It’s been a long time coming, says Matthew VanderBorgh, but now that the Sept. 8 opening is drawing near, the new
Kruizenga Art Museum (KAM) is going to be a big deal for the Hope College community.
VanderBorgh is director of the Netherlands-based design firm
C Concept Design and was the architect of the new $7.8 million art facility on Hope College’s Holland Campus, a project he and co-designer Donald Battjes took on pro-bono as a donation of services to their alma mater.
“When this project was launched, there was no seed money,” says VanderBorgh, who graduated from Hope College with an art degree before pursuing another degree in architecture at Harvard University. “…they wanted a museum that was a little different than the other buildings on campus, they just didn’t want a brick box. With my relationship to Hope, they pulled me in to loosen things up and eventually said, “Why don’t you design it?’”
At about 15,000 total square feet, about 4,620 square feet of the museum will be open to the greater public with the remainder reserved for back-of-house facilities. Its “double-lung” floor plan was designed not only to demonstrate a diverse collection of art works, with one gallery focused on showcasing Hope College’s permanent collection, but also to highlight on-campus diversity, with the other side of the KAM reserved for rotating and traveling exhibitions.
“If you look at the GRAM it’s really a public museum, open to the greater state. With the Kruizenga Art Museum, the canvas is really a teaching museum, and that’s what’s unique about it,” VanderBorgh says. “It’s meant to educate students in the same way a biology lab is or a sports hall. Students should be able to easily walk into it -- it shouldn’t be intimidating…”
VanderBorgh says the flame-cut, exterior charcoal slate panels used to craft the exterior were designed to facilitate a classic, modernist style, using architecture that creates a unique fixture against the grain of the predominately red-brick collegiate architecture of the surrounding campus.
“In this case, most campuses should represent the diversity of their students and especially in West Michigan, a lot of campuses are starting to look international,” he says. “…architecture should represent the international, but each should have an individualistic, expressive style. Our building seeks to do that…What makes campuses unique is when you have a collection of different identities on the campus, the same way it reflects the students with different themes and different backgrounds all coming together.”
VanderBorgh created the new aesthetic for Hope College’s KAM alongside donated services from project managers Lisa Warren and Chad Gould of
Progressive AE, just another part of what VanderBorgh describes as a community-wide effort with a lot of donated time and money from both alumni and others.
He likens the project to a concept in the Netherlands called the “polder model,” which refers to efforts by communities in the Netherlands to reclaim land from the sea to create productive farmland. The continuous pumping and maintenance of the dykes require a greater level of cooperation by the various societies living in the shared polders, and throughout history — even in times of war — these communities have still worked together in service of a greater purpose.
“No one person could do that and no government could do that. It had to be a community of people — perhaps self-interested — but a community of people working together,” VanderBorgh says. “The museum is a lot like that, too.”
“It was really a community effort, more so than most of the projects I’ve been involved in,” he says. “In that way, the polder represents the effort of the museum in the larger picture. It wouldn’t have happened without a lot of donors, alumni, students, and interns contributing along the way.”
Click here for more information on the new Kruizenga Art Museum, which opens to the public Sept. 8.
By Anya Zentmeyer, Development News Editor
Images courtesy of
Tom Wagner Photographer
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