Those who have seen the work of Scottish landscape sculptor, Andy Goldsworthy, know that he gives a simple, yet complex order to natural elements in his art. In the recent documentary made about him called Rivers and Tides, viewers watched Goldsworthy painstakingly create cairns of stones, only to have them swept away by the ocean.

In Des Moines, Iowa, where the ground is more stable, you’ll see a Goldsworthy cairn in Greenwood Park behind the Art Center. It is part of a sculptural work that is his largest in the Western hemisphere. The project took root at the Des Moines Art Center a few years ago when the artist became intrigued by the dense, pewter-colored limestone used by architect Eliel Saarinen to construct the first of the Art Center’s three buildings.

As Goldsworthy looked at Saarinen’s work, he conceived Three Cairns as a complex piece of art that would radiate outward from the center of the country to the East and West Coasts. At each point would be a limestone cairn, and the three works would be linked conceptually to comprise the whole. Goldsworthy and a team of stonemasons completed the work in 2002. Massive walls anchor the permanent cairn on the Art Center grounds. Each of three walls contains a cairn-shaped cavity or chamber that you can enter by a stone staircase. The chambers of the east and west walls are carved out so that the openings fit exactly the corresponding cairns in New York and California.

The Goldsworthy piece has been a big draw for visitors to the Des Moines Art Center and certainly reason enough to visit this amazing art museum on the prairie.

Yet like Goldsworthy, we, too, were drawn to the Art Center for its architecture. We wanted to see the Art Center’s complex of structures created by famed architects, Eliel Saarinen, I. M. Pei, and Richard Meier. Their separate and distinct architectural masterpieces form an amazing interconnected trio of buildings where stone, steel, light and glass flows together like perfect notes in an exquisite piece of music.

If you are familiar with other art repositories such as I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris, or Richard Meier’s High Museum in Atlanta, or Eliel Saarinen’s design for the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan you’ll no doubt understand why we were so blown away by seeing the work of these three architects together in one place.Saarinen’s original Lannon limestone building, constructed in 1945; followed in 1968 by Pei’s bushhammered concrete addition; and Meier’s three-part clad porcelain and granite addition in 1985. This is a treat that art lovers won’t want to miss.

Since we like finding cultural jewels in unexpected places, we made the drive to Des Moines specifically to see the Art Center and we were delighted, even a bit awestruck, by its design and beauty. After all, this is but a little fish in a big pond of art museums. Fortunately the founders of the Des Moines Art Center had the good sense to build something so uniquely different that it stands apart from all the rest.

What makes the Des Moines Art Center even more unusual, is that it was built at a time when art was housed primarily in massive structures weighed down by heavy gothic architecture. The fact that the town citizens chose Saarinen’s eye-dazzling futuristic structure as the museum’s first building is truly remarkable. Saarinen’s U-shaped structure still stands with very little alteration, and contains galleries, foyer and auditorium with a separate wing-like extension for classrooms and studios that are the main part of the Art Center’s famed ongoing educational programs today.

In 1966, I. M. Pei (American, born China, 1917) he added a sculpture wing to the mix. Pei, a well-known architect at the time, proposed a dramatically different construction, built across the open end of Saarinen’s building on its south side. Two stories high, the Pei wing features access from the Saarinen building to a soaring sculpture court with vast windows facing the park. Surprisingly enough, it does not overwhelm Saarinen’s low-lying building--but adds another exciting element to this most intriguing use of space.

Two stairways connect the main and lower galleries, one being an open walkway, and the other a dazzling circular staircase that affords an intimate view to the park beyond. The butterfly roof section allows natural light to flow through the galleries in such a way that the artwork is presented beautifully.

As the museum continued to grow, it needed space to house its large-scale works by contemporary artists. Richard Meier (American, born 1934), who had just designed the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, was chosen from a group of internationally prominent architects to meet the museum’s needs for an additional 28,000 square feet. Meier’s imaginative design blended his architecture with both the Pei and Saarinen structures, in such a way that it enhanced, rather than eclipsed, the existing architecture.

Meier divided his addition into three parts: a restaurant/meeting room in the courtyard; a small addition with gallery, storage, and a service area on the west end of the Saarinen building; and a pavilion for the permanent collections and temporary exhibitions tied by a glassed-in walkway to the north end of the original building.

The three buildings give you a feeling of open space, and the setting is far from stuffy--with cheerful, light-filled rooms to house the sculptural works that soar nearly as high as the ceiling. The Des Moines Art Center (which doesn’t like to call itself a museum) prefers to be known as a user-friendly place where you can come acquaint yourself with art, but not feel overwhelmed by structural immensity.

Recognized by international art critics as a world-class museum in the heart of the Midwest, the Des Moines Art Center has amassed major works of contemporary art from the nineteenth century to the present. The impressive collection ranges from Edward Hopper's Automat to Jasper Johns' Tennyson, Henri Matisse’s Woman in White, Georgia O’Keeffe’s From the Lake No. 1, and Francis Bacon’s Study after Velásquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X.

Of all the paintings, the one that called to us the most was John Singer Sargent’s famous Portraits of Edouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron (1881). It hangs apart from other paintings on its own separate wall, the space around it uncluttered, with no distractions. We were drawn to the painting like magnets, struck by the artist’s awareness of details. The haughty expression on the face of young Edouard, and the seething anger that projects from little Marie-Louise (probably because she had to endure 83 sittings before the painting was finished) was pure Sargent at his best. We felt almost as if we had been transported to the very room where Sargent painted the splendid textures of frills, and lace in Marie-Louise’s dress.

The Des Moines Art Center, compared to other museums, is not ostentatious with its art. The adage, less is more, holds true here. Instead of paintings being crowded together as they are in many museums, the Des Moines Art Center showcases only a relative handful of the 5,500 works in its collection at any one time. With fewer paintings, there is plenty of room to showcase each to its maximum potential. (Indeed, we found the imaginative use of space to be a work of art in itself). This, in turn, helps visitors gain a real insight into the meaning of each piece. By displaying only what it considers to be the most important works of each artist in its holdings, the Des Moines Art Center has given contemporary artists such as Hopper, Monet, O’Keefe, Warhol, and others the real respect they deserve.