Holl v. Wight and Wight II

Continued: Steven Holl's confrontational approach to the Nelson-Atkins. Part one.

Those of us who live in Washington, DC are probably more acutely aware of what it's like to live with Beaux-Arts architecture than anyone else in the U.S. Most prominent is the Federal Triangle, the massive downtown semi-complex of suffocating piles of masonry. (The project was designed as an inside job between Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon and the half-dozen or so leading Beaux-Arts architects of the day. Federally appointed to a commission to determine what to build there, the architects each helped themselves to a building.)

By day the Federal Triangle is dull enough, but at night it's positively depressing: It's dark. It's depressing. Its buildings loom. But that's just the way Beaux-Arts piles are: They're made of stone. The only way to light them is to light them from outside, to send wattage onto the stone. Where it inevitably kind of dies.

The 1933 Wight & Wight Nelson-Atkins building is like that too. Sure, it's lit, but it's still pretty solemn-looking. So Holl decided to confront that bit of typical Beaux-Arts neo-classicism too. His Bloch Building doesn't have to be lit from outside because it is lit form within. And not just some of it, all of it.

The result -- as captured in a zillion Flickr photographs -- is nothing short of astonishing. (One note: The building tends to look white-hot in the JPEGs I've seen. In person it's much more gentle.) Holl shakes his head at the stolidity of neo-classicism, the backward look to a darker, more primitive time and answers with light, a timeless metaphor for optimism. More on Holl and light later today...

Related: My first post on the N-A. Another picture.