As power tools whir, a piéce de résistance awaits
MFAH to open anticipated Kinder Building next fall as part of signature $468M campaign
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will become the nation’s fourth largest in terms of display space when it opens its Nancy and Rich Kinder Building to the public next fall, also bringing the city a significant new architectural signature.
Built to showcase important and growing collections of 20th and 21st century art the museum has acquired in recent decades, Steven Holl Architects’ 183,528square-foot edifice will bring the MFAH its third gallery building, increasing exhibition space by 75 percent and giving the MFAH a jump on the Art Institute of Chicago
and the major museums of Boston and Philadelphia, said director Gary Tinterow. Only New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nashville’s Frist Art Museum (spacious because it’s in a former postal facility) and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., will have more wall space for art.
For now, forklifts beep nonstop, power tools whir, generators hum and hammers pound inside the building-to-be, echoing through the concrete walls with a sense of urgency.
While the exterior of Holl’s attention-getting trapezoid at the corner of Bissonnet and Main Streets is almost finished, the in
terior spaces are defined but still coming together, including roughly 15 galleries, two restaurants, a 215-seat auditorium for films and lectures, two conference rooms and “interstitial” areas such as the large ground-floor atrium, where a zigzaggy central stairwell leads to the open second and third floors.
During a recent hard-hat tour, Tinterow barely seemed to notice the noise.
About eight years into an expansion and endowment campaign that has raised $468 million and has added two other new buildings and a plaza to the Susan and Fayez S. Sarofim campus, he’s finally getting to the really fun part, the piéce de résistance. He can see light at the end of the tunnel — two tunnels, actually, that will hold hypnotic light installations by Olafur Eliasson and the late Carlos Cruz-Diez.
The museum also has commissioned five other, site-specific works by other superstars for transitional public spaces in and around the Kinder Building: tapestries by El Anatsui and Houston’s own Trenton Doyle Hancock, a hanging sculpture by Ai Weiwei, and outdoor sculptures by Cristina Iglesias and Byung Hoon Choi.
Tinterow has been in enough construction sites now to size up a space before the walls are finished. “It’s going to be a magnificent building,” he said. “That in itself will be an attraction for a while. But ultimately it’s about the experience of viewing art together with other people. We have to make that happen, too.”
‘New civic experience’
Holl’s design features large expanses of glass at street level, five inset water gardens and a skin of vertical, translucent glass tubes containing LED lights that will emit a soft glow at night.
The innovative tubes, which Holl said are a first, also have a practical purpose; they create a “cooling jacket” to make the building more energy efficient, drawing hot air up from the bottom and releasing it at the top. Holl also dreamed up the first-of-its kind roof, inspired by billowing clouds; its irregular panels are layered like tectonic plates, to allow natural light into the building from above.
Holl called the Kinder Building a major work in his career, partly because it exemplifies his signature concepts of porosity and luminosity. But his firm also designed the master plan, and he’s proud to see it all materializing.
He designed both the Kinder Building and the new Glassell School in dialog with the MFAH’s existing architecture — to compliment and contrast the Law Building’s rounded steel and glass front, by Mies van der Rohe, and Rafael Moneo’s limestone Beck Building. “It’s a oncein-a-lifetime chance that you can bring these forces together like this,” he said.
“The great achievement of this project isn’t just the Kinder Building. It’s an entire campus…. You have to remember that in 2012, they wanted a seven-story parking garage behind the old Glassell School of Art (in addition to the new exhibition building). All the firms that competed designed that. We took a great risk by saying ‘no.’”
Holl’s design put parking underground, opening up the entire block to reinvention and doubling the school’s facilities with a new building whose sloped roof doubles as an amphitheater. Incorporating plazas and gardens, he envisions the entire block as “a new civic experience” that also brings the museum’s magnificent Cullen Sculpture Garden out of hiding.
Holl has thought about the sculpture garden since he was a young architect. Tinterow’s predecessor, Peter Marzio, gave him a tour of the garden when he was competing years ago for the Beck Building project. “I was too young and green for the job; they chose Moneo,” he said. “But when I look at it now, I think of the Moneo… and the Mies. That’s the only museum building Mies did in the U.S., and the only one that’s curved. It’s a place of legacy that goes on for a long time.”
District transformation
Landscape architect Deborah Nevins began enlivening the grounds last year with the rooftop deck and the Brown Foundation Plaza connecting the new Glassell to the sculpture garden. The Kinder Building’s new fine-dining restaurant will overlook another new plaza and the sculpture garden. (Museum officials are not yet ready to disclose the restaurateur, who also will operate a casual cafe on the building’s first floor.)
When all is done, the museum will have 14 acres of walkable green space that extends, at least visually, across Bissonnet. A new esplanade and reduced lanes, along with new signage, will signal to passers-by that they are crossing a campus, Tinterow said. “We’re kind of taking back the street.”
The MFAH project accounts for more than half of an $800 million transformation across Houston’s Museum District in recent years. The Holocaust Museum opened a dazzling new building in May; the Menil Drawing Institute opened last year; the Rothko Chapel and Houston Zoo campuses are expanding.
Also internationally significant, the MFAH expansion is the largest cultural project currently underway in North America. Including the Glassell, which opened in May 2018, and the Lake| Flato-designed Blaffer Center for Conservation, which opened in September 2018, the project has involved 650,000 square feet of new construction.
Los Angeles may have more to brag about in a few years. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a $1.5 billion project on 11 acres, is under construction there. Nearby, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is planning a $650 million redevelopment and the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County is getting a $273 million upgrade. And in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian Institution is planning a behemoth $2 billion redevelopment of its South Mall Campus.
The first exhibitions within the Kinder Building’s three floors will be up for a year, highlighting a trove of major collections never before presented in depth. “We’re trying to show our strengths,” Tinterow said. “Our emphasis is not trying to be trendy or first on the block but to show what we have in an interesting and engaging way.”
The museum’s collections have been assembled over decades by curators and directors with special interests, he explained. “As a result, we have a very distinctive collection. We can’t do a Museum of Modern Art or a Pomidou-like history of art. We’re more like the Tate.”
The layout of galleries is already visible. Two ground floor spaces will hold sculpture to start, Tinterow said. He’d love to bring out the MFAH’s collection of selfdestructing machines by Yves Tinguely, for starters. A ground floor ‘black box’ area will likely house a James Turrell light installation, Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Room” and Gyula Kosice’s “Hydrospatial City.”
The second floor’s galleries will focus on historical 20th-century art from the museum’s five departments: photography, Latin American art, prints and drawings, modern and contemporary art and decorative arts and design. Six third-floor galleries will hold rotating exhibitions of 21st century works arranged thematically.
New tunnels
The commissioned, sitespecific works will occupy prominent public spaces outside the museum’s paid admission zone. While Cruz-Diez’s ”Chromosaturation” tunnel aspires to envelop visitors in a tangible field of colors, Eliasson’s is designed to emulate a liveaction monochromatic film. Its yellow and gray light will limit the perception of color, providing just two points of purple-filtered natural light for contrast.
The tunnels meet in a cavernous, round room that already feels like an underground cathedral. There, El Anatsui will light up the walls with one of his dramatic, metallic tapestries, made in Nigeria. Hancock’s 10-x-22-foot tapestry, based on a backdrop he created in 2008 for Ballet Austin called “Good Vegan Progression #5,” was commissioned for the restaurant.
Above ground, Choi’s “Scholar’s Way,” a trio of abstract, gently torqued vertical forms sculpted of Indonesian basalt, will tower about 10 feet across one of the courtyard pools. Iglesias — the only woman who received one of the prime commissions — is creating one of her signature sculptural “tidal” pools. It will draw eyes into the ground near the building’s main entrance, with cast bronze pieces under rushing water that mimic the roots of nearby live oaks.
“The choice of artists was based on the ability of the actual works of art to resonate with our spaces and facilities,” Tinterow said, noting that the museum has acquired many other works by women since 2012 with the Kinder Building and campus expansion in mind. Those purchases have included major, monumental works by Kusama, Pipilotti Rist, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Ursula von Rydingsvard.
While the museum exceeded its $450 million campaign goal and many Houstonians assume the organization has an unlimited budget, the Kinder Building design had to be slightly downsized for financial reasons, by 12 to 15 percent, Tinterow said. “Of course, one always wants more space to store and hang art. But the spaces feel good. The proportions seem correct for the kinds of art that we have and anticipate having. Through serendipity and a lot of hard work, we got a building that’s the right size for us.”
He also is pleased that the circulation between the galleries already feels good. “Ultimately, that is more important than the exterior,” he said.
Holl is philosophical. “There’s some space that this director wants, but the building is designed beyond that. There will be another director, and he or she may change the exhibition programming,” he said. “It’s a building for the long run; the light and space must work 100 years from now.”