New York - Steven Holl's Dark Year Gets Brighter

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Bloch Building Entrance

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IT was Saint Patrick's Day in Kansas City, Mo., and Steven Holl,
the New York architect, was presenting his conceptually complex
addition -'a scatter of lenses fused in the landscape' he often calls
it -for the 73-year-old Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Even in those
early days of construction it was clear that the $196 million structure
-three-quarters underground, with five crystalline-shaped glass boxes
jutting up through a sloping lawn -would be a departure for the
landmark museum, credited with one of the nation's finest art
collections. 'As I stood in front of about a thousand people at the
Unity Temple Church listening to the not-in-my-backyard types talking,
I knew they didn't get it,' Mr. Holl said recently. 'They were roasting
me. It was a really awkward moment.'

But then, with a sense of timing right out of a feel-good movie, the
lights went up in one of the nearby glass pavilion 'lenses,' making it
glow like a towering Japanese lantern just as the audience was heading
out to drive home. A traffic jam ensued on the corner as exiting cars
slowed to get a look.

'They didn't know how much it was going to glow until they could see it for themselves,' Mr. Holl said.

Since then anticipation has been mounting that the addition, called
the Bloch Building, which is scheduled to open in June, might turn out
to be Holl's best recent work, a return to form after a spate of
unfortunate events.

'People around here were on the edge of their seats, unhappy because it's so different, so risky,' said Kite Singleton, a Kansas City architect who described himself as 'not a Steven Holl fan.' 'But inside it's just incredible, really masterful.'