The Museum of Fine Art Houston’s White Expansion Wins a Color Award

Each year, Vanceva’s World of Color Award (WOCA) goes to a design firm that best uses the brand’s color interlayers in laminated glass configurations. For the Museum of Fine Art, Houston’s recently unveiled expansion, Steven Holl Architects encased its Kinder Building in white glass, including the canopied entrance, clerestory windows, and double-layered facade of laminated glass tubes over an opaque weather wall. Translucent interlayers filter sunlight into the galleries while protecting the artworks from harmful UV rays. As for the project’s monochromatic nature, its difficult execution makes it worthy, explains WOCA juror Benjamin Wright. “As an aesthetic maximalist, it seems somewhat contrary to give a color award to a white building, but in this case the architects and fabricators used the shape and nature of the glass to optimal effect. The challenge of lighting a museum with natural light cannot be understated.”