MFAH’s newKinder Building focuses on creating quality light
The perception-bending tunnel installations are one thing.
But throughout the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s new Kinder Building, the transcendent, soft glow of natural and artificial light is a wonder in itself. The legendary lighting design firm L’Observatoire International collaborated with architect Steven Holl to create the effects, integrating recent technologies that are a first in the museum world.
“It’s not only about light levels,” saysWei Jien, a senior associate at L’Observatoire. “It’s about the quality of light.”
The Kinder Building is the first to possess a “color tuning” system that in the past would have required rows of different lights. “Now it’s all in one fixture,” Jien says. You might think of it as a supersize smart home. The whole system, including the LEDs in the building’s facade of translucent glass tubes, can be controlled with an iPad.
Other aesthetics come into play with the thousands of small, detachable “monopoint” LEDs directed at artworks to highlight their materials and form. When not in use, they’re hidden within a system of
caps that blends into the ceilings. ( Far more pleasing and practical than the track lights that are ubiquitous in most museums.)
While natural light filters down from glazed clerestory windows in the billows of the roof and comes in sideways from glass walls (also casting cool shadows around the ground-floor spaces), gestures of artificial light also help people find their way through the building. The central staircase glows, as do panels surrounding the elevators.
“We talk about light as an architectural material,” Jien says. “The geometry of this building is really challenging.”
L’Observatoire had a hand in all of the MFAH’s campus expansion projects. Their redesign of the Cullen Sculpture Garden’s lighting creates special magic outside. Washes of LED light on
the concrete walls replicate Isamu Noguchi’s original design, while pathway lamps and tree lighting enhance nighttime safety.