Research: Semi-underground museums

"Adding on or creating new museums in well-established areas that either culturally or environmentally do not lend themselves to expansion of existing structures or would lead to the destruction of a natural landscape invites burying them. An example of the former is Steven Holl’s additions to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. The original building, sitting in a park, presented many problems. By designing a series of pavilions mainly underground, Holl has preserved the park and given the museum the additional space it needs. A similar solution has been planned by Tadao Ando for the second major addition to the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its original white marble neo-classical structure was added on to by Pietro Belluschi with a strong dark, stone, modernist structure. Ando has proposed an addition that will mostly be underground. By far the most impressive “underground museum” is not in America but in Japan, where I.M. Pei has built the Miho Museum on a mountain top in the Shiga Range east of Kyoto on private land in the middle of a national forest preserve. He was required by environmental regulations to put 90 percent of the museum underground; that he succeeded so well is a testament to his design and engineering brilliance.
In my lectures I always end with my choice for the best “non museum.” It is in the Scheveningen seaside resort of The Hague in Holland. A wealthy couple, with an immense sculpture collection, decided to give it to the state. A small neo-classical structure sat on one of the great sweeping sand dunes that characterize the Dutch North Sea coast. The bulk of the museum was built under the dunes preserving the sea view of the coast, yet permitting the light and space needed for displaying the sculpture. The essence of Dutch modern design is wed to nature in a fashion which perhaps only a nation that has rescued itself from the sea and has refined a widely admired modern architecture could have achieved. Instead of being a physical monument as in the past, perhaps the future of the museum should be to reconnect with the physical world. "

Stead, N. (2000). Fried, theatricality and the spectacular in contemporary museum architecture. In: A. McNamara and R. Butler Art Association Annual Conference, Brisbane, 7 -10 Dec 2000.