Towards A New Museum

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. Essential reading for any student or professional interested in museum design.

Towards the Museum of the Future explores, through a series of authoritative essays, some of the major developments in European museums as they struggle to adapt in a rapidly changing world. It embraces a wide range of European countries, all types of museums and exhibitions and the needs of different museum audiences, and discusses the museum as communicator and educator in the context of current cultural concerns.

Where and how an artwork is presented can enhance it or detract from it - painting and sculpture can denote a religious, political, decorative, or educational significance, as well as aesthetic and commercial value. Just how powerful the effect of placement can be is demonstrated in this book by case studies and comparisons of art installations.

This second-expanded edition of Towards A New Engineering is almost double in volume compared to the first edition, with several new chapters, new material and is more graphically oriented in order to guide readers more smoothly throughout the text. It is a collection of intimate reflections on structural engineering, its present and future. A testimony on many issues that ‘bothered’ the author during his years of designing structures. A critique and praise of built structures, structural design strategies, codes, the educational system, digital tools and much more. It’s a professional memoir dedicated to the unsung heroes of structural engineering. Not the unknown ones but the unrecognized ones. It’s an album of their thoughts and designs. This book is a rare possibility for structural engineers to consider the meaning of their profession, to meditate about it and its relation to, or distinction from, the practice of architecture. This is a collection of thoughts but not conclusions and theories. The book is recommended for all structural and architectural engineers, as well as for students of engineering and architecture, especially those who have chosen structural engineering as their lifelong profession. It is an eye-opening book that will provide a clearer, more realistic perspective while also offering an idea of where engineers will be in the future and how they should adapt to the time that comes.

A leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm In an age of protest, cultural institutions have come under fire. Protestors have mobilized against sources of museum funding, as happened at the Metropolitan Museum, and against board appointments, forcing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders to resign at the Whitney. That is to say nothing of demonstrations against exhibitions and artworks. Protests have roiled institutions across the world, from the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim to the Akron Art Museum. A popular expectation has grown that galleries and museums should work for social change. As Director of the Queens Museum, Laura Raicovich helped turn that New York muni- cipal institution into a public commons for art and activism, organizing high-powered exhibitions that doubled as political protests. Then in January 2018, she resigned, after a dispute with the Queens Museum board and city officials. This public controversy followed the museum’s responses to Donald Trump’s election, including her objections to the Israeli government using the museum for an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence. In this lucid and accessible book, Raicovich examines some of the key museum flashpoints and provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding conservative, capitalist values. And she suggests ways museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.

Creating space for the display of works of art has intrigued Renzo Piano throughout his thirty-five years of architectural practice. Today he is acknowledged the pre-eminent designer in this field, entrusted with the collections of the most distinguished art institutions in the world. Renzo Piano Museums presents a portfolio of eighteen museum projects, beginning with the revolutionary Pompidou Center in Paris and continuing to the most current designs for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sarajevo. Featured are the Menil Collection in Houston, the Beyeler Foundation on the outskirts of Basel, Switzerland, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Lush color photographs and handsome presentation drawings and plans convey the form and detail of these extraordinary buildings. Complementing the visual presentation is an essay by Victoria Newhouse, which surveys Piano's museum work and places it in a historical context. In particular, she focuses on the key elements of Piano's aesthetic: natural light, transparency, and the piazza or gathering space. All were introduced at the Pompidou Center and continue to inform the designs.