Kansas City field trip

Friday, we took a field trip. Saori, Vivian, Chuck, and I drove out to Kansas City in the morning, mostly to see Steven Holl's iconic Nelson-Atkins art museum. It's about a four hour drive, so we split up the driving two there and two back. The drive out is not horrible- the landscape quickly transitions from the gentle hills of St. Louis to the great plains. We gassed up in Columbus and got to Kansas City around two in the afternoon.

I'd done a quick pass through google to try to find some good Kansas City BBQ, but even though we found a place with a Zagat rating of 28/30, we were not impressed. I did kind of forget that Vivian is vegetarian in picking out the place, so that wasn't great either. We promised to go someplace with more veg-friendly options for dinner.

I was surpised by how much the I liked the city- the skyline, at least, is much more progressive with more interesting modern architecture, and the downtown felt a lot more vibrant than St. Louis. We walked down to a river observatory above the Missouri, and then stopped for coffee at the CityMarket. It was late in the day on a friday, so few stalls were open. Definitely a good spot to go visit on the weekend though. We did finally get over to the museum just as the sun was beginning to go down, so we got a lot of photographs with the changing light conditions.

The museum has actually got a decent collection of work. In my experience, smaller, private museums like that have a few masters but they're typically B-side works. This was pretty good stuff. Not many masters, but what they had was good.

The building we came to see is actually a modern addition to the older neoclassical edifice. The addition's walls are actually all frosted channel glass which is backlit, so the entire building looks like a series of glowing boxes emerging from the rolling grass landscape. It also makes a fantastic backdrop for silhouette pictures, and we spent at least an hour hopping and skipping and making poses in front of the glowing facade. Actually, it was the highlight of the trip.

After the museum, we went to dinner at a thai noodle shop/retro diner. Loved the interior design and the feel of the place, with stacked noodle boxes on racks in the asiles, worn diner tables and booths, and lasercut wood light fixtures, but the food was just ok.

I took the last leg of driving, getting us back to St. Louis around 1:30 in the morning.