McNay Art Museum Reopens After Massive Expansion
French architect Jean-Paul Viguier led a team that included TBG Partners, the largest landscape architecture and planning firm in Texas.
Nicholas Tamarin -- Interior Design, 3/23/2009 12:00:00 AM
The McNay Art Museum in San Antonio may be the oldest modern art museum in Texas, but it’s looking much more up to date following French architect Jean-Paul Viguier's $50.8 million renovation and addition.
Leading a team that included TBG Partners, the Lone Star state’s biggest landscape architecture and planning firm, Viguier doubled the institution’s size with the new 45,000-square-foot Jane and Arthur Stieren Center for Exhibitions. The addition will allow the museum to host larger traveling exhibitions for the first time, and will house a new museum store, reception hall for special events, lecture hall and two learning centers.
Set into a grassy slope, the center’s glass façade opens onto a terrace on the upper level. On the lower level, it adjoins the museum's new sculpture gardens, the first in central and south Texas. The two-story pavilion's most audacious feature, however, is a seven-foot-thick, glass and steel roof that acts as a cooling system to filter and adjust the bright south Texas sun.
Originally a Spanish Colonial Revival home, built in 1927 by painter, art teacher and oil heiress Marion Koogler McNay, the structure was converted into a museum in 1954. The McNay boasts 100,000 visitors a year, and a permanent collection that includes works by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Images courtesy of McNay Art Museum.
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