Houston glows in beautiful series of tubes
Kinder Building secures MFAH’s national reputation
The tubes are mysterious and opaque during the day, but at night, they glow in a range of illumination patterns, from cool lines of light to warmer rectangles that suggest interior rooms. It’s an expression of incredible wealth — of philanthropists who gave millions and of the art on display inside. And after years of planning and construction, the new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston is now open to the public.
If it wasn’t clear before, this effort secures MFAH’s reputation as one of the premier encyclopedic art museums in the country.
The Kinder Building was designed by Steven Holl Architects with support from Houstonbased Kendall/Heaton Associates Inc. and built by McCarthy.
It is a success. It combines established organizing ideas from Steven Holl Architects’ past projects with an entirely new one — the glass tube façade. The result is a dynamic space for art.
The three-story building’s shape comes from its site, with allowances for live oaks. Seven courts are cut into the perimeter. These indentations break up the mass of building and separate the galleries that ring a central interior forum with an exposed, sculptural staircase. Inside, these cuts provide light and a place to rest between viewing art. Movement through gallery entrances through large openings or corners is skillfully balanced between close immersion
and wide observation.
Above, the ceiling bends and peels apart, allowing natural light to pour and seep into the top galleries and atrium. This expression sculpts the roof into a wavy landscape, like no other roof in the city. Inside, the illumination, supported by LED fixtures, is even and majestic.
The museum invites references to major works of 20th-century architecture. The powerful central atrium distantly summons Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim. The wood floors are stained dark like those of the Menil Collection nearby, but their endgrain pattern recalls flooring at Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp, France, a connection reinforced by the billowing ceilings, here not cast in concrete
but sheathed in drywall. It’s easy to marvel at how far construction has come, but also how consistent inspirational architectural ideas have remained.
The exterior is the most innovative, compelling and new aspect of the building. It advances a dialogue of complementary contrast with MFAH’s two existing exhibition buildings. Distinct from Mies van der Rohe’s thin transparency using steel and glass at the Caroline Weiss Law Building and Rafael Moneo’s thick opacity using stone at the Audrey Jones Beck Building, Steven Holl Architects explores thick translucency. The outside is clad in laminated glass half-cylinders, 30 inches in diameter, with some approaching
20 feet in height. The tubes capture and thicken light; they push what glass can do as a material. Sometimes they’re reflective and white. At other moments they appear in a flat baby blue color. The shadows also vary widely. At night, the tubes light up. The overall assembly realizes a repetitive, convex, muted façade that’s refreshingly abstract.
The tubes have concealed attachments, so they float, balancing out the thick concrete walls that run back into the building. For the curious, there’s one section of clear glass near the café outside where all joinery questions are answered. I wish there were more places to see directly out through the tubular façade instead of “sensing” its illumination behind another piece of translucent glass.
There’s a nice alignment between a building faced in tubes named for a generous couple whose wealth comes in part from pipeline construction. The Kinder Building is funded by The Campaign for the Museum of Fine Arts. Initiated in 2012, it has raised more than $470 million and financed the construction of four new buildings, among other uses. Contributions from the Kinders and Sarofims totaled $150 million alone. Jawdroppingly, the Kinder Building opens with no debt.
MFAH’s success puts it ahead of other major art institutions. On the west coast, LACMA readies to build architect Peter Zumthor’s controversial beige oil spill while MFAH emerges with a campus plan that makes sense and increases gallery space. On the east coast, MoMA’s recent renovation brought the museum to just over 700,000 square feet, while MFAH added about 650,000 square feet in this expansion alone, lauded as the largest cultural project in North America.
The Kinder Building is a major achievement for Steven Holl Architects, an office that has realized important buildings worldwide. Holl himself described the Kinder Building as a “gift to the future.” I agree. The space deserves a visit, so venture safely when the time is right. No rush: The building and its art will be here for a long time.