In this episode of our series about the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art International Design Competition, As Built co-hosts Patience Jones and Brian Jones speak with competition finalist Brian Butterfield of the firm WHY Architecture.
PJ: Hello and welcome to As Built, the podcast from Graphicmachine about architecture firms, buildings, and how both get built. I am your host, Patience Jones. With me is your co-host, Brian Jones. Today's episode is the next in our series about the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art International Design Competition.
Our guest today is Brian Butterfield of the firm WHY Architecture. Welcome to the podcast. Tell us about your firm.
BB: WHY Architecture was founded 20 years ago by Kulapat Yantrasast, who was a Thai architect. He trained in Tokyo and then worked with for a number of years for Tadao Ando before founding WHY. The first WHY project was the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which was actually the first LEED Gold-certified museum in the world. And really the legacy of the firm since then has been pretty significantly weighted towards arts and culture and museums. The firm's ethos now is really connecting people, culture, and place, so the project typologies range from ground up museums to temporary art activations. For instance, we designed the first iteration of the Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles, and we continue to work with them.
We also have a landscape design studio, and I run something we call the Museums Workshop, which really focuses on our museum clients, the more institutional clients. But within that workshop we also do exhibition design. So there's quite a wide range of projects we get involved with at different time scales, from short temporary activations or exhibitions through to these large-scale capital projects for museums that can take up to a decade sometimes.
PJ: Where is your firm based?
BB: We are based in both Los Angeles and New York. Los Angeles was the original office started 20 years ago, and then we added New York about a decade ago. And we are now operating small outposts in both Tokyo and Paris.
BJ: What type of work is your firm known for?
BB: I think generally arts and culture. That is starting to evolve. As you know, we get engaged with different regions of the world. We're also doing our first science museum in Saudi Arabia in Riyadh. We completed a project a few years ago for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which was the Pacific Northwest Coast Hall. It was the first, how would I say this? You know, that project really looked at bringing a contemporary approach to exhibition-making, to the Natural History Museum environment. It allowed us to take that skillset we know from working with fine art museums and bring that into a natural history context.
It is starting to branch out from just fine art institutions, but I think we're definitely known more in that arts and culture space. We also do have a fairly significant residential portfolio and are engaging in a couple of projects that deal more with hospitality master plans.
Of course the Landscape Studio is quite strong. All of this we see, regardless of the project typology, as this sort of connective practice about people, culture, place. Which I think can mean many different things. That term “cultural placemaking” can mean many different things in different contexts and gets thrown around a lot.
I think for us, what we take most seriously, is that it starts with the people. It's really about the architecture with the people. And that architecture is not just the building, it's the site, it's the region, it's the context, it's the ecology.
PJ: What is one of your favorite projects to have worked on and why?
BB: We are opening a project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this spring, which I'm very excited about because I've been working on that project for a decade. I worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an in-house architect and designer, both planning capital projects and doing exhibition design and this project is the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing Renovation, which is the galleries for African Art, the Art of the Americas, and the Oceania Collection. Having been involved from the earliest stages of pre-planning on the kind of institutional planning side, helping be part of the museum project management team, and then leaving and joining WHY in part, so I could still work on that project, it's really exciting to see that open. The art collection that wing serves, it represents three-fifths of the world. To be able to be part of that legacy where it opened as the primitive art collection, and to have the challenge of, how do you present work that does represent three-fifths of the world, over a thousand distinct cultures, in a new way, knowing that the way people have seen this collection and its importance to not just art history, but living artists today, who see this as part of their living cultural heritage. How do you present that in a new way and what is your role as an architecture and exhibition designer in that context? Working with the museum. So that will open in May and after 10 years, I'm very excited to finally see it.
BJ: Why did your firm decide to enter the Nelson-Atkins competition?
BB: Well, we love museums. We love the challenge of museums, and we also love the absolute wonder and delight and cultural importance of museums. You know, these are not the easiest projects to do as architects. They have very complex stakeholder considerations. The art itself is as much your client as the museum leadership, the public is as much your client. We firmly believe as a design practice that museums are a critical part of cultural infrastructure, and it's an amazing opportunity to work on a museum that, in my opinion, is one of the best museums in the world.
I grew up about three hours east in Iowa and grew up going to the Nelson-Atkins. I remember one of my first memories of art as a child was when my mother took me to the Nelson-Atkins and seeing the Guan sculpture there, the power of art. And as a work of architecture, the sophistication of the materials there is really quite unique. It's a special place. We were very excited and honored to be asked to participate.
PJ: What have been your impressions of Kansas City so far? Probably different from when you were littler.
BB: Yeah. Growing up in the Midwest, and then I did my undergrad studies in St. Louis at Washington University and visited Kansas City a few times. And then you're right, I probably didn't go back for about a decade. I'm incredibly impressed with the amount of participation in not just this project, but generally in the sort of culture and collective ownership of the city and pride in the city - really wanting to engage in conversation about all the good and bad things about the city, where it's going, change. It feels like a very involved and active city on that front. We were amazed when we did our presentation with the other five architects that it was a full house. It was telecasted into other rooms. We ran into probably 10 people over the next three days that came up to us and said they had watched it online. They wanted to talk. The energy that comes from that kind of collective participation is really amazing. We always take the approach that we want to get to know the place, that the design needs to come out of that place.
It's not just the architectural aspects or the historical aspects, it's really the people. We like to embed ourselves there. We're working with a local architecture firm that specializes in historic preservation called STRATA, and so that's become our home base when we're in Kansas City. We've conducted three different workshops in Kansas City at their offices.
And it's not just meeting with the architects and the engineers. We've been engaging with community activists, with teenagers, with local chefs. We want to understand what culture means to Kansas City from all of their perspectives and what they see as an opportunity in the Nelson-Atkins with this new expansion project.
BJ: What have you found to be a highlight of the museum from your visits?
BB: I think the way the museum interacts with the landscape and has seen the role of art as very indoor/outdoor really is in line with our own design practices ethos of the whole site is the museum. And I think that activating the landscape with art, but also thinking about it in terms of that visitor experience through the landscape, those pathways, whether they're formal or informal, whether they're places that are, you know, clearly meant to be visited or places to get lost and discover is really - there's the richness of that at the Nelson-Atkins. I also think that the historic building is much more playful than people give it credit for in terms of its material usage on the inside. There's amazing sight lines and a really wonderful mix of different ceiling heights in this play of sort of expansion and compression.
In a way it's a more contemporary building than I think people realize. And you know, it's not without its problems. I mean, in 2025 there are things we expect now of museums in terms of visitor flow and accessibility. What is an entry experience today? It's certainly not what it was in the 1930s and it's not what it was in 2004 either.
So these buildings need to be modernized. And I think the combination of the Steven Holl building, the Bloch building, the Wight and Wight building, and hopefully our new expansion project. You know, what we're hoping is that we can really kind of reinvigorate those two pre-existing buildings through thoughtful design that really allows them to be their best selves today.
The idea that buildings don't need to be updated or be sort of augmented to respond to contemporary culture and expectations is not the way we see it. We always see it as our role is to sort of sensitively improve. I think that's a real opportunity and both the Steven Holl building and the Wight and Wight building are marvelous examples of architecture that I think really represent their own era as well.
PJ: What have you found most compelling and challenging about the competition brief?
BB: One of the most compelling would be the recognition that the audience of today has certain desires for certain types of program and certain types of spaces and certain types of activities that the museum would like to participate in, to be able to accommodate. Artists also are now making art and conceiving of exhibitions that require different types of spaces.
It's not just about more digital art or spaces that can be able to accommodate more digital art. It's also the relationship I think of art to a museum-going public is different. And so I think as artists respond to that, as artists respond to cultural events, as artists produce art, that actually blends the digital and the real in new ways because our world is becoming hybrid in that sense, the artists want those spaces. They need those spaces. The public wants to experience those things in those spaces. And also, they're looking to museums as places for dialogue and connection and even potentially for their own artistic production: art-making facilities or podcast studios or places you can learn about, even museum professional practice, whether it's learning about art conservation or learning about digital media production. I think museums can play a role in ensuring art is alive within their local culture in a way that is not just restricted to coming and looking at art and the galleries and visiting exhibitions. That to me was the most compelling is that the brief from all different perspectives of what they're asking for in the program really spoke to the desire for the museum to move in that direction. The most challenging, I would say, is really, and it's a good problem to have, when you're given a site that's as special as the Nelson-Atkins Museum you have to take touching that very seriously and the ambition of the program and all of the new spaces that the museum wants. As well as this idea of sort of healing or fixing some of the identified - I wouldn't even say “problems,” but just, you know, things that need improvement in the existing building.
There's not a clear answer as to where you put this new building or how it touches the existing building, how it relates to the existing landscape. Where do you see it from and what is this relationship to the other buildings? I think it's a really exciting opportunity, but that is definitely a challenge.
BJ: What has inspired your approach to the competition brief?
BB: We have an approach we often refer to as “acupuncture architecture.” It can manifest in many different ways. One reading of that approach would be, let's not start with the need for drastic surgery. Let's not start with the need for a sort of large-scale augmentation. Are there more strategic interventions, more targeted interventions that can be really smart and effective at creating major impact to the visitor experience or to the operational experience? Or sometimes it's to increase earned revenue by optimizing spaces for events and food and beverage. After you've sort of done your diagnosis, you can then build out from that, build a larger building, build a larger extension. But it's built on this layer of fundamental understanding of the health of the body. We have a landscape studio and we always practice hand-in-hand. I think really respecting the site, understanding that horizontality, understanding that complexity, working with nature knowing that the museum has very ambitious goals for their sustainability targets for the future and particular certifications that would go with that. So you have to start with the land. You have to start with how you're dealing with water on site. You have to start with thinking about the plantings. We always also look to - we call it “rewilding,” and our landscape studio’s actually called Wilding X WHY -- native plant species, looking to water retention methods, looking to opportunities for creating energy from solar fields. How do we really build an architecture that is mindful of that building's future role in terms of the ecology of the site and the ecology of the region?
From that, hopefully the right architecture emerges. When you combine considerations for ecology and considerations for ease of mobility on both the visitor side as well as the operation side, from that an architecture that is really born of that place, in that context, kind of emerges. We hope that in our approach, that's evident in the building you'll all see in a few weeks. That probably exemplifies our main approach.
PJ: What trends do you foresee emerging in museum and/or cultural architecture over the next decade?
BB: I think the main trend that I'm seeing in museums is one that was happening before COVID, was certainly talked about during COVID, but I think is manifesting itself in different ways around the world, is museums not defining themselves by their brick and mortar existence. That a museum's impact on its local community, on the global community, is not defined by the spaces it has necessarily. There are opportunities to engage in arts, education, and sort of have a digital self in a way. The idea of the museum being both onsite and online and then potentially also AR [augmented reality], VR [virtual reality] existences, none of these are either/ors.
I think that museums can start to define themselves as houses of culture, and ones that can have, and most of them do now, fairly robust engagement and offerings both onsite and online. And I think what's most interesting is thinking about projects that can exist in all those spaces.
So even when we're thinking about this new building, this extension of the existing building, we're also thinking about what role those physical architectural spaces we're proposing will have in that relationship to the larger institution that can be designed, defined by both its onsite and online presence.
It may be that content made at the museum ends up online. It might be that a student's relationship to that museum is when they visit the museum, or it's when their teacher uses virtual aids produced by that museum in the classroom. It's when there are videos and educational experiences that they can do at home with their parents, and that creates this circular loop where every single person involved in those different experiences becomes engaged with the museum. That engagement isn't beholden to the actual physical visit to the museum. And I firmly believe that when you think of those projects that can have elements in all of those different worlds, so to speak, you actually will get people in the museum physically more throughout a calendar year. I think it really drives engagement.
Transcript has been edited for clarity.
Photo of Brian Butterfield courtesy of WHY Architecture
