Kohler Arts Center

The John Michael Kohler Arts Center encourages and supports innovative explorations in the arts and fosters exchange between a national community of artists and a broad public. Today, holding nearly 5,000 individual works of art by vernacular environment builders, the Arts Center is the world’s leading center for research and presentation of this complex and unique work and is the only institution to make it the focus of its collecting effort.

Acknowledging the complex care and storage requirements of this growing collection, the Arts Center retained Lord Cultural Resources to work with the Arts Center to develop plans for a new collections storage and care facility. Lord Cultural Resources worked with senior staff to develop a concept for the new facility and then expanded that concept to develop a Functional Program for the facility which includes a space plan; access, adjacency and circulation diagrams; systems and standards; and room-by-room technical data sheets. This Functional Program served as the basis for the architectural development of the facility.