1985–1987, Brown and Healy. Northwest corner of E. Locust St. and E. 6th St.
The approach taken by the architects for this public building bears some points of resemblance to Kevin Roche's Oakland Museum of 1969. Roche's desire was to submerge his building under a landscaped city park; the architects of the Des Moines research and museum building pursued a somewhat similar approach. There are, as one would expect, a number of differences between the two buildings. The 1980s Iowa building is a much more aggressively high-tech modernist design in its desire to display an encyclopedic array of late Modernist images; and the landscape proposed in Des Moines will never push the building into the background.