New Museum Design

New Museum Design provides a critical and compelling selective survey of contemporary international museum design since 2010. Essential reading for any student or professional interested in museum design.

Since the opening in 1997 of the Guggenheim Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry, museum architecture has enjoyed worldwide attention on an unprecedented scale. That single watershed project demonstrated to municipalities that architecture has the power to transform the image of an entire city, thus making the turn of the twenty-first century the unofficial age of the museum building. New Museums examines the boom in high-design museum projects in detail, beginning with the Guggenheim Bilbao’s groundbreaking role in the development of contemporary museum architecture. It continues with a beautifully illustrated tour of 30 examples of the most innovative and exciting museum architecture around the world, including Tadao Ando’s Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Renzo Piano’s Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and many others.

Since first publication in 1998, Towards a New Museum has achieved iconic status as a seminal exploration of the late-20th-century revolution in museum architecture: the transformation from museum as restrained container for art to museum as exuberant companion to art. Author Victoria Newhouse critiqued numerous institutions for the display of art opened in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, culminating in Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao and Richard Meier's Getty Center in Los Angeles. In this expanded edition, she continues her investigation of new museums, assessing the radical, 21st-century changes that have propelled Herzog & de Meuron's De Young Museum in San Francisco and SANAA's 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, to the forefront of this building type. Among the institutions added to this new edition are the Giovanni and Marella Agnelli Pinacoteca, perched atop an enormous Fiat factory in Turin, Italy, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, both by Renzo Piano Building Workshop; three notable updates of the museum as sacred space, two by Yoshio Taniguchi and one by SANAA; the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati by Zaha Hadid; and expansions of the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art in Madrid by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis by Herzog & de Meuron, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Taniguchi. Finally, the De Young Museum, reflecting its own eclectic conditions, and the 21st Century Museum, consisting of non-hierarchical spaces for every conceivable kind of contemporary artwork as well as facilities for social exchange, are innovative hybrids that propose new directions for the future of museum architecture.

Presents a challenge to traditonal museum design and demonstrates that new museums are often still based on old concepts that no longer apply to contemporary art forms.

New Museum Design provides a critical and compelling selective survey of contemporary international museum design since 2010. It provides an accessible and analytic review of the architectural landscape of museum and gallery design in the 2010s. The book comprises twelve case study museum and gallery projects from across Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Each built example is interrogated through an essay and a series of beautiful supporting illustrations and drawings. Where appropriate architectural analysis is cross-scale, extending from consideration of the artefact’s encounter with museum space at the most intimate scale, through detailed architectural readings, to the wider perspective of urban/landscape response. Similarly, the book is not confined in its thematic or architectural ‘typological’ scope, including museums and art galleries, as well as remodellings, extensions and new build examples. New Museum Design provides a critical snapshot of contemporary international museum architecture, in order to: better understand reasons for the state of current practice; reveal and explore on-going themes and approaches in the field; and to point towards seminal future design directions. This book is essential reading for any student or professional interested in museum design.

The Future of Museum and Gallery Design explores new research and practice in museum design. Placing a specific emphasis on social responsibility, in its broadest sense, the book emphasises the need for a greater understanding of the impact of museum design in the experiences of visitors, in the manifestation of the vision and values of museums and galleries, and in the shaping of civic spaces for culture in our shared social world. The chapters included in the book propose a number of innovative approaches to museum design and museum-design research. Collectively, contributors plead for more open and creative ways of making museums, and ask that museums recognize design as a resource to be harnessed towards a form of museum-making that is culturally located and makes a significant contribution to our personal, social, environmental, and economic sustainability. Such an approach demands new ways of conceptualizing museum and gallery design, new ways of acknowledging the potential of design, and new, experimental, and research-led approaches to the shaping of cultural institutions internationally. The Future of Museum and Gallery Design should be of great interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of museum studies, gallery studies, and heritage studies, as well as architecture and design, who are interested in understanding more about design as a resource in museums. It should also be of great interest to museum and design practitioners and museum leaders.

Museums have emerged as major travel destinations for millions of travelers and every major city is adding to an existing museum or planning a new one to compete as a world cultural center. What's new about museum visitors today is that it is not only the collections and shows they are coming to see, it is also the museum building itself. Cities are quickly learning that a new museum, or an addition by a world-class architect can do more to generate tourism than can the acquisition of a major piece of art. This unprecedented collection takes a look at the new museums and museum builders. Presenting in detail a selection of museums which have been built in the past five years or are planned for completion over the next five years, this book will look at these new museums from a design perspective.

The new building for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which will open in December 2007, will house the first museum to be developed from the ground up in Lower Manhattan. The seven-story building, with a total floor area of 60,000 square feet, designed by the renowned architectural duo SANAA - Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. This book presents the design and building of the new museum in a series of interwoven stories, documents, and dialogues. The building expands the museum and its distinct role within the city and at the same time testifies to an important moment in the history, art, and life of the city. The photographs by Dean Kaufman emphasize the dynamics of the life of the building, whose unpredictability and disorder seem to be in conflict with minimalist form and order. This richly illustrated book, edited by Joseph Grima, Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Lisa Phillips, Director of the New Museum, will provide insight into SANAAa (TM)s process.