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July 17, 2007
Holl v. Wight and Wight I
The thousands of Nelson-Atkins photos on Flickr are evidence enough that people find the museum's new Steven Holl-designed addition beautiful. (And, notes the N-A's blog, a growing collection of YouTube vids does too.)
That's fine and all, but I love the new building because it's so daringly confrontational. Virtually every critic who has visited the new building has commented on how well the Holl fits with the N-A's 1933 Beaux-Arts pile. Fine. Agreed. But the two buildings work together not because they're harmonious, but because Holl apparently decided to answer the '33 building at every (square) corner.
Actually, that's too polite: What Holl really did was challenge the Wight & Wight building to a fight.
Because this is the web and because we can have more fun with images here, over the course of a dozen or so posts I'll show pictures that make my point. The first example is the simplest, the most obvious confrontation between the two buildings: Solidity.
The Wight & Wight is a typical Beaux-Arts building, a big, heavy stone-dump, built on a broad, flattened area. Holl's building is a single building, but he has made it appear to be four separate buildings by allowing the building to 'run down' a hill. The Wight & Wight building is made out of weighty Indiana limestone. Holl picked the material that is almost the opposite of quarried rock: Glass. More on that later today...
Posted July 17, 2007 8:31 AM
