The Chicago Tribune recently reviewed the new expansion at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO, and had this to say about the DAM:

The happy twist is that the package doesn't overwhelm the contents. Inside are some of the finest museum galleries completed in recent years, at once architecturally assertive with their flaring ceiling vaults and deeply respectful of the Nelson-Atkins fine collection of contemporary art, photography and African art. It's a very different story from Daniel Libeskind's madly exuberant, 7-month-old Denver Art Museum addition, where tilting titanium walls create both a spectacular outside image and a less-than-ideal setting for art.

The new "Bloch Building" (after the H&R Block mogul) is indeed quite an architectural feat and was highlighted for its advanced technology in Wired Magazine as well ("Giant Light Boxes the Answer to Museum's Underground Expansion ", June 2007). Designed by architect Steven Holl, the Trib offered:

Holl breaks the paradigm of the "look at me" building with a partly underground structure, 840 feet long, that tumbles down a slope alongside the Nelson-Atkins' original neo-Classical temple. The most visible feature isn't one big whammo shape, but a string of smaller, elegant ones. Five irregularly shaped glass pavilions (Holl calls them "lenses") pop out of the earth, engaging the sylvan landscape of the adjoining Kansas City Sculpture Park and energizing the addition's spatially fluid interior with softly diffused daylight.

By day, the lenses are veiled in mystery, alternately brooding and iridescent. But as the sun sets and soft white light glows outward from them, they become magical, ethereal and seemingly weightless, like something from the moon. Not since Frank Gehry's startling eruption of metal, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, made its smashing debut 10 years ago has a museum been this enchanting.

The new museum also features a "serene but lively reflecting pool" which was designed by architect Holl along with artist Walter De Maria, well known for his SW New Mexico "Lightening Field " as well as his permanent NYC "Broken Kilometer " exhibition.  Sounds like a KC roadtrip is in order...

Here's a link to a Newsweek article on the new building, from the article:

But ever since Frank Gehry's exuberantly curvy Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, became a hot tourist destination, additions to museums have tended to be showy, like Daniel Libeskind's expansion of the Denver Art Museum, a symphony of titanium angles and peaks. Museum directors like to say such structures are artworks themselves; Wilson says that idea "leads to extravagance for its own sake, to gain attention." He may be on to something.