Nasher Museum of Art

Artful Design Yields World-Class Art Museum

By Pam Hunter

Creating a world-class art museum with features that naturally blend with the gardens and wooded landscape around it was the major objective of architect Rafael Viñoly, who designed the new $23 million Nasher Museum of Art project at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

The 64,592-sq.-ft. project, targeted to be completed by October, will sit on a nine-acre site midway between Duke's East and West campuses. Its design enhances and highlights the natural beauty of the surrounding area, which includes public gardens and a line of trees that separate the site from the rest of the campus.

The centerpiece of the museum is a soaring 14,000-sq.-ft. steel-and-glass atrium that connects five pavilions housing three art galleries, an administrative/education building and a lecture hall. Underneath the atrium is a "great hall," or lobby area, that gives visitors a glimpse of both the connected galleries as well as the outdoors, made visible through glass panels.

"The overall goal was to really set up these five pavilions in the garden and to really take advantage of the site, which is centrally located between the two campuses," said John Kinnaird, project manager for Rafael Viñoly Architects of New York.

Beck, the general contractor on the project, performed all of the major construction work, which included preliminary sitework, foundation work, installation of structural steel, precast concrete panels and museum-quality glass walls, construction of the five pavilions and installation of the atrium and skylight. To date, most of the work has been completed. In the next few months, Beck will focus on completing interior finishes and landscaping around the museum grounds.

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"This spectacular museum taking place in the center of Duke's campus is a symbol of the university's renewed commitment to the arts on campus and in the community," said Wendy Hower Livingston, the museum's interim communications coordinator.

Livingston said Duke University formerly had housed its collection of more than 13,000 artworks in a former science building on the East Campus. The Duke University Museum of Art, which opened in 1969, closed in May. The new Nasher Museum of Art will open in October 2005.

The museum's namesake is Raymond D. Nasher, an internationally prominent art collector and real estate developer who graduated from Duke University in 1943. Nasher provided the largest gift of $7.5 million toward the new building, and his Nasher Foundation of Dallas subsequently kicked in $2.5 million.

At the time, Beck was working on the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, another Nasher-funded project.

Duke signed a contract with Beck in 2003, after having commissioned Rafael Viñoly Architects to design the building in 2001. The Nasher museum project broke ground in January 2003.

Steve Collins, senior project manager for Beck, said the unique design created an art building that's also a work of art itself. "Rafael Viñoly is a renowned architect. He's always pushing the boundaries of architecture, and consequently, he's pushing the boundaries of engineering as well," Collins added.

The atrium is supported by structural steel columns hidden behind the precast concrete skin of the five pavilions. Five steel box beams span the great hall to form the bones of the atrium in the shape of an asymmetrical pentagon. Smaller secondary beams run between the pavilions. Two longer beams create the peaks in the roof, which rise 45 ft. above floor level.

Because of the complexity of the atrium's design, Beck couldn't use normal drawings. "It could really only be viewed in 3D," Collins added. "The design doesn't lend itself well for regular drawings. It did make it a little more challenging, but it worked out very well."

Viñoly also required that some of the office space in the administration/education pavilion be built as a cantilever over the classrooms at the lobby level and that glass panels form the walls of the two classrooms beneath the cantilever to create a more open effect.

"We wanted to keep that as completely open to the wooded landscape as much as possible so that when you're in the classroom, you feel as if you're outside," Kinnaird said. "Everything is connected with the landscape."

To further create a feeling of bringing the outdoors inside, the design team specified that green slate be used for the flooring and that clear stories - partially concealed vertical glass walls - form three of the four walls in the pavilions. Additionally, Viñoly accommodated a natural slope in the site's landscaping by creating a 2-ft.-high platform at the lobby's entrance, a platform from which visitors will step down to enter the rest of the museum.

The construction team ran into a few roadblocks, Collins said. Beck encountered unanticipated site groundwater while preparing the foundation, a development that required a redesign of the foundation. The point at which water entered the building was located at the future site where artwork would be stored between exhibitions, Collins said.

Workers from Beck dug down to bedrock and replaced unsuitable soil with gravel. They also installed several subsurface water drainage systems to make sure that any water that came onto the site was intercepted and carried up the storage drainage system, away from the building footprint.

Because of these unexpected developments, Duke University extended the project's completion date from June to October of this year. "The owner decided it was better to extend the completion date of the project rather than try to speed things up and take a chance on quality," Collins said.

The geographic distances between different members of the project team created additional hurdles, Collins said. With the steel detailer based in New Zealand, the architect and engineer based in New York, the steel fabricator in Virginia and the project and general contractor in North Carolina, the entire team had to make a commitment to keeping the lines of communication open throughout the duration of the project.

"Just communicating with people was a challenge, although it worked very well with conference calls and exchanging data electronically," Collins said.

In addition to completing interior finishes inside, Beck will perform some foundation landscaping outside the museum. Additionally, Lappas & Havener, a Durham, N.C.-based landscape architect, has completed the preliminary designs for up to four outdoor sculptural gardens at the museum, Livingston said.

Duke University has big hopes for the final product.

Kimmerly Rorschach, the museum's new director, said, "The arts at Duke play a vital role in campus life and in the surrounding community, and this extraordinary new building will provide a platform for many of the university's wonderfully diverse arts programs and initiatives. I am inspired by the brilliant vision that Rafael Viñoly has designed."

Project Team:

Owner: Duke University, Durham, N.C.

Architect: Rafael Viñoly Architects, New York

General Contractor: Beck, Atlanta

Landscape Architect: Lappas & Havener, Durham, N.C.