West Building Turns Ten

In traditional museum spaces, light has always been treated as the enemy of art. But when architect Thomas Phifer and the NCMA’s Larry Wheeler, former director, and Dan Gottlieb, director of planning and design, began to envision a new museum for the 21st century, they leveraged science in the service of art, creating in West Building a modern museum space that actually curates light, filtering out the bad rays from the good.