Mineral Hall at 4340 Oak Street in Kansas City’s South Hyde Park neighborhood is a Prairie School residence designed by Louis Singleton Curtiss and built in 1903–1904. Named for the mineral samples embedded in the walls of an interior wing by its second owner, the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and now serves as the Admissions Office of the Kansas City Art Institute.
History
The building was commissioned by William A. Rule as a second city residence — never personally occupied — constructed over fourteen months at a cost of approximately $25,000. Rule’s stated motivation was to “maintain the quality of the neighborhood.” In 1905, Roland E. Bruner, a mining businessman, purchased the property. Bruner engaged Curtiss to design an addition on the north side of the house, completed in 1906. During that work, samples of local minerals were embedded in the mortar of the interior walls of the new wing — the detail that gave the building its enduring name.
The property remained in private residential use through the mid-twentieth century. In 1968 the Kemper-Sosland Estate donated Mineral Hall to the Kansas City Art Institute, whose campus surrounds it on Warwick Boulevard. On July 12, 1976, Mineral Hall was listed on the National Register of Historic Places (Reference No. 76001112).
The building
Curtiss designed Mineral Hall in a Prairie School idiom that folds in Second Empire, Art Nouveau, and Neoclassical touches — a characteristically eclectic synthesis for the architect who also produced the Boley Building. The three-story asymmetrical structure, roughly 75 by 55 feet with a full basement, is clad in rock-faced Jackson County limestone laid in a random pattern over an uncoursed large-block foundation. Construction was supervised by local stone contractor Henry H. Johnson.
The east-facing main facade fronts Oak Street with a stone veranda and a central entrance reached by seven wide stone steps. The arched Art Nouveau entry doorway is among the building’s most-recognized features; the Kansas City Art Institute has described it as “the most photographed doorway in Kansas City.”
Current use
Mineral Hall functions as the Admissions Office for the Kansas City Art Institute. It remains one of the few extant residential commissions by Louis Curtiss (1865–1924) in Kansas City, alongside the Boley Building among his most-cited surviving works.
See also
hyde-park, kansas-city-art-institute, louis-curtiss, boley-building, gilded-age-kc
See also
- Wiki
- hyde-park
- kansas-city-art-institute
- louis-curtiss
- boley-building
- gilded-age-kc