Steven Holl pictures The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art as a succession of architectural “lenses” inviting visitors to discover art between space and time. Design by Steven Holl. Texts by Steven Holl, Michael Cadwell. Photos by Roland Halbe, Andy Ryan

The expansion of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art fuses architecture with landscape to create an experiential architecture that unfolds for visitors as it is perceived through each individual’s movement through space and time. The new addition, named the Bloch Building, engages the existing sculpture garden, transforming the entire museum site into the precinct of the visitor’s experience.

The new addition extends along the eastern edge of the campus, and is distinguished by five glass lenses, traversing from the existing building through the Sculpture Park to form new spaces and angles of vision. As visitors move through the new addition, they will experience a flow between light, art, architecture and landscape, with views from one level to another, from inside to outside. The threaded movement between the light-gathering lenses of the new addition weaves the new building with the landscape in a fluid dynamism based on a sensitive relationship to its context.

Rather than an addition of a mass, the new elements exist in complementary contrast with the original 1933 classical “Temple to Art”: opaque/transparent; heavy/light; hermetic/meshing; inward views/views to landscape; bounded/unbounded; directed circulation/open circulation; single mass/transparent lenses. The first of the five lenses forms a bright and transparent lobby, with a café, art library and bookstore. Inviting the public into the museum, it encourages movement via ramps toward the galleries as they progress downward into the garden. From the lobby a new cross-axis connects through to the original building’s grand spaces. At night the glowing glass volume of the lobby provides an inviting transparency, drawing visitors to events and activities.

The lenses’ multiple layers of translucent glass gather, diffuse and refract light, at times materialising light like blocks of ice. During the day the lenses inject varying qualities of light into the galleries, while at night the sculpture garden glows with their internal light. The “meandering path” threaded between the lenses in the Sculpture Park has its sinuous complement in the open flow through the continuous level of galleries below. The galleries, organised in sequence to support the progression of the collections, gradually step down into the park and are punctuated by views into the landscape. Today we can finally see and experience this architecture the way it was imagined, in a view from the inside out. The fluttering T’s subtly mix the cool light from the north and the warm, yellow light from the south.

Structural glass lenses, luminously bracketing the sculpture garden landscape, begin to glow from within at dusk. The dream of constructing with light reaches a comprehensive passion in this building. The interiors of overlapping perspectives in subtle changing natural light is constructed from an exterior architecture of translucent prisms emerging from the ground: an architecture of sculpted bars of light and time. One can really see that intensity in a billowing cloud-like spatial energy above the gallery floor. This light changes by the hour, by the day and by the season. It is as ephemeral as time. The spatial parallax experienced in moving through these galleries is also somehow related to time, whose passage is never in a straight line. Time is more mysterious: it has no beginning, no end, and no final event.

Likewise these spaces turn and overlap with a cadence or rhythm, but, like time, without an absolutely defined direction. A time relation is concretised in the way the new building opens to the Greco-Roman 1933 original museum architecture. The core of the Greek feeling about time was in cyclic return, and the perfections in art and architecture relate to repetitive cycles. Today, as we experience the open-ended geometry of the new architecture of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, we experience its spatial energy personally, from the viewpoint of our eyes positioned in our moving bodies as they glide through the new spaces. It isn’t just the idea of this architecture being “of its time” which is at stake here. It is a proposal aimed at the experience of moving through these spaces as an individual act.

We personally open ourselves to art as a phenomenon of central importance to the collective and to the individual. By opening up to potential knowledge, opening up to reflect on and to become inspired by something greater than just “of our time”, the hope is that we experience “we are our time”. Steven Holl