Campus

Now the largest city in the state, and the second-largest Midwestern economy, Kansas City is poised to become a major player on the national stage. ​‘KC’ lays claim to being the birthplace of jazz music and the home of barbecue – with its famed local style. Its back-to-back Super Bowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, and top-level professional baseball and soccer teams have drawn international audiences. It is the proud home of the first purpose-built stadium for women’s sports in the world, where the KC Current soccer team plays. Kansas City will also host matches in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, bringing jobs – and a worldwide audience – to the city. Cultural standouts include the National WWI Museum and Memorial, Union Station, and the Moshe Safdie-designed Kauffman Center for Performing Arts.

New projects are raising the city’s profile as a great place to visit and live. The $1.5 billion new terminal at Kansas City International Airport, which opened in 2023, will bring more tourism and investment – helping the wider economy around the museum’s new initiative. 

The museum’s rectangular site is more than 1,400 x 950 feet (at its widest point), on land that was formerly William Rockhill Nelson’s personal Oak Hall estate.

Designed by local architectural firm Wight and Wight, the original Beaux Arts-influenced museum is a monumental neoclassical building on a grand stone podium towards the northern end of the site. Its vast, Indiana limestone-coated façade stretches 390 feet long and 175 feet high, its sense of grandeur accentuated by the building’s placement on a hill descending a circa 65 feet drop southwards to the Boulevard. 

This forms an uninterrupted view down a great lawn (designed by local landscape firm Hare and Hare), which houses the acclaimed Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park. The lawn is framed by rows of mature trees and pedestrian paths.

To the original building’s north, the Sculpture Park and Plaza Drive form a level forecourt for the campus. The Bloch Building stretches across the site’s eastern edge, from the original building into the Sculpture Park.

Bounded by East 45th Street and Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard to the north and south, and on the west and east by Oak Street and Rockhill Road – built at Nelson’s expense to service his developments – the site is in the Southmoreland and Rockhill neighborhoods: both predominantly low-rise residential areas first developed by Nelson. Parts to the museum’s west have now been redeveloped into mid-rise, mixed-use neighborhoods.

Kansas City’s free-to-use Streetcar is undergoing a major expansion that will link the Nelson-Atkins to downtown. Set to open in 2025 with 15 new stations, the Streetcar line will extend to UMKC (south of the museum). The ​“Art Museums” stop on 45th & Main Street will provide walkable access to the Nelson-Atkins, Kansas City Art Institute, and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Additionally, the city has recently invested in improved bike lanes surrounding the museum.

Design Challenge

The emerging competition brief covers three typologies: new expansion, reimagining of existing spaces, and engagement with the museum’s public realm.

The new expansion needs to be an original new addition (or ensemble) of world-class architectural quality and significance that is in dialogue, confidently and respectfully, with the site’s icons.

Holistically, the new addition together with the repurposing of the existing buildings needs to enhance and enliven the museum campus to create an inviting, transparent, energizing and dynamic environment – a design that expresses art’s ability to bring people together, create a sense of belonging, and inspire human creativity.

Design Objectives

• Consider the wider connections to the surrounding landscape and city
• Create a design that integrates with the existing campus – either contrasting or harmonizing
• Address multi-modal arrivals to the museum (vehicle, school bus, rideshare, Streetcar, bike, on foot, etc.)
• Identify one primary public entrance and one ideal school group entrance within the campus which may, or may not, be the same
• Enhance the museum’s visual and sensory qualities through transparency, openness and materiality
• Create a new photography center (a suite of galleries, conservation, cold storage and study spaces) 
• Add focused exhibition space that can support differently-scaled exhibitions and events
• Provide inspirational educational spaces that foster inventiveness and imagination across generations through hands-on art activities, including a school group entrance so that more students may be served
• Make the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park more welcoming and accessible; activate and amplify the campus and create exceptional eco-friendly facilities
• Create exceptional spaces for events and programming including an experimental, black box-style theater for digital art and immersive programming, and a restaurant with indoor/​outdoor seating
• Renew the museum’s infrastructure, addressing renovation and operational challenges; upgrade power, data and technology; and modernize and relaunch the museum for the next 50 years