The building blocks of America's best architect

A breathtakingly simple new museum extension puts Steven Holl in a class of his own, says Dominic Bradbury

In an era of ever-increasing architectural showmanship and gravity-defying statement buildings, the work of American architect Steven Holl is defined by a more sophisticated, considered approach.

That's especially true of his latest project, the Bloch Building extension to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Part of a $200 million transformation, the Bloch Building opens in June, yet is already complete – bar internal detailing and art installation – and forms an extraordinary addition to the original 1930s building.

The Nelson-Atkins holds one of the finest art collections in America, but had outgrown the traditional neo-classical temple of art that forms its centrepiece. The Bloch Building increases its size by more than 70 per cent, or 165,000 square feet.

Its design is thrillingly unorthodox, with much of the structure tucked into the landscape of the museum's sculpture park, while a sequence of five glass pavilions, or "lenses", emerges from the undulating greenery along the eastern flank of the original building.

"It's as if the landscape were lifted up and the new building folded into it," says Holl's co-designer, Chris McVoy.

"The lenses come up through the land and bring daylight down into the lobbies and gallery spaces below. But the green roofs over some of the building become part of the sculpture park itself, so that Bloch is neither fully a traditional building nor a landscape, but a fusion of the two. Steven envisaged the pavilions as being like blocks of ice or sculptural elements floating in the landscape."

advertisementUsing frameless, structural planks of glass as building blocks for the pavilions – with iron content removed to take away the green tint and create a pure, white light – the lenses have a crisp, surreal presence.

At night they glow like vast lanterns, while in the day they let natural light filter down into the gallery, creating a layer of light supplemented by artificial illumination at exhibition level. Glass planks have been used, to similarly powerful effect, for another of Holl's new projects, the Swiss ambassador's residence in Washington, DC.

In the past, the quality of Holl's work has been criticised for being erratic, but the overwhelming success of both the Bloch and the ambassador's house give weight to Time magazine's recent description of Holl as America's best architect, praising him for "buildings that satisfy the spirit as well as the eye".

The new projects have a vigorous, intelligent concept, but also a simplicity of form which recalls much of Holl's best work from the past: the aluminium-clad Turbulence House, a beautiful, sculpted metallic swirl sitting in the New Mexico desert; or Y-House, his reinvention of the red-painted American timber barn, transformed into a divining-stick structure with its pair of prongs opened up to the landscape.

Holl's rising reputation has now brought a string of commissions for new projects outside America, including a marina building in Beirut, an arts centre in Denmark and an oceanic museum in Biarritz.

But for now, all eyes are on the Bloch Building. With it, Holl appears to have found a new way to approach the whole business of museum design: it's neither a car-wreck spectacle nor the bland box that we have come to expect from museum extensions.

"The architecture is dynamic," says McVoy, "but it's not attention-grabbing, and is actually quite serene and subtle on the exterior. Yet the interior opens up to these great expanses within space which are very supportive of the art itself. In this case, more than any other museum that we've done, we've hopefully been successful in creating a third way."

See more of Steven Holl's work at www.stevenholl.com