Officials in Park City, Utah have rejected the second proposal for an expansion to the Kimball Art Museum from Danish design firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Despite the firm’s best efforts to reconcile criticisms leveled against its first proposal, which won a P/A Award in 2013, the city recently issued a decision deeming the latest effort incompatible with both the historic Kimball Art Center building and the streetscape along Main Street in Park City, according to Park Record’s Jay Hamburger.
As Carolina Miranda reported in March, BIG’s second effort for Park City attempted to address more directly the city’s 84 pages of design guidelines. Among these guidelines is a 48-foot height limitation, which the first BIG proposal exceeded, albeit with dramatic, twisting fashion that provoked awe from critics and ire from locals—enough of the latter to spur the redesign. The torqued, vertical log cabin aesthetic of the original design was replaced with a low, canted, concrete box, to which community feedback had been, according to Kimball executive director Robin Marrouche, “largely positive.”
The Kimball Art Museum seeks to double its size to 30,000 square feet with the addition, and had planned to start construction in 2015 if the redesign had been approved. BIG declined to comment on the current status of the project.
