At the tail end of 1994, several months after Norman Foster was awarded that year’s AIA Gold Medal, the star British architect’s inaugural commission in the United States opened in a somewhat curious location: smack dab in the American heartland, in Omaha. An expansion project connecting to the Joslyn Art Museum’s landmark Memorial Building via a 200-foot-long glass atrium, the project marked a reserved stateside debut for the future Pritzker Prize laureate: a boxy, windowless gallery building wholly sympathetic to its older, Art Deco counterpart, completed in 1931. In a brief dispatch, Progressive Architecture asserted that Foster’s new wing at the Joslyn proved the skeptics—convinced that his firm “could not do a building that fits into a historic context”—wrong. From their height and massing to the matching cladding in the form of blush-colored Etowah (or Georgia pink) marble sourced from the same quarry, the two buildings are in such close dialogue that, for nearly three decades, it was difficult to imagine how an inevitable third building on the Joslyn campus would engage with its predecessors.
