HOUSTON – With its flowing pan‑fluted façade and warm evening glow, the newly opened Nancy and Rich Kinder Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) commands attention day and night on its challenging triangular site in the Museum District.
Observers have offered varied descriptions of how the new structure sits among MFAH’s traditional and mid‑century buildings.
Set behind a canopy of trees, the building occupies a trapezoid footprint. From above its structural wings suggest a starfish; from the street it reads as a refined, frosted fortress; by night it can appear almost otherworldly.
$450 million Redevelopment Largest Cultural Project in North America
Contemporary in form, the Kinder Building expands MFAH’s exhibition capacity by nearly 75 percent. The addition creates generous open galleries to showcase the museum’s international collections of modern and contemporary art, a rapidly growing segment of MFAH’s holdings that span roughly 70,000 objects from antiquity to the present.
Steven Holl Architects designed the landmark addition and the master plan that has reshaped MFAH’s 14‑acre Susan and Fayez S. Sarofim campus, adding new buildings, plazas, gardens and improved pedestrian connections between old and new components.
The Kinder Building serves both as a capstone and the completion of a decade‑long effort to integrate and unify the campus, museum officials said in preview materials.
Key features of the 237,000‑square‑foot Kinder Building include approximately 102,000 square feet of exhibition space distributed across the entry level, two upper floors, and two pedestrian tunnels that connect to MFAH’s existing buildings. The facility also houses a 215‑seat theater, underground parking, and a café overlooking the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden, designed by Isamu Noguchi. Additional elements include courtyard gardens and water features.
Structurally, the building relies on a concrete superstructure with steel framing for floors and a trussed roof. The roof comprises a series of floating planes reportedly inspired by billowing Texas clouds; intended as a “luminous canopy,” it admits natural light into galleries below and into a three‑story atrium.
The façade’s translucent glass half‑tubes modulate light and shadow while functioning as what architect Steven Holl described as “a cool jacket” that helps reduce solar gain.
The Kinder Building project team included:
- Landscape architecture: Deborah Nevins & Associates, in collaboration with Nevins & Benito Landscape Architecture
- Project Manager: Legends
- Structural Engineers: CardnoHaynes Whaley and Guy Nordenson and Associates
- MEP Engineer: ICOR Associates
- Civil Engineer: Walter P. Moore & Associates
- Climate Engineers: Transsolar
- Lighting Consultant: L’Observatoire International
- Façade Consultant: Knippers Helbig
- Glass: Gartner Permasteelisa
- LEED Commissioning: Loring Engineers
- Water feature: Waterscapes
Groundbreaking for the Kinder Building took place in June 2017, and the structure topped out in January 2019.
During the building’s construction, MFAH completed two other major projects on the campus: the new Glassell School of Art, notable for its sloping, walkable roofline and the monumental stainless steel sculpture Cloud Column by Anish Kapoor; and the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation Center for Conservation, built atop an existing MFAH parking garage. Together with off‑site storage, these three facilities add roughly 650,000 square feet of new construction to MFAH’s campus as part of the museum’s $450 million redevelopment—the largest cultural project currently completed in North America.
Gary Tinterow, a Bellaire High School graduate, serves as director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and has overseen construction and campus transformation efforts since 2011.
Nov. 25, 2020 Realty News Report Copyright 2020
Caption: Night photo of the new building from Main at Bissonnet. Photo credit: CALpix.
File: Houston Museum Capstone Complete – the Kinder Building
File: (2) Gary Tinterow. MFAH, Steven Holl Architects. Anish Kapoor. Houston Museum Capstone Complete – the Kinder Building.