Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Expansion

The McGlothlin Wing II is the most ambitious expansion and renovation in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' history, a roughly 173,000-square-foot addition designed by SmithGroup that extends the museum to the south and west and rises to a new fifth floor. The glass-and-stone wing dramatically enlarges gallery space for the museum's African, American, and 21st-century collections, and introduces a luminous central atrium, flexible event and gathering spaces, a bistro, and reimagined connections to the surrounding sculpture gardens and Museum District streetscape. Conceived to make one of the largest comprehensive art museums in the United States more open and accessible, the expansion reorients the institution toward its parkland setting with a flowing, light-filled architecture meant to draw the city in.