Buffalo AKG Art Museum | Buffalo, New York | 2023
Executive Architects: Cooper Robertson
Lead Architect: Erin Flynn
Design Architects: OMA New York
Lead Architect: Shohei Shigematsu
Landscape Architects: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates
General Contractor: Gilbane, Inc.
Client: Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Photographers: Marco Cappelletti
This expansion and renovation of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum creates a holistic, 21st Century cultural campus integrating art, architecture, and nature. Highlights include a newly constructed pavilion to accommodate the museum's growing art collection, as well as a major renewal of the institution's 1905 neo-classical building and 1962 modernist expansion, which now helps cultivate diverse programming. Cooper Robertson served as Executive Architect in collaboration with Design Architect OMA/Shohei Shigematsu.
Renowned for its collection of modern and contemporary art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is one of the oldest and most significant public arts institutions in the United States, with holdings that have grown substantially in recent decades. The new work represents the most significant campus expansion and development project in the museum's 161-year history, and addresses a chronic space shortage while dramatically enhancing the museum campus's accessibility and relationship with the public. The new expansion, the Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, adds 30,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor exhibition space, including state-of-the-art galleries for presenting special exhibitions.
Conceived as a transparent counterpart to the adjacent, more hermetic buildings, this signature work of architecture presents a wraparound glass veil enclosing the sculpture promenade that visually connects the building with the surrounding Frederick Law Olmstead-designed Delaware Park. In a creative sleight of hand, all key systems including fire protection, radiant heating and cooling, lighting, and shades are seamlessly integrated into the façade structure.
The new building also includes several visitor amenities, a multipurpose black-box theater, staff offices, and art loading docks that service all buildings on campus. Central to the project goal of more closely integrating museum facilities with each other and to the public, the new building and the existing campus connect through the sinuous new John J. Albright Bridge. This ADA-compliant enclosed structure weaves around groves of historic oak trees preserved on the site, facilitating both visitor movement and art handling between the old and the new gallery spaces.
The project team's design also accommodates a need for public green space, adding a new underground parking structure and transforming the surface parking lot into 36,400 square feet of vibrant green lawn. This design allows the restoration of the grand stair entry into the 1905 Wilmers building. Additional point of entry is restored on the eastern façade of the Gordon Bunshaft-designed 1962 Seymour H. Knox Building, creating a thoroughfare between the city and the park. The exposed outdoor courtyard is now enclosed by the site-specific installation Common Sky by Studio Other Spaces, facilitating year-round usage that is open to the public free of admission.
This project also entailed significant renovations and modernizations of the museum's key existing facilities. Work on the Wilmers Building included major rehabilitations and updates of finishings, enhancements to visitor services and gallery acoustics, and ADA upgrade. Interior renovations in the Knox Building add 3,800 square feet of new classrooms, art studios, and new restaurant, and also renewed the 350-seat auditorium. Since reopening in June 2023, more than 110,000 patrons have visited the museum 's double its last pre-renovation yearly attendance -- with over 11,000 on opening weekend alone.