Nerman Museum's natural light, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to the The Kansas City Star,when the new Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art opens to the public Oct. 27, it may not have the architecture critics turning somersaults.

Artists and art lovers, on the other hand, have something to celebrate in architect Kyu Sung Woo’s quiet minimalist structure of white limestone and glass at Johnson County Community College.

Costing roughly $13 million and measuring 38,000 square feet, it’s the perfect container for art.

Put in motion by a $1.5 million gift from the Nerman Family of Leawood four years ago, the new museum has a permanent collection of more than 700 pieces and plans for 16 special exhibitions a year.

Woo’s design — a rectangular box that projects diagonally from another rectangular box toward the intersection of College Boulevard and Quivira Road — will let them shine.

Galleries defined by big walls and right angles and proportioned in accordance with the so-called golden mean or golden ratio are ideal for displaying large paintings and playing the straight man to unruly sculptures and installations.

Situated between the Carlsen Center and the new Regnier Center, with which it shares an airy atrium, the building asserts its presence through a Zenlike simplicity of form and materials.

Its power is most acutely felt in the spacious lobby, where a 16-foot-high, 140-foot-long glass curtain wall provides immediate connection with the surrounding campus and bathes the soft gray Spanish limestone floor in daylight.

In the galleries, clerestories and skylights admit natural light, which falls softly and subtly down the walls onto floors of 4-inch select quartersawn oak.

The museum’s most dramatic feature is the projecting box at the front, where the second story cantilevers over the first. A large off-center window provides a view into the distance over the museum’s front lawn, where director Bruce Hartman has plans for a monumental sculpture as well as concerts and other student gatherings.

The underside of the cantilever is where the art collection makes its debut in the form of a permanent light work commissioned from New York artist Leo Villareal.

Once inside, visitors will see two “Sound Suits” by Nick Cave on a low platform in the lobby, across from a recently acquired Nadine Robinson wall piece featuring a rhinestone-encrusted stereo speaker.

Hartman’s plans for 16 special exhibitions a year will mean a roughly 50 percent increase in the number of shows put on by local museums and major nonprofit art spaces. Local artists are a key part of the Nerman picture; so are contemporary American Indian artists.

And when it comes to trends, Hartman has a reputation for leading rather than following.

A major show called “American Soil” gets things off to an auspicious start in the first-floor special exhibition galleries. Large paintings and installations by six rising stars of American art take a critical look at American values through the prism of our relationship to the landscape.

A grand cascading stair leads from the lobby to three permanent collection galleries on the second floor, where a monumental robe fashioned from stainless-steel dog tags by Do-Ho Suh anchors large paintings by Brad Kahlhamer, Kerry James Marshall, Roger Shimomura and others.

Their diversity of perspectives on the human experience is typical of the collection overall.

Hartman is ecstatic about a newly acquired piece by Navajo weaver Martha Smith, showing the post 9/11 New York skyline. He has paired it with a “before” view (with the twin towers) lent by a private collector.

Most of the works on display in the permanent collection galleries were purchased with funds from Kansas City philanthropists Tony and Marti Oppenheimer, who have contributed more than $750,000 for acquisitions in the last three years.

Although the museum is attracting many private gifts — the museum and many spaces within it bear donors’ names — it is a public institution overseen by the college’s six publicly elected trustees.

Since 1980, when the college art collection began, it expressed confidence in locally produced art as well as cutting-edge national and international talent.