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Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art
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The Great Plains inspires a museum's design, and a subsequent addition.
When the Beach Museum at Kansas State University looked for an architect to design an addition to its 1996 Charles Moore building, it turned to Arthur Andersson and Christopher Wise, who had worked for Moore in his Austin, Texas, studio. For Andersson and Wise, the challenge here was to complement their mentor without aping him. Their response was to create an architecture that connects to the Kansas State campus while making an abstraction of the surrounding rural vernacular. The Beach, a small, regional fine art museum, features the work of American artists, many from the Midwest.
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The design guidelines for both the original building and the addition called for pitched roofs and local limestone. Moore’s original building was an experiment in combining the warm and cool tones evident in the rolling flint hills. That program continues in the addition, though the forms are simpler and more sculptural. Andersson and Wise used limestone to evoke the warm tones of earth and burnt grass, and cast concrete to recall the Midwest’s cool, big sky.
The addition’s pitched roofs take inspiration from regional art—especially the work of John Steuart Curry, whose entire collection is at the Beach—and depictions of simple barns and grain silos on the Plains. The design ties into the tradition of American museums in houses, with a plan reminiscent of a farm compound. Yellow-green mullions draw from Sven Birger Sandzen’s paintings of the Midwestern prairies.
A courtyard with a curving wall connects the first building to the new one, yet also creates a distinct separation. Light comes in from the courtyard, bathing the curving wall and engendering movement. A small, sculptural opening along the facade offers views to a grove of trees.
Though the client discouraged the architects from bringing daylight into the galleries, Andersson and Wise created a “spirit window,” a slice of glazing in the upper corner of the main gallery. Andersson likens this to a device used by American Indians on their spare, abstracted rugs. When the Indians started trading these rugs with the settlers, they were asked to put borders on them. The concept of a border was foreign and frightening to the Indians because they could only conceive of open landscapes. So they left a break in the rugs’ edge to allow the spirit to be free. That concept inspires the spirit window.
Formal name of project:
Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art
Location:
Kansas State University
Manhattan, Kansas
Gross square footage:
Original: 26,000 sq.ft.
Addition: 17,000 sq.ft.
Total construction cost:
Original: $6.3 Million
Addition: $5.1 Million
Completion Date:
Original: October 1996
Addition: April 2007
Owner:
Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art
Architect:
Andersson•Wise Architects
98 San Jacinto Boulevard #2010
Austin, TX 78701
T 512.476.5780
F 512.476.0858
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