The new renovation of Buffalo’s AKG – one of the best art museums in North America – is a fine example of creative architecture for public space. In the courtyard, light filters through a lattice of white steel, and triangular mirrors that reflect a pale marble floor.Handout
The sun filtered down through a lattice of white steel, dancing through triangular mirrors that reflected a pale marble floor. I was in the courtyard of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in upstate New York, standing under a work of art that serves as both a roof and part of the gallery’s collection.
Common Sky by artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Sebastian Behmann is one of the most surprising bits of the new museum, formerly the Albright-Knox, which reopened this summer after a three-year rebuild. Architect Shohei Shigematsu of OMA added a new wing to the complex, and reshuffled the interiors of two existing buildings from 1905 and 1962.
Now the gallery has a campus worthy of its incredible collection. It scrambles some familiar binaries of architecture: new versus old, closed versus open, practical versus whimsical, polite versus radical. It is, improbably, brilliant.
The museum is a two-hour drive from Toronto, and if you make that trip you will begin your visit in a new underground garage. From there you climb a spiral ramp into the Gundlach Building, a three-storey new addition by OMA. The first artistic offering, a rich Clyfford Still survey, begins just past the reception desk, in a double-height gallery that is packed with paintings and has a broad south-facing window.
“This place is immediately understandable as a museum, because the first thing you see is art,” Mr. Shigematsu said. “At the same time, there is this connection between inside and outside,” which symbolizes a “radical transparency” between the museum and the city around it.
The new building contains the majority of the exhibition space and its galleries – high-ceilinged white boxes punctuated by oversized marble doorways – serve contemporary art well.Handout
In Buffalo, this impulse clearly make sense. From the Gundlach Building you can see the museum’s two previous wings: a 1905 Beaux-Arts stone temple and a 1962 addition by Gordon Bunshaft in black steel. Both rest on a plinth of white marble. Both are beautiful but “very opaque,” as the museum’s director, Janne Sirén, said.
“We wanted a museum that is of the people and for the people,” Mr. Sirén added. “For a museum to be that, you need to collapse the notion of the museum as a castle on a hill.”
The new building has the bulk of the exhibition space, and its galleries – high-ceilinged white boxes punctuated by oversized marble doorways – serve contemporary art well. Large canvases (including a suite of Anselm Kiefers) and installation works sit well here.
These galleries are surrounded by broad corridors, the largest on the second floor, which provide generous breathing space between rooms, and allow visitors to linger and take their time, or get a coffee.
From there you move across a glassed-in second-storey pedestrian bridge, which slaloms around a copse of trees. This dose of light and landscape prepares you for the quieter atmosphere of the 1905 Wilmers Building. The AKG has hung much of their great 20th-century art holdings here: a double-sided Kurt Schwitters here, a lucent Frankenthaler and a Rothko hanging companionably in a side room.
For the renovations to the gallery, architect Shohei Shigematsu of OMA added a new wing to the complex, and reshuffled the interiors of two existing buildings from 1905 and 1962.Handout
It all makes sense, and it all works. While that swooping glass bridge gives a frisson, the project has an air of rationality – much like Mr. Shigematsu’s 2016 remake of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
OMA began as a group of architectural provocateurs, led by Rem Koolhaas, whose work has often subverted the self-serious tradition of modern architecture. If there is such a twist at the AKG, it lies in the renovation of the 1962 Knox Building, which now houses Common Sky. This was designed by Gordon Bunshaft, a major figure in 20th-century American architecture.
OMA has reinvented this cloister-like structure, changing the courtyard from an outdoor to an indoor space, and removing art from the adjacent galleries. Bunshaft’s building has been reduced in stature to house a gift shop. Are the architects attacking the whims of the previous generation? Or are they just serving the public?
The courtyard is unticketed, a place for Buffalonians and visitors “to gather and to move freely,” as Mr. Siren puts it. I saw the museum’s very diverse crowd do just that: a young man working on his laptop, a couple having coffee, a woman settling in with a novel.
This was not a temple of high art, nor was it a pure modernist cloister cut off from the world. It was something else – something meaningful and bright.
Alex Bozikovic