The Kimbell Art Museum has announced plans to open new museum building by Renzo Piano on November 27, 2013.
South East View
Renzo Piano’s colonnaded pavilion stands as an expression of simplicity—glass, concrete and wood—surrounded by elms and red oaks, some 65 yards to the west of Louis I. Kahn’s vaulted, luminous museum of 1972.
Similar in scale to the Kahn building, the 300-foot-long, 22-foot-high building is composed of two parallel wings stretching from north to south, connected by two glass passageways. To the rear, the west wing will have a green sod roof, which appears to rise out of the ground with berms on either end and concrete retaining walls on the sides. The front, east wing is topped by a glass, steel and wood roof system. The wafer-thin top layer of this system, which features louvered photovoltaic cells, hovers above the east wing’s most prominent feature: enormous laminated wood beams that appear to float above the concrete and glass walls and which are held aloft by square concrete columns.
The plan and elevation of the east wing, which faces the Kahn building, is tripartite, which mirrors the tripartite plan and elevation of the Kahn building. This is the most overt of the Piano building’s numerous echoes of its esteemed predecessor. The facade’s central, 100-foot-long recessed glass entrance bay is flanked by two crisp, light gray concrete bays of equal length. A subtle verticality offsets the emphatic horizontality of the facade with mullions repeated at five-foot intervals and with four columns. The columns reappear on the north and south sides of the east wing, but more closely spaced as a colonnade.
Twenty-nine pairs of wooden roof beams, weighing a total of 435 tons, span the interior and extend to the exterior as an overhanging canopy. As well as providing support for the roof system, the 100-foot-long beams of laminated Douglas fir add visual weight and warmth within largely continuous, changeable and airy interiors. More information may be found at www.kimbellart.org.