Glass and aluminum announce the Grand Rapids Art Museum, one of the first LEED-certified art museums in the world. The museum's striking glass and aluminum building, opened in 2007 and designed by the firm wHY Architecture, replaced an earlier neoclassical structure and announced that Grand Rapids was serious about design as a civic value. The GRAM traces its roots to 1910, when community members organized a permanent art collection for the city, believing that a furniture capital should also have aesthetic ambitions beyond the showroom floor.
Today it holds more than six thousand works including a notable collection of furniture and design objects — fitting for a city whose identity was shaped by craftsmen and their workshops. Every autumn the museum's plaza becomes a flashpoint for ArtPrize, the international public art competition founded in Grand Rapids in 2009 that drew hundreds of thousands of visitors and scattered thousands of art works across every hotel lobby, church, brewery, and park in the city, making Grand Rapids, for a few weeks each year, one of the most art-saturated places on earth.