The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building for modern and contemporary art, part of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston is scheduled to open for the public on November 1st 2020. The intervention was conceived for the “display of the important and rapidly growing MFAH collections of 20th- and 21st-century art”.
With more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space, the Kinder Building is the final component in the Museum’s eight-year project to expand and enhance its 14-acre Susan and Fayez S. Sarofim Campus in the heart of Houston, the largest cultural project in North America. The master plan for the redevelopment was designed by Steven Holl Architects, along with the Kinder Building and a new home for the Glassell School of Art.
The Kinder Building spreads over two floors comprised of a light-filled atrium and three gallery spaces at street level. Standing between existing structures, in contrasting yet complementary integration, the Kinder Building is adjacent to the Caroline Wiess Law Building, designed in the 1920s by William Ward Watkin, with later extensions by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the Audrey Jones Beck Building, designed by Rafael Moneo in 2000.
Cladded in vertical glass tubes, generating a softly illuminated pattern at night, the structure will hold international collections of modern and contemporary art, including postwar U.S. painting, postwar Latin American art, international photography, with notable concentrations in Japanese, Latin American, and Central European photography, prints and drawings, with the entire 1980–1994 archive portfolio of Peter Blum Editions and international decorative arts, craft, and design, in particular, contemporary work.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has, over the last dozen years, become one of this nation’s fastest-growing art museums in terms of collections, programs, and audience. Through our campus plan, we have been stepping up in every way to match the growth, diversity, and dynamism of our city. When we open the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building to the public on November 1, 2020, we will welcome visitors to an expansive, beautifully designed complex of buildings and urban gardens, revealing an international collection that we could never before an exhibit in such range and depth. -- Gary Tinterow
To celebrate the opening, “a series of seven major site-specific commissioned artworks will be inaugurated with the Kinder Building, serving as portals that connect this new structure with the other components of the campus”. Moreover, from November 1 through 8, the Museum will offer free general admission to all three of its Sarofim Campus gallery buildings.
