North Carolina Museum of Art

Since he became the North Carolina Museum of Art’s director in 1994, Lawrence Wheeler has lobbied for an expansion to the Raleigh, N.C., institution’s 1983 Edward Durell Stone–designed building (completed after his death). This year—after an fundraising campaign to get more than $70 million from state, county, and city funds, as well as from private donors—his vision was finally realized with the opening of a new 127,000-square-foot building by New York–based Thomas Phifer and Partners.

Wheeler’s vision called for a light-filled building open to the surrounding landscape and free to the public, in which art would be presented in a less constricted environment than the existing building allowed; it would also be a destination for anyone seeking a place of beauty and serenity. This became partner-in-charge Thomas Phifer’s mandate. The once rural site is now a museum park, veined with hiking and bike trails leading to site-specific art installations.

A Southerner himself, Phifer sought to acknowledge the region’s historic attachment to the land, designing a museum that would be an iconic landmark for the state without overwhelming the site’s established identity. “The goal from the beginning was to create a beautiful environment for experiencing the museum’s diverse collection of art, both in galleries and out in the landscape,” Phifer says

Phifer’s parti is a large rectangle penetrated by smaller rectangles that represent the park’s infiltration of the building. These penetrations evolved into sculpture courtyards with reflecting pools and a garden with granite boulders from western North Carolina that are placed as sculptural pieces. Low-E–glazed window walls allow clear, untinted views from the interior galleries to art installations outside. At these points, unlike most museums, the building allows liberal access in and out, contributing to an experience that is of the land. This is reinforced by the fact that the museum is a single story: No visitor is ever isolated from the landscape.

Elsewhere, the perimeter of the one-story structure is windowless, clad with a vertical array of anodized-aluminum panels with a matte-gray finish. Each of these panels measures 5 feet 2 inches by 24 feet, which qualifies them as among the largest aluminum panels fabricated in the U.S. to date. Each panel overlaps the next at an angle, and in the resulting gap, a highly polished, stainless-steel insert reflects the sun’s rays back onto the adjacent panel. Without this detail, the solid façades would seem monolithic and impenetrable; instead, the walls seem to dematerialize as reflections of clouds and trees float across the surfaces.

What is not perceptible is that these walls are 2 feet thick. Rigid insulation occupies the exterior space behind the cladding. Conditioned air is pumped through a cavity, dispersed at the ceiling, and returned at the floor.

In addition to the window walls, 362 skylights admit natural light into the building. Waves of louvers on the roof allow only indirect northern light to enter the insulated skylights, set into deep molded coffers forming oval oculi, which are in turn covered by protective fabric scrims. The gently curving coffers prevent shadows, causing the art to seemingly emerge from the walls and pedestals into high relief.

Phifer cites Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, as a key inspiration. Kahn’s concrete barrel vaults direct daylight downward into the galleries, articulating the spaces with gently dispersed light. Phifer’s design invites comparison from which neither architect suffers. The spatial articulation and detailing of each museum has been described as austere, but both were borne of steadfast logic and disciplined execution, which translates complexity into sublime simplicity.

The new building at the North Carolina Museum of Art provides more than 65,000 square feet of exhibition space, in addition to public areas such as a store and a café. The entry plaza is delineated by a tree-lined path that leads to a 2-1/2-acre environmental art installation (completed in 1997), which includes an amphitheater by New York architects Smith-Miller + Hawkinson, a sprawling environmental work by conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, and landscaping by Nicholas Quennell.

North Carolina Museum of Art, in Raleigh, N.C., by Thomas Phifer and Partners.

Although the perimeter is clad in anodized-aluminum panels, which protect the artwork from harsh southern and western sunlight, the façades around inset sculpture areas are lined with fritted glass, giving the gallery spaces a connection to the outdoors without allowing copious sunlight to compromise the safety of the artwork.

Outside (and reflected by) the entry canopy is an informal seating area for visitors. Covered by porous gravel pavement that admits rainwater into filtration beds, the area is part of a larger water-management strategy that includes collecting roof and roadway runoff into a 90,000-gallon cistern, which is used for irrigation and maintaining water levels in the site's reflecting pools.

The canopy creates a shaded indoor-outdoor entry sequence into the new building, with glass walls that allow views out to one of the five courtyards inset into the floorplan and a stainless steel ceiling that reflects the patrons entering or leaving the building. The canopy ends at tall glass entry doors that lead into the main sculpture hall, the central space around which the other 40 galleries are organized.

The museum features skylights with an interlayer for UV protection. The skylights have louvered domes oriented to allow only indirect north light into the galleries, and the oculi are covered in lightweight, interchangeable fabric scrims calibrated to complete the filtering process.

source : Architect Magazine