Boston Architects Land Plum Contract for $60-Mil Blanton Museum of Art

AUSTIN-Kallmann McKinnell & Wood Architects Inc. of Boston will be designing the $60-million Blanton Museum of Art, the latest project of the University of Texas.

The selection hushes a controversy over the position, which previously had been awarded to a Swiss firm, Herzog & de Meuron. The firm quit in November over design disagreements with the university’s board of regents.

Kallmann McKinnell & Wood has designed facilities for Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Ohio State universities. The firm’s project roster also includes several US embassies, Boston City Hall and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA.

The Boston firm had been in a face-off with Michael Graves & Associates of Princeton, NJ, for the plum contract. The 150,000-sf project is slated to break ground in 2002. It will be situated at the south end of the UT campus at the intersection of Speedway and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. A tentative 2004 opening is scheduled.