Article source: Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects
Park City and the Kimball Art Center exist in an alpine landscape of great scale and beauty. While this is a superb location, it is a daunting challenge to making a building with an iconic presence.
Rather than trying to compete with the power of this place we have chosen to capture and contain its spirit through framed openings to the mountains and the sky. The new galleries, on the upper level, flank two outdoor rooms. Surrounded by sheets of hammered and punctured copper – these are sky rooms – looking out to the landscape and open to the atmosphere.
Brooks + Scarpa has released their proposal for the roughly 22,000 square foot addition to the existing 12,000 square foot 1929 historic Kimball Art Center located in the heart of downtown Park City at the corner of Main Street and Heber Ave.
The design concept for the new Kimball Art Center is to perceptually bring the mesmerizing and seemingly endless deep blue Park City sky directly into the space of the city. Despite the time of year or weather conditions, the sky always seems to quickly return to its infinite and hypnotic clarity, with rarely a cloud in the sky. It provokes a kind of indelible wonder; a dreamlike state of mind that engages the viewer, heightens their sense of awareness, and brings a sense of vitality to the place. The Kimball “Cloud” delivers a new experience and expands art into the broader Park City community, creating a new social space for the 21st century.
Will Bruder + PARTNERS’ design proposal for the reinvented Kimball Art Center creates a community arts pavilion that is scaled to and complementary to its urban context — proportioned to be understood and enjoyed both from the pace of a pedestrian on Main Street or through the perspective of a visitor’s windshield as they arrive in Park City. The Kimball Art Center is conceived as a comfortable building of its place and time that also celebrates the challenge of ‘the new’. It is a home to the possibilities of ‘making and ideas’, as it serves its mission of providing quality arts education, exhibition, and events.
Design team: andrebighorse, patrickbradley, craigchapple, elizabethgalvez, rob gaspard, richardjensen, christophkaiser, ethanlay-sleeper, kentmcclure, ben nesbeitt, angelapoorman, louise roman, anthonytuminello, matt winquist withbrucetaylor of summit design architecture Park City, UT, &mark rudow of rudow and berry structural engineers
In approaching the design for the new Kimball Art Center, we found great inspiration in the urban development of Park City, the Kimball site, and the city’s mining heritage. We feel the form of the new Kimball Art Center emerges where these rich stories overlap.
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