There’s art in this eco-friendly design

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- The new Grand Rapids Art Museum building is open and airy, a deceptively large concrete-and-glass structure featuring abundant space to exhibit and store artwork and plenty of natural light for visitors to easily view it.

It’s a stark contrast to the museum’s previous home: a cramped, old post office where a work could be overlooked due to its proximity to the men’s room.

“I would say there’s nothing I would change in the building,” said Celeste Adams, the museum’s director. “It really is a building that functions very, very well as an art museum. The plan, the layout, will help us do our job better and I think help the public learn more and enjoy the works of art that we have here.”

The museum’s striking new $75-million home in the heart of Michigan’s second-largest city not only gives visitors another reason to explore the revitalized downtown, but it’s also environmentally friendly. The three-story building could become one of the world’s first art museums to receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

The council’s standards generally don’t require specific features to be incorporated into a project. Instead, credits are awarded in categories such as site selection, construction materials and energy and water efficiency. A building must amass a certain number of credits to become LEED-certified.

The project is registered with the building council but has not yet received certification, said council spokeswoman Ashley Katz.

A lot of planning and effort went into trying to secure that designation. The museum was built from 10% recycled materials at a site that encourages access by public transportation. Recycled rainwater is used throughout the facility, including toilet flushes, plant irrigation and a reflecting pool. The building’s vapor-misting air conditioning emits no ozone layer-depleting hydrochlorofluorocarbons.

The building was both publicly and privately funded. LEED certification was a stipulation of the lead gift of $20 million from local philanthropist Peter Wege, whose father founded office furniture giant Steelcase Inc.

“It’s something we’re very proud of and we see the virtue of it,” Adams said.

Designing a green building generally is easy, but creating a green art museum is hard and takes longer because of the inherent importance of aesthetics for such a facility and the demanding climate standards required for art preservation, said the museum’s Los Angeles-based architect, Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture.

His building, which officially opened last week, measures 125,000 square feet, which is more than three times the floor space of the previous museum. It has 15 galleries, a children’s art-education area, a gift shop and a cafe that can be accessed without paying the museum’s admission fee, and a 285-seat auditorium whose overhead lights mirror the stars in the sky above Grand Rapids at the summer solstice.

The exterior consists of 188 sections of poured concrete that was mixed to the architect’s exacting standards.

“I always like concrete because it reminds you that something ordinary can be made into something extraordinary, if you put a lot of attention into it,” Yantrasast said.

Works of art move through a below-ground loading dock with a freight elevator that allows delivery trucks to be loaded and unloaded indoors.

“We have a covered loading dock,” Adams said. “At the old building, we had to unload art outside, no matter what the weather, from extremely small loading docks. There were several exhibitions that we turned away because we simply could not fit [works] through the doors.”

The museum was founded by a federation of women’s clubs in 1910 as the Art Assn. of Grand Rapids. The name was changed in 1963.