Category : Kansas City, MO

Kansas City holds an unusually wide spread of building types, and several of them sit at the technical extremes of this series. Union Station's Grand Hall is the largest interior we have written about — a volume so big that lighting it is not an option, because light falls off with the square of distance and there is nothing close enough to bounce the spill back. The Nelson-Atkins is the opposite: pale marble that reflects so efficiently it does most of the lighting for you, at the cost of leaving almost no direction to model a face.

And the Kauffman Center's curved glass curtain wall combines two problems in one surface, since a curve offers no flat elevation to square up to and a glass wall passes light one way and reflects the other.

Two things recur across the cluster and both are worth planning for. The city is low-rise in parts, which means low evening sun actually reaches street level and runs the length of a street — a frame a city of uniform towers cannot offer, and the block that locates a gallery when the interiors could be anywhere. And Missouri summer humidity is high enough that a lens carried from heavy air conditioning into outdoor air fogs for ten to twenty minutes, which costs the arrival frames unless the kit is acclimatised first.

The guides below are venue by venue: why a skyline needs 135mm or it does not exist, why polished metal shows what the light bounces off rather than the light itself, and why the real problem at a very large hotel is distance rather than lighting.