GRAM’s ‘green’ gets noticed in Chicago
The architect who designed the world’s first LEED certified art museum, The Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM) is also working on the interior of the Art Institute of Chicago; that, and his ability to integrate “green” concepts into the GRAM’s modern building in the middle of Grand Rapids’ Victorian architecture, grabbed this Chicago journalist’s attention—and praise.
The architect who designed the world’s first LEED certified art museum, The Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM) is also working on the interior of the Art Institute of Chicago; that, and his ability to integrate “green” concepts into the GRAM’s modern building in the middle of Grand Rapids’ Victorian architecture, grabbed this Chicago journalist’s attention—and praise.
According to excerpts from the story:
Grand Rapids—A building expected to become the world’s first all-new green art museum opened in this western Michigan city Friday, yet it has little in common with the earnest but visually challenged solar houses of the 1970s. No clunky rooftop solar panels here, thank you. Instead, the new Grand Rapids Art Museum is a serene temple of green, one whose energy-saving features are deftly layered into the building rather than crudely glommed onto it. Elegance and environmentalism, it reveals, are not incompatible.
At once understated and powerful, the museum represents the latest move beyond the visually overheated structures that sought to duplicate the “Bilbao effect,” the global buzz and influx of tourists that followed the opening of Gehry’s voluptuous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, 10 years ago. Its crisply outlined, well-crafted exterior of concrete, glass and aluminum reflects the passion for details associated with such renowned Grand Rapids furniture-makers as Steelcase and Herman Miller.
Read the complete story here.
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