The renewed and expanded campus of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum will stretch alongside the city’s Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Delaware Park, with three new points of entry, to increase the accessibility of the facilities and engage all members of its community with an inclusive, interactive, and porous site.
Designed in collaboration with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and Cooper Robertson, The Buffalo AKG will comprise more than 4600 m2 (50,000 sf) of prime exhibition space, five state-of-the-art studio classrooms, an interior community gathering space, and more than 0.08 ha (0.2 acres) of new public green space situated above an underground parking garage. On the north side of the campus will be the Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building—a work of signature architecture that adds more than 2787 m2 (30,000 sf) of space for the display of special exhibitions and the museum’s world-renowned collection of modern and contemporary art.
Featuring a translucent glass curtain wall, the Gundlach Building furthers the museum’s mission of accessibility and initiates a dialogue with the surrounding community, inverting the traditional model of the art museum as an opaque facility and creating tremendous porosity between the interior and the exterior.
Galleries will be located on all three floors of the Gundlach Building, ranging from an intimate black box gallery on the ground floor, to the enclosed Sculpture Terrace on the second, to the expansive 700 m2 (7,530-sf) gallery on the third. Visitors would enter the Gundlach Building both from the ground level and from the subsurface parking garage. The staircase from the parking garage to the ground level will be adorned with Others Will Know, an innovative site-specific artwork by Swedish artist Miriam Bäckström. The immersive woven tapestry was designed using 3D mapping and virtual reality technologies to create the illusion of depth, transparency, and three-dimensionality.
To integrate the Gundlach Building with the museum’s existing campus, OMA has designed the John J. Albright Bridge—a unique glass-walled structure that connects the Gundlach Building with the Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers Building, designed by E. B. Green, and originally constructed in 1905. The bridge was designed with a unique, circuitous path from the second floor of the Gundlach Building to the main floor of the Wilmers Building to protect a grove of historic oak trees, ensure a slope compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and facilitate the transport of artworks from one end of the campus to the other.
“It has been amazing to witness our collective vision for the Buffalo AKG take shape in such a culturally and historically significant campus and city,” said Shohei Shigematsu, Partner, OMA New York. “This milestone was made possible through the tireless work and effort of the design and construction team and Janne and the museum staff, with endless support from the Board of Directors and Project Committee. The project was designed to connect art, nature, and people by providing new links of access and radical transparency, and we’re excited to see the campus come to life as it welcomes new activities and dialogues with global and local communities.”
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