28 Crit Introducing the Buffalo AKG Art Museum
July/August 2023
OMA and Cooper Robertson update and expand a historic institution.
MARCO CAPPELLET TI
Design architect: OMA/Shohei Shigematsu Architect of record: Cooper Robertson Landscape architect: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Structural engineering: Arup Electrical engineering/MEPFP/ Telecommunications: Buro Happold Civil engineering: Wendel Lighting design: Arup Gallery lighting: Litelab AV/Acoustics: Jaffe Holden Graphic Design (Signage/wayfinding): Wkshps with Once-Future Office Facade consultant: Thornton Tomasetti General contractor: Gilbane Geotech: McMahon & Mann Consulting Engineers Historic Preservation: Preservation Studios Vertical transportation: VDA Elevator & Escalator Consulting Town Square Roof, Common Sky: Studio Other Spaces - Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann
Metal/glass curtain wall: The Roschmann Group Moisture barrier: Grace Exterior marble: Vermont Quarries Glass: Glasbel Entrances: Blasi, Schuco Metal doors: Steelcraft Roofing: SBS, Soprema Waterproofing: Grace, Suprema Insulation: Rockwool Acoustical ceilings: Armstrong Paints and stains: Sherwin Williams Plastic laminate: Formica Solid surfacing: Corian Special surfacing: 3 Form Floor and wall tile: Daltile, Porcelanosa GFRG: Formglas Metal ceiling: Lindner Furniture: Hay Upholstery: Kvadrat Lighting controls: Lutron Water closets: Duravit Urinals: Toto Lavatories and faucets: Lacava
Buffalo, New York, is at last experiencing some happier days. The city has done a decent job of preserving its historical building stock—with works by Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, Eliel and Eero Saarinen, and Frank Lloyd Wright still intact—but the renovation and revitalization of a myriad of other urban sites has picked up as well. From Silo City’s grain elevators to the Trico facilities, which once produced windshield wipers, Buffalo’s industrial relics are transforming into new centers of art and culture. The city is growing, again: It experienced population gain, as registered in the 2020 census, for the first time in 70 years, while adding some 10,000 new apartments in the last decade. The most recent manifestation of this trend can be found in the cultural anchor of the Albright-Knox Gallery, rechristened as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum with the addition of the new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building by OMA New York in collaboration with Cooper Robertson. For decades, AKG was composed
of two iconic pieces. The original Neoclassical 1905 Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers Building, designed by Edward B. Green, is based on the Erechtheion in Athens. There are a total of 102 Ionic columns, a grand central portico, and side porches supported by caryatids. The second piece, by contrast, is the 1962 Seymour H. Knox Building by Buffalo native and SOM archduke Gordon Bunshaft, a man with some ideas about how to exhibit Giacometti and Léger, given that he had them in his house. This first addition used the same Vermont Danby marble as its 1905 counterpart but updated the museum’s programming with an open air courtyard and a crowning gray smoked glass auditorium. The Albright-Knox was well-loved, though the Bunshaft addition suffered from the common high-modernist paradox of providing excellent views of nature while literally obstructing access to it: The courtyard was built astride a former Frederick Law Olmsted– designed path into the adjacent Delaware