Return to travel by seeing 14 architectural marvels, from a building that tracks the sun to a donut-shaped cultural center.
JULY 21, 2021
SHANGHAI MUSEUM OF ASTRONOMY, CHINA
ZEITZ MOCAA, SOUTH AFRICA
Architect Thomas Heatherwick carved concrete tubes that once held grain into a dazzling lobby at the Zeitz MOCAA, which opened in 2017 in Cape Town, South Africa. The first contemporary art museum in Africa, it showcases works by sculptors, photographers, and painters from across the continent.
LUMA FOUNDATION, FRANCE
Frank Gehry was inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night painting when he designed the Luma Foundation in Arles, France, which opened in June 2021. The combo contemporary art museum and cultural center towers 180 feet above the small French city known for drawing Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and other painters. Some critics believe it is too overwhelming in size for the surrounding geography.
V&A DUNDEE, SCOTLAND
A sister museum to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, the V&A Dundee opened in 2018 as an outpost for Scottish craft and design. Japanese architect Kengo Kuma used glass and concrete slabs to summon Scotland’s cliffs; an innovative dam holds the river back from the ship-like structure.
MUSEUM OF THE FUTURE, UAE
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY & CULTURE, U.S.
A standout addition to Washington, D.C.’s National Mall, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture opened in 2016. Architect Thomas Adjaye shaped the building like a Nigerian tribal crown and covered the façade in aluminum fretwork mimicking iron balconies in New Orleans.
GUGGENHEIM BILBAO MUSEUM, SPAIN
HEYDAR ALIYEV CENTER, AZERBAIJAN
JEWISH MUSEUM, BERLIN
ANDALUSÍA MUSEUM OF MEMORY, SPAIN
M/S MARITIME MUSEUM OF DENMARK, DENMARK
MUSEU DE ARTE DO RIO, BRAZIL
CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU, FRANCE
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, U.S.
Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was planning out New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the 1940s, dreaming of buildings shaped like seashells. Wright died shortly before it opened to mixed reviews in 1959; the modern and contemporary display space is now considered his masterpiece.
When Frank Lloyd Wright’s swirling, curling concrete Guggenheim Museum opened in New York City in 1959, naysayers disparaged it as “Wright’s Washing Machine” and claimed it looked like a giant sweet roll. The museum was, wrote one New York Times critic, “a war between architecture and painting in which both come out badly maimed.”
Wright’s now-iconic, nautilus-like curl was the first of many modern museums designed to captivate (and lure in) visitors with their exteriors as well as their collections. “In the past, museums were made to recall Greek temples and structures like the Pantheon in Rome,” says Patricio del Real, a professor of architecture and history at Harvard University. But these structures could be austere, intimidating, and overtly Eurocentric, so, says Del Real, “As society became more pluralistic, people began to demand different representations, and museum forms and imagery had to change.”
That meant goodbye Roman columns, hello revolutionary elements like the laser-cut aluminum lattices on architect David Adjaye’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. or a planetarium formed from a floating sphere at the just-opened Shanghai Astronomical Museum. At the latter, architect Thomas J. Wong says he envisioned “giving the building the real astronomical motion of the earth orbiting the sun, which means walking through the museum is almost a teaching tool.”
Many experts attribute this 21st-century building boom of striking showplaces to the “Bilbao effect,” as in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. When it opened in 1997, the museum put the northern Spanish city on the contemporary art map via Frank Gehry’s voluptuous glass curves and gleaming facade.
Planners and curators realized a flashy, design-forward museum could transform a city’s skyline—and its tourist appeal—the way the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building did generations before. “People want a sense that visiting a museum can be exciting and memorable,” says Wong. “A beautiful exterior helps convey that.” Come for the selfie-taking op outside, stay for the paintings or artifacts inside.
Newer museums with astounding architecture are boosted by technological innovations including 3D modeling and parametric construction (key to the United Arab Emirates’ fiberglass-and-steel, lopsided hula hoop-esque Museum of the Future) and ever-stronger, ever-more refined materials and tools (laser-guided saws, tissue-thin exterior fiberglass). At the V&A Dundee, Japanese architect Kenzo Kuma used an innovative, river-sluicing dam and planks of precisely cast concrete to create a ship-like showplace on the Scottish city’s waterfront.
“What these architects have in common is this need to mobilize tourists by creating an iconic building,” says Del Real. “They are aiming for spaces the city can feel proud of and embrace.” These 14 museums are worth seeing for both their exterior design and the treasures and knowledge within.
(Sources: National Geographic)
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