Steven Holl Architects merges architecture, art, and landscape into a unified experience for the Bloch Building at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City
During construction, the reaction to Nelson-Atkins’ Bloch Building ran the gamut from irascible to irate. According to its intrepid museum director, Marc Wilson, the Kansas City public had liked Steven Holl Architects’ design well enough when viewing it as an architectural model. “But all models are tiny,” Wilson explains. It was another thing when the citizenry got a glimpse of the channel-glass-clad structures, coming out of the muddy turf atop the 840-foot-long linear underground galleries. Winding down the eastern slope, hard by the classically styled Nelson-Atkins museum, all five polyhedral forms looked like so many icebergs threatening to sink the Titanically proportioned limestone building designed in 1933 by Wight and Wight.
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