High Museum of Art

Stand for a moment on the plaza and look up. The building in front of you is almost blindingly white. Its surface is made of square enamelled metal panels, laid out like a grid of tiles, and in bright sun the whole facade seems to glow. Traffic hums along Peachtree Street behind you. Ahead, a long ramp slants toward the entrance and draws your eye inside before your feet get there. This is the High Museum of Art, the leading art museum in the American South.

The name surprises many visitors. It does not describe the building's height. It honours a family. In the 1920s, Harriet Wilson High gave her family's home on Peachtree Street to the Atlanta Art Association, a group of local citizens who wanted a permanent home for art in their city. That house became the first museum. The building you see today stands in the same Midtown neighbourhood. So the word "High" on the wall is a name, not a boast.

The next chapter of the story is a sad one, and it shapes this whole campus. In 1962, a chartered plane carrying more than one hundred members of Atlanta's arts community crashed on takeoff near Paris. They were returning from a museum tour of Europe. Almost everyone on board died. For a city of Atlanta's size at the time, it was a devastating loss. Whole families and a large part of its cultural leadership were gone in a single afternoon.

Atlanta answered with a building. The city raised money for a memorial arts centre to honour the victims. It opened in the late 1960s and gathered the museum, a theatre, and a symphony under one roof. Today that complex is called the Woodruff Arts Center, and the High is part of it. France also sent a gift in memory of the dead — a bronze cast of a figure by Auguste Rodin, the French sculptor. Look for it on the grounds. It is called The Shade, a heavy, bowed figure that seems to carry grief in its shoulders.

Now turn back to the white building. It was designed by the American architect Richard Meier and opened in 1983. Meier was known for clean white geometry, and here he worked with curves, grids, and open space. The year after this museum opened, he received the Pritzker Prize, often described as the highest honour in architecture. When you walk through this building, you are walking through one of the works that made his reputation.

The heart of Meier's design is the atrium. Step inside and you will find a tall, curved, light-filled space with a ramp that climbs along its edge, floor by floor. Many visitors think of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, with its famous spiral. The idea is related — a path that lets you see where you have been and where you are going. Here the ramp wraps a quarter-circle of glass, and daylight pours down through it.

Here is a detail most people miss. On a clear day, stand still in the atrium and watch the floor and the walls. The light moves. Shadows from the window grid slide slowly across the white surfaces as the sun crosses the sky. The building works almost like a sundial. Meier designed the atrium so that natural light, not just electric lamps, would bring the space to life. Come back at a different hour and the room looks different.

In 2005 the museum grew again. The Italian architect Renzo Piano added new buildings around a central piazza, an open public square. Piano did not try to copy Meier. Instead, he chose pale panels that sit comfortably beside the older white facade. His great idea was in the roofs. Hundreds of small upturned scoops collect northern light and guide it softly into the galleries below. That is why the upper floors of the newer wings feel calm and evenly lit, even on a grey afternoon.

What fills all these rooms? The collection is wide. There are European paintings, a strong collection of American art, decorative arts and furniture, African art, and modern and contemporary work. Photography is a real strength. The museum holds important images from the civil rights movement — fitting in Atlanta, the city where Martin Luther King Junior was born and preached. Those photographs connect the art on the walls to the streets just a few kilometres from here.

The second surprise is the folk and self-taught art. The High has one of the most important collections of its kind in the country. These are works by artists who had no formal training. Many lived and worked in the rural South. Look for Howard Finster, a Georgia preacher who covered wood and metal with bright paint and handwritten sermons. Look also for Bill Traylor, born into slavery in Alabama, who began drawing late in life on scraps of cardboard. Their work hangs here with the same respect as any old master.

The museum also shows it can think big. In the mid-2000s it ran a multi-year partnership with the Louvre in Paris. Works from the French museum travelled to Atlanta for a series of exhibitions. It was an unusual arrangement for an American museum, and it drew large crowds. In a quiet way, it also closed a circle. A tragedy that began in Paris decades earlier had become a long friendship between the two cities' art worlds.

Outside, the grounds deserve some of your time too. The lawns and plaza often hold large outdoor sculptures, and they change over the years. Families sit on the steps. Students sketch. Office workers from the towers nearby cut across on their lunch break. The museum is not sealed off from the city. Its ramps, open plaza, and glass walls invite the street in, and you can feel the life of Midtown on every side.

Before you leave, pause once more where you started. Look at the white grid of Meier's panels, and the paler, calmer wings beside them. Think of the house on Peachtree that began it all, and the travellers who never came home from Paris. Then listen — the traffic, the voices, perhaps a child running down the ramp. This museum was built by a city that chose to answer loss with art. As you walk away, look back once. The white walls will still be catching the light.