kimball-art-center-expansion
The proposed Kimball Art Center expansion.
Rendering courtesy the Kimball Art Center, Bjarke Ingles Group.

The Kimball Art Center will leave downtown Park City, Utah, after municipal officials shot down its expansion plans, the Park Record reports. Though the museum could have appealed the city’s decision, it opted not to, and will instead pursue its expansion plans at a different location.

“We have been dedicated to making every effort to stay in Old Town because we feel the arts are a crucial piece of our local culture, and will help continue to make Park City an international destination,” the Kimball’s executive director, Robin Marrouch, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the parameters we are required to work within did not allow this to come to fruition.”

The Kimball has occupied a landmarked building on Main Street since its founding in 1976, but its plan to build a very modern annex designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group architecture firm drew criticism from locals and officials alike. The scaled-back version of the expansion that was most recently rejected still failed to satisfy Park City’s stringent requirements for new buildings in the Historic District.

“We had several concerns about the mass and scale and the rhythm and pattern. It didn’t match the look and feel of Old Town,” Anya Graham, planner of historic preservation for Park City, told the Park Record. “We thought there were simple ways to break up the massing. They thought the changes were substantial.”

The Kimball has long been one of the star attractions of Park City, which also hosts the Sundance Film Festival and a number of Banksy murals—see “Utah Man Charged for Defacing Banksy Murals.”