Akron Art Museum

Address 1 South High Street

The Akron Art Museum holds a small but consistently strong collection of American art from 1850 to the present — Hopper, Sloan, Hartley, Andy Warhol's Portrait of Knight Kiplinger Sr., photography by Berenice Abbott, Chuck Close, and Cindy Sherman. The temporary exhibition programme is more ambitious than the city's size would predict.

The building is the real draw for many visitors. The original 1899 Italian Renaissance Revival post office at the front contrasts dramatically with the Coop Himmelb(l)au extension behind it: a folded glass-and-steel canopy that cantilevers out over the entrance plaza. The interior is just as deliberately strange — staircases that hang from the ceiling, oblique galleries, sudden views of the old post office through cuts in the new wall.

General admission is free; the museum is open Wednesday to Sunday. Allow an hour to ninety minutes.

things to do museum architecture
A story
The 2007 Coop Himmelb(l)au addition was nicknamed "the Crystal" by the firm and "the Roof Cloud" by everyone else in town — a 327-foot steel-and-glass cantilever that hovers above Market Street and lights up in changing colours after dark. It is the only Coop Himmelb(l)au building in the United States.