TMA’s

New Museum Team Makes Headlines

      TYLER, April 27 – Members of the Tyler Museum of Art’s new museum

project team of architects continue to make both national and international

headlines. Earlier this month, the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky

opened an exhibition titled Unveiling the New Speed: A Model of the

Future designed to showcase its $79 million expansion led by TMA

project architects, wHY Architecture. Doug Reed of Reed Hilderbrand

Landscape Architects was awarded the esteemed Rome Prize from the American

Academy in Rome. Reed Hilderbrand was chosen by the TMA to design plans

for the new museum project in 2008.

      Now

through March 2012, Speed Museum visitors can view plans for the massive

renovation and addition designed by wHY Architecture which encompasses

over 200,000 square feet. The museum plans to begin construction on

the new addition beginning this year. The new Speed project constitutes

the largest capital campaign project ever untaken in Kentucky. wHY was

charged with creating a space that made its nearly windowless, 1920s

original building more inviting and accessible to the public.

      wHY

Architecture is a Los Angeles-based firm with a stellar track record

in museum design including Michigan's Grand Rapids Art Museum, the Art

Bridge spanning the Los Angeles River in southern California, and numerous

galleries for the Art Institute of Chicago. Kulapat Yantrasast, the

firm's executive/creative director, previously served as project architect

on the team of Pritzker-Prize winning design architect Tadao Ando for

the 153,000-square-foot Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which opened

in 2002 to international acclaim.

      Yantrasast

joined forces with Yo Hakomori to form wHY (an acronym for Workshop

Hakomori Yantrasast) in 2003, and immediately landed a major assignment

to design the Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM). The 135,000-square-foot

facility was praised by Newsweek as a "calm and cool modernist

building" and opened in October 2007 to glowing reviews from a

host of national publications including the New York Times, Los Angeles

Times, Chicago Tribune and Architect Magazine. The firm was announced

as project architects for the new museum project by the TMA in 2008.

      In

addition to the Speed Art Museum project, wHY is also working on a large

cultural project in Cairo, Egypt for Bibliotheca Alexandria, one of

the oldest libraries in the world. The team will design a cultural complex

in Cairo that includes conference center, exhibition spaces, research

centers, offices and a museum to house the collection of drawings, paintings,

and sculptures of Adam Henein, one of Egypt’s most famous artists.

      Members

of wHY aren’t the only TMA project architects making headlines. The

prestigious Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome is to acknowledge

the leading, emerging artists in the nation and to award them the opportunity

to refine their abilities by immersing themselves in the abundant art

and architecture opportunities of the city and surrounding areas. Dog

Reed, landscape architect for Reed Hilderbrand, is currently enjoying

an eight-week stint in Rome as one  of the Rome Prize recipients.

      The

Tyler Museum of Art’s capital campaign for the new museum project

continues to move forward and gain momentum, positioning the community

ever closer to a new TMA. Near the end of 2010, the Museum announced

that the construction documents designed by wHY Architecture had been

completed and approved by its Board of Trustees.

      The

Tyler Museum of Art, accredited by the American Association of Museums,

is located at 1300 S. Mahon Ave., adjacent to the Tyler Junior College

campus off East Fifth Street. Regular hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday

through Saturday, and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. (The Museum is closed Mondays

and major holidays.) Lunch is available in the Museum Café from 11:30

a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and the TMA Gift Shop is open

during Museum hours. For more information, call (903) 595-1001 or visit

www.tylermuseum.org.