Duke University, Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina
From Archiplanet
| Duke University, Nasher Museum of Art | |
| Designer | Rafael Vinoly Architects PC, New York, New York, USA |
| Location | Durham, North Carolina, USA |
| Date | 2005 |
| Building Type | Museum |
| Street Address | 2001 Campus Drive, Durham, North Carolina, USA |
| Notes |
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| Building Details |
In 2000, Rafael Viñoly Architects PC won the commission to design a new building for the Duke University Museum of Art, which had outgrown its home in a renovated science building on campus. Renamed the Nasher Museum of Art after a donation by art patron, philanthropist, and Duke alumnus Raymond D. Nasher, the new museum was designed to create a distinctive campus landmark and a cultural center serving the university and surrounding communities.
Rafael Viñoly Architects conceived of the Nasher Museum of Art as a series of pavilions in a park that draw the landscape into the museum. A collection of five separate, rectangular volumes, arranged in a loose radial pattern near the top of a gentle slope, define an irregular, pentagonal central courtyard topped by a glass roof. The complex, almost vertiginous geometries of the atrium roof are formed by a hierarchy of structural systems, all supported on five primary beams. This seemingly complex, yet deceptively simple, network of structural supports adds rhythm, lightness, scale, and openness to the column-free public lobby and event space at the heart of the museum, and it also incorporates the building’s mechanical systems.
The atrium creates a strong dialogue between indoors and outdoors, flooded with sunlight and framing glimpses between pavilions to the surrounding gardens. Further blurring the inside-outside distinction, the precast concrete panels that clad the exterior of the pavilions extend into the protected, interior atrium space, and the green slate floor extends outdoors as terraces and additional café seating. Visitors move easily from one pavilion to the next, always passing through the central atrium, as though through an architecturally abstracted version of the natural landscape.
In contrast to the monolithic concrete exteriors and the dynamic atrium, the interiors are designed to be architecturally introverted. Entered through deep vestibules from the lobby, they are white, ethereal spaces suited for the display of art. Concealed clerestories in a ceiling cove around three sides of each gallery allow natural light to filter inside, in a controlled manner that preserves the artwork on display.
