[ will bruder+PARTNERS ] NEVADA MUSEUM OF ART

The design concept of the Nevada Museum of Art creates an architecture of dynamic urban presence in downtown Reno, Nevada. The Museum frames a series of well-scaled and formed galleries, choreographed in a sequence of memorable visual experiences. The Museum's architecture is enhanced by its material articulation and invention of detail that forms a strong link to its geologic and cultural place.

The Museum’s height and volume carefully mediate the transition between its commercial and residential neighbors. Its warping and curving western façade contrasts the angular faceted east façade and sculpturally sets the Museum apart from the expected. The architecture is shaped by the sun, capturing a unique identity with the geologic formations of the mythical Black Rock Desert. The carefully lapped handcrafted random seam pattern of the Anthra-Zinc, applied over the west facades, exaggerate the form of the building with a unique organic tapestry of shade and shadow.

Entry into the Museum is through a compressed wedge of intimately scaled walls inserted under the raked black ceiling of the first level public spaces. The visitor is at once inside and outside in a glass pavilion and four-story skylight atrium, carving through the entire section of the building. Lifting ones eyes upward, the atrium is an ever-changing chamber of form, light, and shadow. Carefully shaped and proportioned wall apertures and skylights with unique lenses of clear and translucent filmed glazing act as light magnifiers,
refracting the changing light of the days and seasons.

The roof terrace sculpture garden caps the atrium and staircase. Taking over more than half of the roof's surface, this space is formed by the edges of the building as they sweep up on a rake to the sky where the syncopated rhythm of crevices on the west frame the city, the sky, and distant views of the Black Rock Desert. 

from  architeria