Design For Kansas City Museum Is En-'light'-ened

"The translucency of watercolors usually has little to do with the hard surfaces of modern buildings. Yet it shines through New York architect Steven Holl's $200 million Bloch addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Opening June 9, the new wing is a rich and accomplished work of U.S. design.

Much was at stake. This is one of the most important collections in the Midwest. To avoid disfiguring the museum's original building, a grand columned limestone temple that has presided over its hilltop site since 1933, Holl buries most of the 165,000-square-foot Bloch Building underground. Much of its 840-foot length terraces down the side of the sculpture garden behind the main building.

Holl, 59, works out his designs in tiny watercolor paintings, and their luminous quality is evident in the way four tractor-trailer-size, milky-white boxes appear to tumble down the slope. The boxes are light-catching devices -- clad in an elaborate, two-layer sandwich of glass, night lighting and adjustable shades -- that diffuse daylight into the galleries beneath the turf."