Nelson Akins Art Museum

About

Standing before the Beaux-Arts stone building at 4525 Oak Street in Kansas City, which opened in December 1933, the eye is first drawn to its 390-foot facade, modeled after the Cleveland Museum of Art. The museum was built with the bequests of two people: William Rockhill Nelson, publisher of the Kansas City Star, and Mary McAfee Atkins, a former schoolteacher. On the lawn outside, four 18-foot-tall badminton shuttlecocks by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen still stand as if frozen mid-flight. Step behind the original building into the Bloch Building, completed in 2007, and the atmosphere shifts entirely. Designed by architect Steven Holl, this addition sets five glass pavilions atop a 165,000-square-foot underground structure; by day, light passes through the glass walls and spreads softly into the galleries. Walking through the rooms, one's pace naturally slows before Hieronymus Bosch's The Temptation of St. Anthony and Rodin's The Thinker.