NCMA extension by Thomas Phifer and Peter Walker

You probably know that the North Carolina Museum of Art has been under construction for a while now.  Although it looks like the museum isn’t open, outdoor events and many exhibitions have rolled through in the mean time.  In fact the Monet show drew record numbers daily during its entire hanging.  The museum has a vast collection of undisplayed work and the extension will allow NCMA to show more of it as well as use the existing structure to house temporary exhibitions. 

Click above for slide show

The new building simulates an outdoor setting while you view the NCMA collection.  The beauty of Phifer’s structure and Walker’s flora arrangement is awe inspiring.  Phifer’s design includes a new roof structure that consists of swollen skylights that light the entire interior.  An appropriate and seductive design for the large pastorial landscape that the museum sits in. 

Phifer talks about the history and need for this new building:

The institution’s current Ed Stone building was constructed in the -1970s after Stone’s death when North Carolina and everybody else in America was in economic crisis. The State could not construct the whole complex Stone had designed, so the museum has been living for almost 30 years just a small portion of what was originally supposed to house it. So, the museum has been improvising there for all these years, growing all these years, have more and more programs and visitors, acquiring more art, and now they are finally in a position to build something at the level of excellence they have always wanted, to the level of their collections.

Since the Stone building won’t have to accommodate the permanent collection galleries once the new building is finished, it will be adapted for other important museum programs and functions. That was also one of the objectives the museum outlined for us.

Of course, the museum also told us very, very clearly that they wanted all these various elements knitted together in a coherent, beautiful campus.

Phifer on his inspirations for the project:

And who could talk about natural light without citing Louis Kahn’s building for the Kimbell museum in Fort Worth? Kahn got everything right there, from the outdoor procession through a garden, to the way light is managed inside, to the rooms with daylight where the pictures are shown.

It seems to me most museums are just too closed to natural light, perhaps because they are afraid of controlling it. And in urban settings particularly, the city has been kept at arm’s length because the experience of art is presumed to be about looking at a thing inside a discreet volume removed from daily life and the cares of the outside world. Sometimes that works well but I question it as a premise. In North Carolina we’re making our building as the foyer to nature, not the foil to it.

Another issue that’s very important to us is how we sequence the spaces inside the new building. We’re designing an unfolding spatial experience so that visitors get subtle breaks and breathers. You’ll go into a gallery space, see work there, have a quiet experience with a picture, go out and get a breather in the main Central Gallery space, go back in to another smaller space and see art in a quiet way, get another breather, and so forth. At John Russell Pope’s National Gallery building in Washington D.C. , visitors go into clusters of galleries and then come out and get re-oriented in a beautifully lit center hall. You go into that center hall and you see other visitors doing the same thing. You get a sense of community and shared experience. I really love that approach to organizing the flow of the visit because it allows people to have a wonderful one-on-one experience with art but also have a collective experience.

More of Phifer’s Interview on the Museum site

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