by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design a contemporary art museum informed by the prevalence of public art on its site?

Summary: Designed as a series of gateways that lead visitors into an art-filled campus, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kan., is an austere, Modernist space that is informed by its suburban setting. Though calm and un-iconic, the museum is easily recognized by its two displaced volumes and dramatic cantilever. The new building is part of a museum building boom that is especially impacting smaller cities in the nation’s interior.

At Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kan., public art is incorporated into dining halls, classroom corridors, and dotted across the campus lawn. One of the largest community colleges in the nation, with 34,000 students, the school has been collecting art since 1980. Early on, the school’s board of directors decided to make day-to-day exposure to art the rule for their students, not the exception. “They never viewed the forming of an art collection as essentially decorative,” says Bruce Hartman, director of the school’s new art museum.

This impression was not lost on Kyu Sung Woo, FAIA, and his Cambridge-Mass.-based firm, who were hired to design the museum that now houses this collection, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. “I’ve never seen any place where daily life and art interact that intensely,” he says.

Gateways
“In his first presentation to us, he said, ‘The museum is just the beginning of the journey. The whole campus is a museum.’ We knew at that moment that he got it,” says Hartman.

Woo’s design is organized around points of entry into the campus’s collage of public art in and outside the museum. “The whole idea is to make the museum as a gateway to the art experience,” Woo says.

The museum’s site is on the edge of the sprawling 234-acre suburban Kansas City campus. The Nerman Museum is backed into two other facilities and connects (via an atrium) to one of them. Limestone retaining walls reach out from the museum entrance and define movement patterns and boundaries for the visitor, while they simultaneously pull art patrons into the museum’s most striking feature: a 22-foot cantilever that hangs over the museum entrance. On the underside of the cantilever is a permanent LED light installation by artist Leo Villareal, which acts as a bridge between the art inside the museum and the art outside. Just as the museum is a gateway to the campus, Woo says the cantilever is a gateway to the museum. It’s the end point of a shoebox-shaped floating mass that hovers above the museum’s first floor. This mass draws its sense of buoyancy from the glass panels that line the lower floor where the lobby is located. On the opposite side, the cantilevered mass sinks into the lower volume. In one of the few flourishes in the succinctly Modern and minimalist museum, a single, tall window looks out from the end of the cantilever—a portal for the silent witness of artistic contemplation.

The lower, rear volume is largely rectangular, with a protruding double-height atrium that connects to an adjacent technology building. By connecting to another facility, the atrium (like the cantilever and its art installation) becomes another intermediate space that gains its own identity through blending two standard reference spaces. Part of the museum’s café sits in the atrium, which is encased in a glass ceiling that extends down to form two walls between the two buildings. A folded and perforated metal screen covers the glass ceiling and walls, which casts rich, gridded shadows on the interior walls.

White limestone (present at the site) is the primary façade material. This creates a sharp contrast to the adjacent red brick buildings. Inside, long, slitted skylights bring natural light into nearly every one of the galleries. A 200-seat auditorium, museum shop, café, and classroom space fill out the rest of the 41,600-square-foot museum.

Underserved and overserved
The addition of the Nerman Museum to Kansas City’s cultural scene makes this midsize Midwestern city one of few places that has two dedicated contemporary art museums, says Hartman. (The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art by Gunnar Birkirts, FAIA, opened in 1994. Steven Holl, AIA, won a 2008 AIA Honor Award for his addition to the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.) For Kansas City, the Nerman Museum is emblematic of local and national trends. Johnson County is an affluent suburban area at the eastern edge of Kansas, across the state line from Kansas City, Mo., where most of the city’s cultural offerings (like the Kemper and Nelson Atkins museums) are located. Hartman says that this means Johnson County and its highly educated population are an underserved art market, and ripe for a museum like the Nerman.

Nationally, a museum building boom is changing the cultural landscape of many cities. In October, the Washington Post reported that a 2006 survey by the American Association of Museums found half of the respondents reported they had begun or recently completed an expansion. Smaller cities in the nation’s interior have been leading this charge with museum expansions, like Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum, Herzog and de Meuron’s Walker Art Center expansion in Minneapolis, Zaha Hadid’s Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, and Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum expansion. Far from the urban cores that these buildings inhabit, the Nerman Museum’s suburban context make it, in some ways, the leading edge of this boom.