The new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston will open to the public on Saturday, November 21, 2020. Designed by Steven Holl Architects as the third gallery building on the MFAH Susan and Fayez S. Sarofim Campus, the Kinder Building is dedicated to presenting works from the Museum’s international collections of modern and contemporary art. It will open with the first comprehensive installation of these works, drawn from the collections of Latin American and Latino art; photography; prints and drawings; decorative arts, craft, and design; and modern and contemporary art. In addition, eight major site-specific commissioned works will be inaugurated at the time of the opening. Commissioned artists are El Anatsui, Byung Hoon Choi, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ólafur Elíasson, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Cristina Iglesias, Jason Salavon, and Ai Weiwei.
The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building stands in complementary contrast to the Museum’s existing gallery buildings—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, opened in 2000)—and in dialogue with the adjacent 1986 Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden, designed by Isamu Noguchi.
The trapezoidal concrete Kinder Building is clad in vertical glass tubes that emit a soft glow at night in a pattern across its facades. Five rectangular courtyard pools are inset along the perimeter, emphasizing the building’s openness to its surroundings. The redevelopment of the Sarofim Campus and off-site art-storage facilities has been the largest cultural project in North America, with some 650,000 square feet of new construction. Steven Holl Architects designed the master plan for the redevelopment, along with the Kinder Building and a new home for the Glassell School of Art.
Phototgraphy by Peter Molick