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Stanley Museum of Art University of Iowa

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Interior Layout

As soon as you enter the Stanley Museum of Art, you are welcomed into a large multi-functional lobby that has hosted everything from student meditation to children’s story time, as well as docent lectures and community art events. Galleries are on the second floor, with the third floor devoted to staff offices, collection storage, and two unique teaching spaces. “The visual classroom is directly adjacent to works on paper storage so pieces can be moved in and out of the classroom and staged for students coming in. The architecture is designed to have two walls that are solely acting as easels to be used in the education process,” says Robb. The visible storage room provides another wonderful place to study, surrounded by a dense display of artwork from storage.

Wood Ceiling & Walls

An innovative but timeless wood panel system manufactured with perfectly aligned and spaced wood strips and endless customization options by Rulon wraps walls and ceilings.

Furnishings

Harry Bertoia’s 1950 experiment with bending metal rods into practical art produced a revered collection of seating, including the exquisite Diamond chair. Innovative, comfortable, and strikingly handsome, the Bertoia Diamond Chair’s delicate filigree appearance belies its strength and durability. A seat pad and cover attach directly to the frame with hidden monofilament and metal hooks.

Knoll

Bertoia Diamond Chair www.knoll.com

Furnishings

The Eames sofa compact is a sleek, slender, minimalist piece of classic mid-century furniture. Two foam pads that constitute the sofa back feature a reinforcing cord welting detail. Urethane foam seat cushions are supported by fabric-reinforced rubber webbing on a steel and wire-spring armature. The steel frame is black enamel, and the tubular steel legs are chrome plated. Stainless steel glides have rubber bases.

Herman Miller Eames sofa www.hermanmiller.com

—Carey Nagle, BNIM, Des Moines, Iowa

Daylighting and Lighting

Panel Grilles Vertical Blade Solid Wood Panels consist of fixed length boards with dowels and/or woodbackers. A factory attached black fabric backing material is also available, allowing sound to pass through the space between wood slats to the plenum space beyond and are therefore acoustically transparent.

Rulon International

Panel Grilles Vertical Blade Solid Wood Panels www.rulonco.com

Lighting decisions were scrutinized for their energy use, aesthetics, and potential impact on the conservation of art, especially natural light. “As architects, one of the first tools we start to use to articulate a building is glazed fenestration,” explains Nagle. The design limited windows on the second floor, relying on the threestory lightwell that separates the gallery space into two halves and hugs the stairwell from the lobby on up. “The stair acts as a baffle to reduce the amount of UV penetration that filters into the entrance component of that gallery level,” she says. The lightwell and its natural light also help orient visitors when they’re viewing art in the second-floor galleries.

To light the artwork, the team relied on a mathematical grid of track lighting. “A messy ceiling is very distracting to someone trying to view art. We paid a lot of attention and re-laid out the ceiling about a thousand times to make sure that the track lighting grid was aligned with the diffuser grid, was aligned with all the devices in between those and it was perfectly proportioned so it fades away as much as it can,” explains Robb. No matter whether the galleries feature 2-D or 3-D art and where moveable walls are positioned, the ceiling configuration can accommodate all variations.

Brick

Endicott Clay Products Endicott Face Brick www.endicott.com

Ceiling Systems/Walls

Rulon International

Panel Grilles Vertical Blade Solid Wood Panels www.rulonco.com

Elevator & Conveyance

Schumacher Elevator schumacherelevator.com

Furnishings

Herman Miller Eames Sofa www.hermanmiller.com

Knoll Bertoia Diamond Chair www.knoll.com

Exterior Lighting

Lumenpulse Lighting Element Column www.lumenpulse.com

Art and Systems

Providing the ideal environment for art meant careful selection of building equipment and paying special attention to the location of plumbing and mechanical systems with hydronic components. “Everything was designed such that no water-based elements could be stacked over art spaces. Mechanical spaces were pushed to level one. Galleries are elevated above that and spaces like storage are on level three,” explains Nagle.

“Museums are known for a pretty high energy load, but by virtue of having two mechanical systems, we could concentrate those loads solely where they’re required for the conservation environment,” he says. In art-based spaces, maintaining constant temperature and humidity levels is critical. A heat recovery chiller helped maximize energy savings.

BNIM’s building design separates art-based spaces from non-art-based spaces, and not just with different mechanical systems. A vapor barrier and higher fire-rated assembly provides an additional level of protection for artwork on exhibit and in storage. Similarly, the building has two different back of houses. With art storage stacked above the galleries, incoming works can move directly into a freight elevator from the loading dock. There are no hallways to wind through and catering for events and other service items use their own loading dock for both security and conservation reasons.

Hydraulic Elevator

The largest of four elevators at the Stanley Museum of Art is a roped hydraulic elevator, sized to fit the collection’s largest painting, Mural by Jackson Pollock that is nearly 20-ft. wide x 8-ft. tall. The system uses a combination of cables and a piston to extend the rise of a holeless hydraulic elevator by a ratio of 2 to 1. Roped Hydraulic Elevators are environmentally friendly, since they eliminate jack corrosion and oil leakage through electrolysis.

Schumacher Elevator schumacherelevator.com

“We put collection storage as high as we possibly could. It’s on level three, essentially 60-ft. above grade. In the old museum, a lot of the storage was on level one and some of it was, at one point, even below grade.”

-Levi Robb, BNIM