Successful collaboration between US firms SO-IL and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson resulted with a winning proposal – Grand Canopy was awarded first prize on a competition to design an art museum at the University of California’s Davis campus. Their design envisions uniting indoor and outdoor spaces beneath a large steel roof – the canopy. Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art is therefore conceived as a landscape of galleries and workshops, referencing the flat plains of California’s Central Valley.

In the words of Florian Idenburg, of SO-IL, the museum of the future will be the one that needs to be able to accommodate a lot of change, therefore a museum on campus should be seen as a testing ground for new ideas. Their aim was to propose a building that would act as a platform, offering a stage on which different things can happen.

Their design proposes 50,000 square-foot permeable cover, named “Grand Canopy”, over both the site and the building. This distinct shape is predestined to become a new symbol for the campus. Extending over the site, the roof blurs the edges of both natural and artificial landscape, creating a new, sensory one, of activities and scales. The Canopy works in two important ways – it generates a field of experimentation, an infrastructure and stage for the events, while acts as an urban device, creating a new locus of activity and center of gravity on campus. At night, canopy is illuminated and becomes a beacon within the campus and to the city beyond.

The design results with continuity of interconnected interior and exterior spaces, with the diverse qualities and characteristics that create set of informal opportunities for interaction, networking and learning. The museum is not created as isolated or exclusive space, but open and permeable, as a constantly evolving public event.