Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans

The Ogden Museum of Southern Art houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of the region's art in the United States. The new building attempts to reflect the collection through its use of contrasting public and domestic scales and its expression of traditional influences through modern form.

The new building is a hybrid of the background warehouse and the foreground landmark. It attempts to reflect the context of the Warehouse District, where it is located, and its role as a new, major cultural institution in New Orleans.

The warehouse element is a container of art, windowless and protected, and wraps around a light-filled entry/stair hall. Though galleries have no windows, they borrow light from the stair hall and no gallery is more than one room away from this source of openness and space.

The rooms of the galleries are contrasted in scale. They are domestic and private in character, reflecting the kinds of spaces for which the art was originally created, i.e. rooms in houses and the stair hall reflect the public nature of the museum as an institution. There are, in these rooms, implied links to traditional grand Southern architecture.

The spatial contrast intends to relieve museum fatigue through a constantly changing spatial variety of scale, light quality, activity and views.

The composition of the elements of the new building is guided by sets of regulating lines taken directly from the Richardsonian wing, now under renovation for occupation in 2005. The underlying geometry of the 19th Century building served as an inspiration and a means of linking the new and old buildings into a single institution.

These two buildings are physically separated but will be connected by a passage.