as “a scatter of lenses fused in the landscape”. Contrast and variation are main theme in the design, as he said. By using different gradations of light in the building, Holl intended to bring a fluttering effect. Echoes of the lantern effect can be found here, includes a string of oversize skylights bulging from the institution’s stately lawn, glow like a towering Japanese lantern. Bluish light flows in from the north end, gradation to the warm, yellowish light that flows in from the south end. There are nine different shades of light glowing in the building, and the effect varies depending on the time of day. “The light is working in this building like sound does in music,” says Holl, explaining that his concept is like cuts through darkness as sound cuts through silence.The Nelson-Atkins is Holl’s manifesto of the total expression to date of his thinking about what is architecture. His fundamental belief is in good architecture, experience affects form. Mr. Holl is impatience with the kind of iconic architecture but less meaning. Instead the new addition joined on to the north facade of the 1933 Beaux Arts block ~as the five other competitors~ he develops his building underground.
“It’s not an object, you can’t compare it to anything like Bilbao or all the generations of Bilbao’s. The only way to see it is to move through it,” Holl said. He was trying to solve the on-going conflict between “hyper-expressionistic architecture” for the new galleries, that doesn’t nicely accept art and “boring white boxes” whose dullness exerts its own negative impact on the art. He devised spaces with art-friendly straight walls that at about 10 to 15 feet up start “billowing” with curves and canopies as they rise to the ceiling to capture, reflect and juxtapose natural light streaming in from different directions. These wave or “T-shaped” walls, he said, will “play light like an instrument.”
Mr. Holl said his attempt to achieve a smooth mixture between architecture, art, landscape and urban setting amounts to a new approach to design. “This building is an urbanistic manifesto for the public realm,” he said. Asked how he expects the public will react, he responded philosophically, by resigning that suggests both the praise and the pressure he has experienced. “No one is going to understand it unless they walk through it,” he said. “When the building is done, you are not involved at all. You are out of the picture. It goes out into the world and has to lead its own life.”
The Nelson-Atkins is known for connecting between the public and its collections, that’s why the museum has been reputable enough in the United States since its opening. The Great Depression is the turning point to the Nelson-Atkins to assemble one of the largest collections in the country. Yet, public still considered that the museum is conservative.“It’s not really important to me for you to learn art history,” Wilson says. “The most important thing for me is for you to come into the art museum and through the presentation of the art ~the relationships, the way it’s grouped from room to room~ that you will be visually stimulated.” Many of the museums are adding their collections to raise the urban quality. But Nelson-Atkins takes the different approach, by concerning to raise the individual quality.
