NC Museum of Art Expansion featured in Architectural Record

Architectural Record, the premier architecture periodical in the US, features the North Carolina Museum of Art in its July issue. Tom Phifer, of New York based Thomas Phifer and Partners and the lead architect of the museum’s recently opened $86M expansion project, is quoted that he “wants his new building… to disappear into the landscape.” As the article points out, the museum’s warehouse-like addition, little more than a large concrete box during much of the construction, isn’t exactly the transparent glass boxes of early modernism, allowing the surrounding landscape to ‘become the walls’ of the building; nor does is gently blend into the hillside of the complex’s 164 acre art park, like the new Cottages at Fallingwater.

The beauty of the museum’s new architecture, and the subtleties of Phifer’s vision, are worked out in the details. Traditional museums have often been dark, temperature controlled boxes, in order to preserve the delicate art inside of them. The North Carolina Museum of Art on the other hand, dissolves the ceiling into hundreds of oblong ocular skylights, which allow filtered indirect daylight to flood the gallery spaces, without any of the usual adverse effects on the paintings, sculptures and installations. The rectilinear form is broken up by glass walled courtyards and reflecting pools, each creating unique experiences in and around the voids of the building. The result is a truly 21st Century space to view the NCMA’s permanent collection, which disappears, not into the landscape around the museum, but around the art that the addition was built to house.

See a slideshow and the full article here.

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