Boston-based studio Safdie Architects has completed an expansion for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, with structures that both maintain and depart from the original style.
This component of a long-running plan for the site adds two galleries and 114,00 square feet (10,590 square metres) of space for a recent major gift and the subsequent reinterpretation of its collection. The museum’s footprint has expanded by half since its opening in 2011.
The expansion presents a U-shaped volume at the bottom of the site that follows the already established two-pronged programme set down by Safdie in the original design.
The structure now forms a complete figure-eight loop following the path of a rerouted stream at the core of a heavily wooded natural landscape.
A bridge gallery with a 40-seat cafe connects the two Safdie-designed galleries, which sit while offering flexible programming spaces for museum curators.
The design is completed by a learning centre reserved for artist residency programs and education studios, and a circular-shaped outdoor gathering space inside a plaza area.
A second entrance has also been added to the northern end of the museum site.
According to the Safdie Architects team, work on the expansion links experiences of art to the tenor of the region’s storied naturalism, while adding a new material pallette.
“In developing the design of the expansion, it was decided to stay within the vocabulary of the existing museum, with one exception: the North Temporary Exhibition Gallery and new creative learning Hub add a new palette to the design,” studio founder Moshe Safdie told Dezeen.
“There are three galleries: the new Contemporary American Art Gallery, which is lit with skylights and timber construction; the North Temporary Exhibition Gallery with unique North-facing skylights; and the Glass Bridge Gallery, which incorporates a cafe, intended for the exhibition of objects not sensitive to light and offering expansive views of the surrounding landscape,” he said.
Viewed from a bird’s eye perspective, the added gallery and bridge’s steel standing seam roof structures establish continuity with the architecture of existing pavilions, while the sawtooth pattern used for the learning and engagement centre offers the stated formal demarcation from the existing program.
Skylights allow the control of sunlight passing into exhibition halls, while the bridge gallery’s interior sequences are framed by exposing barrel vaulted glued-laminated timber ceiling beams whose material was carefully sourced from local forests in northwestern Arkansas.
Safdie admitted it was “extremely satisfying” to see the success of Crystal Bridges fifteen years after its inauguration and said that the “diversity of visitors and the response of the public has been very gratifying” in retrospect.
Crystal Bridges executive director Rod Bigelow added his praise for the addition of architecture, which he said “gives us an entirely new canvas to share American art in ways we simply couldn’t before”.
On the entrance portion of the 134-acre Crystal Bridges campus, local studio Polk Stanley Wilcox has completed its design for the Alice L Walton School of Medicine, joining Marlon Blackwell Architects’ giraffe-inspired vision for the Heartland Whole Health Institute headquarters.
Alice Walton of the American retail empire Walmart has driven much of the building in the small American city.
SWA Group and Gensler have also designed a mass timber corporate headquarters for Walmart in Bentonville.
Elsewhere in the American southwest, Safdie Architects’ four pavilion Cherokee Heritage Center design in eastern Oklahoma was unveiled in early April.
The architect of Habitat 67, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum, and soon-to-expand Marina Bay Sands has enjoyed an American resurgence of late, announcing new projects for Miami and New England since the end of 2023.
The photography is by Tim Hursley
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