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With an extraordinary combination of vision, knowledge and experience, YO Hakomori and Kulapat Yantrasast of ‘wHY architecture’, design the first ‘GREEN’ Museum.

Touted as the world's first "green museum'' built from the ground up, the Grand Rapids Art Museum is notable for its serenely inviting architecture.

The new Grand Rapids Art Museum in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a unique place of beauty and tranquillity and is the latest in this year's bag of art museums opened in the United States. The purpose of the Grand Rapids Art Museum is to make provisions for a gathering place where people of all ages and cultures can adorn their lives through interacting in an intriguing and artistic manner. It not only  receives attention for its looks but also for its environmental performance.This museum has been recognised broadly for its ‘green’ architecture, designed to reduce energy consumption, to recycle rainwater and make the planet overall a finer and better place to live. It is the world's first and only art museum whose entire facility is LEED certified. (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, — the most widely used benchmark to determine whether "green" buildings live up to the label.)

The museum dominates unquestionably, a strong sense of place. It's located in the heart of Grand Rapids, an industrial city in western Michigan with a strong legacy in office furniture design and manufacturing. Haworth, Steel case, Knoll and Herman Miller, among other furniture companies, have headquarters in the region. The museum nestles amid a collection of gleaming office and hotel towers and magnanimously altered Victorian storefronts, next to a small park with a circular pool and skating pond designed by Maya Lin.

The paradigm, designed by Kulapat Yantrasast, AIA, partner in Los Angeles-based Workshop Hakomori Yantrasast (wHY), is intended to be a cultural cornerstone to a revitalized downtown Grand Rapids and brings out an extraordinary combination of vision, knowledge and experience to the creation of public monument. wHY architecture and design has also been working on many gallery designs and collection installations for the ‘Art institute of Chicago’, renovation and expansion of the Venice jail, environmental project for the ‘art bridge’ at the great wall of Los Angeles. Their works include many innovative architectural designs on art, people and environment. Their current projects also include a lot of residential and commercial work.

The museum's collection knuckles primarily on the 19th- and 20th-century European and American art, with ample stress on American Impressionists. In total, GRAM’s medley consists of 5,000 works of art. Some of the most awe-inspiring works on view carries a radiant late abstraction by Willem de Kooning.

The superstructure totaling of 125,000sqft, includes nearly 20,000sqft of gallery and exhibition space and functions magnificently as a venue for temporary exhibitions, such as the shows on Modern and contemporary art from all over the world as well as provides increased space for education and public programs.
Made of architectural concrete -- a fine-grained version of the common material used for sidewalks roads and bridges -- the museum is an assemblage of cubic forms and flat planes methodised in a uniform arrangement with a canonical sense of elegance and tranquility. The building's most conspicuous and evident feature is the broad, flat plane of concrete that extends horizontally over the entrance like an abstraction of a pediment on an ancient Greek or Roman temple.

“The design integrates the park within the front [of the building], so it feels almost like the park has penetrated deep into the space itself,” Hakomori Yantrasast says.

A portico with a roof canopy cantilevered toward the park extends the building’s connection to Ecliptic Park, reflecting pool cascades over a water wall on the lower plaza level , is enclosed to form an outdoor pocket park for visitors along the front of the building. The plan was to create a large, outdoor civic mezzanine, guarded from rain and snow in the winter, and provide shade in the summer.

Environmentally friendly measure taken during the building process including 10% recycled materials used in construction, 20% of all materials used in construction, including wood and concrete, obtained from local sources, wood products obtained from Forest Service Council-certified lumberyards, recycling of waste created during construction.

Parkland, plantings and water features of the new GRAM have been maximized to reduce the urban “heat island” effect caused by paved surfaces. The museum’s exterior landscaping and plantings are plotted to make the most efficient use of water and other resources. The building’s air conditioning and filtration systems is a passive system via vapor misting using zero HCFC (hydrochlorofluorocarbon) emissions and strict CO2 emissions monitoring.The building’s insulation systems include light-colored concrete walls, three-layer UV filter glass in windows, insulating Aragon gas between glass window panels and low-emission coatings on all components.

Other green features include tanks that collect rainwater, which is used to flush the building’s toilets. In Grand Rapids, fresh air will be collected and stored below the building, where the earth will cool it naturally before the air-conditioning kicks in.
Being one of the very first art museums in the US designed with the goal for LEED certification; the use of natural light in the building was prudently coordinated. Most public areas have natural light, the galleries receive light from top lantern skylights as well as large windows; connecting art to surrounding urban life.

Galleries and shops, a cafe and a lecture hall flank the main lobby. Staircases lead to more galleries on the second and third levels, plus a library and meeting areas. The galleries reserved for the permanent collection, all placidly lighted from above with square cupolas of frosted glass, are the types of arenas that should foster donors to be generous with gifts of art in the forthcoming.
The Grand Rapids museum has established a positive impression through a series of luminous, well proportioned interior spaces in daylight, not to mention a sense of connection to the city outside, are ever-present. The design weighs importance on both the emblematic need of a museum, to be a communal Icon and the cultural needs for people to have their own familiarity with art.
The $60 million museum will no doubt inspire the artistic donations and financial contributions necessary to expand the collection's depth and range.

Chris McCarthy, director of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, said her institution “got a lot of support from people who were less interested in art than in the whole green aspect.” Environmentalists provided grants to pay for features like 17 solar panels on the roof as they would help reduce the museum’s electric bills.

The museum is impressive in its presence, and elemental in the experience with a strong architectural performance and will enhance civic life for many years to come.

Text compilation: Misha Raj Jagasia
Photographs courtesy: wHY architecture and design

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