U-M Museum of Art wins worldwide architectural award

The architectural design of the University of Michigan Museum of Art has been deemed on par with that of the Horizontal Skyscraper in Shenzhen, China, and the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece – all members of a select group of ten projects worldwide bestowed with the 2011 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Honor Award for architecture.

The museum now sports a 53,000-square-foot addition and a full restoration of its 1910 Beaux-Arts building. The design was done by Allied Works Architecture, with Integrated Design Solutions serving as the associate architect. The finer points of the $42 million project include more than doubling the display space for collections and temporary exhibits, open-storage galleries, a 225-seat auditorium, and a curatorial research center.

In Michigan, it seems, innovation in museum design is not a rare artifact. The Grand Rapids Art Museum is the first LEED-certified new construction art museum in the nation.

What sets the U-M Museum of Art apart and enabled it to garner the award, says Director Joe Rosa, is "[The architect's] massing from the existing to the new works quite beautifully, as well as the notion of transparency through the new addition, juxtaposed to a Beaux-Arts building which has no sense of transparency. So you get this compositional feel when you walk around the building that makes both worlds work quite well together, and of course as our collection is historical in scope, from Asia onto tomorrow's makers, we have a mission to show a breadth of art and our building allows us that."

The museum is now 100,000 square feet in size, about half the size of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Rosa notes. "We are quite a large university art museum and one of the oldest and now...we can really go into the 21st century as being a leading institution for how we envision art in the future and educate our students to have the edge culturally and also ask those questions that might not happen in a free-standing museum."

Source: Joe Rosa, director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art
Writer: Tanya Muzumdar