Marion Weiss with original design plans in the background (photo by Steve Paul)
The architectural team had just walked the grounds of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art when they sat for a debriefing. “I want to do all of it,” museum CEO Julián Zugazagoitia declared a few minutes later when he emerged from a conference room.
What “all of it” will add up to, physically and financially, remains to be seen, but the enthusiasm for the museum’s proposed expansion project, first announced nearly two years ago, is unmistakable.
Michael Manfredi and Marion Weiss, principals of the architectural firm bearing their last names, were in town from New York again, continuing to get their bearings as their vision for the second major Nelson addition enters a long phase of tweaking and fine-tuning.
Structural and mechanical engineers have been examining the project’s needs and possibilities, they told me in an interview following their walkabout with Zugazagoitia and project team members from their office and his.
Weiss/Manfredi’s design proposal, which won a competition featuring six finalist firms, offered the reasonable advantage of building on the west side of the museum campus, along Oak Street, and avoiding obstructions of the classical views of the original’s north and south facades.
As they put it, their idea completes a kind of embrace of the 1933 museum in conjunction with the east side’s Bloch Building addition, designed by Steven Holl, of 2007. Expect to hear them and museum officials touting a modernist, metaphoric connection to the way the Italian architect and urban planner Gian Lorenzo Bernini framed St. Peter’s Square in 17th-century Rome.
Said Weiss, “You could say that Bernini’s arms in Rome are about embracing and giving measure and scale and identity to a place that if it only had one arm, one would not think about it in the same way.”
After winning the design competition early last year and signing a contract with the museum about six months later, Weiss/Manfredi entered a “testing period” of their initial idea, Weiss said, “and really putting it through a set of much more detailed decision-making processes. We’re talking to the curators. We’re talking to the folks that maintain the museum to really, in a way, take the original concept design, and give it a lot more detail and give it, I think, a sense of being a result of lots of different conversations.”
With large stretches of glass walls and inviting areas that open to the outdoors, the expansion also would inject a feeling of transparency in counterpoint to the solidity of the main building and the translucency of the Bloch’s five above-ground “lenses.” The new building would be extroverted, they said, in contrast to the more introverted expressions of its companions.
Weiss and Manfredi bring to the project the deep experience in urban planning, community building, and potential campus enhancement that they helped to develop in the 2012 exercise to imagine a cultural district making institutional and neighborhood connections in all directions around the Nelson.
An entry on the west will help emphasize the added openness and connection possibilities, and the shear expanse of the museum’s grounds and its sculpture garden presents “a magnificent asset” enjoyed by few museums around the globe, Manfredi said.
The new structure is intended to house gallery spaces, the museum’s ever-growing Hallmark Photography Collection, a restaurant, a theater seating 200 to 250 people, and other activities. Emphasis on landscaping may well heighten the interplay between culture and nature.
One of the design firm’s driving ideas is “to make the connections between old and new feel inevitable and natural,” Weiss said. “It takes a lot of effort to make something look effortless.”
Daniel Wehmueller, the project director on the Nelson-Atkins side of the team, confirmed that current activities have been focused on the pre-schematic design phase. “Essentially,” he said by email, “we are vetting the program and design presented by Weiss/Manfredi during the competition to ensure it is functionally and operationally meeting our needs.”
Not long after meeting with the architects, we learned that BNIM, a Kansas City firm with a long history of working with the Nelson-Atkins, has been selected as the local architect of record. BNIM staffers were intimately involved in the details that brought Holl’s Bloch Building to fruition.
The Nelson-Atkins expansion is just one such project underway at Weiss/Manfredi. Ground was broken in May for an enhancement of the Lincoln Center cultural campus in New York, a project that also involves reconnecting with adjacent neighborhoods. Also on their plate is the overhaul and modern transformation of the La Brea Tar Pits museum campus in Los Angeles, a $240 million project just recently launched.
Manfredi said the Nelson-Atkins provides a throughline of these projects as a “stellar” cultural institution with an international reputation and global connections.
“This project,” Weiss added, “is in many ways, it’s kind of the dream project because it brings together so many things we care about. Art, culture, place, transparency, connections to the community, rejuvenating things that have in many ways not captured the contemporary culture’s imagination the way they might have captured it a hundred years ago. So how do you leverage what’s great but bring in through new additions a kind of rebalancing of this incredible place.”
At some point the Nelson will launch a capital campaign that is likely to exceed $500 million to cover building costs, maintenance and a hefty endowment.
This comes at an extraordinary time in Kansas City as other cultural and sports organizations are mounting ambitious and expensive projects. Interesting to learn that Donald Hall Jr. has succeeded Evelyn Craft Belger as chair of the Nelson-Atkins board of trustees. That announcement came about a week after Hall, whose family and corporate connections to the museum go back decades, revealed a new partnership between Hallmark Cards and the Kansas City Royals to build a new baseball stadium and entertainment district on the longtime site of the corporate headquarters at Crown Center.
Hall’s presence along with a new group of trustee heavy hitters could instill confidence that funding the next-generation expansion of the Nelson will not be a major obstacle.
TWO THINGS
Music: July 4: What a day to hear the Nobel laureate and American bard Bob Dylan at Starlight Theatre. The symbolism of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding cannot be lost on Dylan, whose work over the last 65 years has chronicled the long and dusty road of American history in so many overt, subtle and surreal ways. Now, after more than four years of touring to highlight his “Rough and Rowdy Ways” album, the 85-year-old Dylan launched a summer tour with opening acts including Lucinda Williams and John Doe here. It’s much along the lines of Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival, in which Dylan had been featured in recent years. Dylan’s fans have been oh-so-eager to find out what his summer setlist of classics, covers, and perhaps newer songs will bring.
Book, early alert: The biographers organization that I’m deeply involved in recently awarded a fellowship prize to a British writer working on a book about a little-known Black woman from Kansas City who became an accomplished composer of classical music. Nora Holt went on from here to social and cultural fame during the Harlem Renaissance. Samantha Ege, a music historian and classical pianist, is telling her story in Fabulous Is the Word: The Life and Legend of Nora Douglas Holt. Ege received a $5,000 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship, from Biographers International Org., for a biographical work-in-progress that significantly advances our understanding of the Black experience. Ege earlier served as a source for an audio feature on Holt produced by our friends at KCUR and its People’s History of Kansas City series.
