A new museum for Davenport, Iowa.(Current and coming)(The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935)

The Davenport Museum of Art in Iowa, was founded in 1925 when American regionalist painters were experimenting with a variety of styles. A leading proponent of American regionalism was Grant Wood, who was born in Iowa. Other noteworthy practitioners were John Steuart Curry of Kansas and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Now, a $12 million gift from the V. O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Charitable Foundation has helped to build an entirely new facility for the museum on a site overlooking the Mississippi River. The total cost of the new building is $42.1 million. It is named the Figge Art Museum for its most generous benefactors, and it opens to the public on August 6.

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The museum is the centerpiece of a large-scale revitalization plan for downtown Davenport. The 100,000-square-foot structure is a simple glass box on top of another glass box. It includes permanent and temporary exhibition galleries, a cafe, bookstore, lecture hall, library, space for educational activities, and offices.

The museum's trustees selected David Chipperfield Architects of London and Berlin to design the new museum from more than one hundred architects asked to submit materials about their practices. As described by Chipperfield, the Figge Art Museum is "based around the idea of a simple volumetric block enveloped by opaque, transparent, and translucent surfaces. These glass ...