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New Museum Design
New Museum Design provides a critical and compelling selective survey of contem-
porary 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 exam-
ple 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.
Laura Hourston Hanks is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and

Built Environment at the University of Nottingham, where she teaches across the
Department and is a member of the Architecture, Culture and Tectonics Research
Group. She graduated in Architecture from the University of Liverpool in 1995
and gained her doctorate in Architectural History and Theory from the University
of Edinburgh in 2002. Laura’s research interests coalesce around contemporary
museum and exhibition design, and her key publications in this field include the
monograph Museum Builders II (2004), the co-edited volume Museum Making:
Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions (Macleod, Hanks and Hale, 2012) and chapters
in Architecture and the Canadian Fabric (Hourston Hanks, 2011) and The Future
of Museum and Gallery Design (2018). Laura’s related research extends into the
architectural expression of identities, issues of narrative space and place making
and collaborative digital heritage projects such as the recent creation of a VR expe-
rience and AR-enabled app of Lincoln Cathedral (Queen’s University Belfast, Hot
Knife Digital Media).
New Museum Design
Laura Hourston Hanks

First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Laura Hourston Hanks
The right of Laura Hourston Hanks to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hourston Hanks, Laura, author.
Title: New museum design / Laura Hanks.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020008581 (print) | LCCN 2020008582 (ebook) | ISBN
9781138350823 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138350915 (paperback) | ISBN
9780429435591 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Museum architecture–History–21st century.
Classification: LCC NA6690 .H684 2020 (print) | LCC NA6690 (ebook) | DDC
727/.60009–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008581
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008582
ISBN: 978-1-138-35082-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-35091-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-43559-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Avenir LT Std
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
List of Illustrations vii
New Museum Design 1
Part 1: Re-Place 25
Chapter 1. Messner Mountain Museum (MMM) Corones,
South Tyrol, Italy 29
Chapter 2. Turner Contemporary, Margate, United Kingdom 41
Chapter 3. China Academy of Art’s Folk Art Museum, Hangzhou, China 55
Part 2: Re-Use 69
Chapter 4. Western Australia Museum Boola Bardip, Perth, Australia 73
Chapter 5. Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa 91
Chapter 6. Tirpitz Museum, Blåvand, Denmark 104
Part 3: Re-Present 119

Chapter 7. Louvre-Lens, Lens, France 125
Chapter 8. National Museum of African American History and Culture,
Washington, DC, USA 139
Chapter 9. The Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, West Bank, Palestine 157
Part 4: Re-Imagine 173

Chapter 10. The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology,
Oxford, United Kingdom 179
Chapter 11. Rijksmuseum refurbishment, Amsterdam, Netherlands 197
Chapter 12. James-Simon-Galerie, Berlin, Germany 211
Index 229
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham

for funding a period of extended leave to facilitate the research and writing
of this volume, and the Department of Architecture and Built Environment for
enabling and supporting this activity. Without such considerable backing the
project would not have been possible.
My wholehearted gratitude extends to staff at all the museum institutions
and architectural practices featured here who have most generously supplied
the images contained. This genuine openness — as well as the very consider-
able time and effort involved — is sincerely appreciated and has been vital to
the final outcome. Thank you all.
I am similarly indebted to staff at the University of Nottingham Libraries
for providing unfailing help in the accessing of research materials. Thanks
also to the many libraries, both national and international, that supported this
hunt for information or provided study space.
Without the dedication and hard work of many at Routledge, this book
would not have been realised. Very many thanks go to Fran Ford for showing
initial interest in the project, as well as Imran Mirza for making it a reality, and
I would particularly like to thank Trudy Varcianna for her great enthusiasm,
patience and professionalism in guiding me through the process.
Finally and most sincerely I would like to thank my family: my parents,
Elizabeth and Douglas, for always being there for me; and Phil, Isla and Jamie,
for their boundless love and support — not to mention good humour! This is
for you.
List of Illustrations
Introduction
I.1 9/11 Memorial & Museum, New York, USA, Davis Brody Bond 3
I.7 View of the Shed, 15 Hudson Yards and The High Line,
The Shed, New York, USA, Diller Scofidio + Renfro 8
I.8 Evening north elevation view of the Shed from Hudson Yards, The
Shed, New York, USA, Diller Scofidio + Renfro 8
I.9 Nested Shed section, The Shed, New York, USA,
Diller Scofidio + Renfro 9
I.10 Deployed Shed section, The Shed, New York, USA,
I.11 Fixed building axonometric, The Shed, New York, USA,
I.12 Façade Detail: ETFE, Bogie Wheel Assembly and
Operable Walls, The Shed, New York, USA,
I.13 Performance view of Soundtrack of America, McCourt,
The Shed, New York, USA, Diller Scofidio + Renfro 11
I.14 V&A Dundee, Dundee, Scotland, Kengo Kuma & Associates 13
Part 1
1.1 Site plan 30

1.2 Eclectic structures on the Kronplatz plateau 31
1.3 Teetering form, at once grounded and dynamic 32
1.4 Longitudinal section of building and earthworks 33
1.5 Third basement level plan 34
1.6 Interior spatial flow aided by inset artificial lighting 34
1.7 Ground floor plan 35
1.8 The three projecting portals to the southeast of the site 36
1.9 Dramatic six metre cantilevering balcony affords 240 degree
views 36
1.10 Terrace façade details 37
1.11 Culmination of the spatial sequence: the visitor is precipitously
immersed in the mountain landscape 39
2.1 Ephemeral view of museum from across the beach 42
2.2 Site plan, 1:2000 42
2.3 Community arts and event spaces tie the Turner
Contemporary to its Margate home 43
2.4 View of Turner Contemporary and early nineteenth century
‘Droit House’ from the beach 44
2.5 Southwest entrance elevation, showing plinth 45
2.6 Museum terrace, and summer café seating space 46
2.7 Detailed ground floor plan, 1:200 46
2.8 Detailed first floor plan, 1:200 47
2.9 Detailed section, 1:200 47
2.10 Large windows on the northwest sea-facing façade allow
visitors the same views that Turner enjoyed 49
2.11 View of gallery showing natural lighting strategy 50
2.12 Elevational line drawing demonstrating the building’s
rarefied forms 52
3.1 Context is of seminal importance at China Academy of
Art’s Folk Art Museum 56
3.2 Site plan, A3 - 1:10,000 56
3.3 Longitudinal sections, A3 - 1:500 57
3.4 Concrete-encased steel column and beam construction system 58
3.5 ‘Ruptured’ roofscape that addresses contours and creates a
more human scale 58
3.6 The museum building is situated in and around dense woodland,
and ‘floats over the terrain like a mist’ 59
3.7 Free-flowing spaces form a variegated internal landscape,
reminiscent of the spatial sequencing of Chinese formal
gardens 60
3.8 The architects overlaid natural with cultural allusions, the
formal tessellation referencing vernacular Chinese dwellings
and villages 60
3.9 Sloping and overlaid spaces at the Folk Art Museum have been
modified by the exhibition curators 61
3.10 Reclaimed ceramic tiles, unusually suspended in a wire mesh,
create striking façade screens 62
3.11 Detailed elevations showing the studied attention given to the
tiled patterning 63
3.12 Beautiful play of light and shadow animating and enriching the
museum building. However, this can create a problematic visual
environment for the display of artefacts 64
viii List of Illustrations

Part 2
4.1 Western Australia Museum Boola Bardip, as seen from the corner
of James and Beaufort Streets Building 74
4.2 Francis and James Street elevations showing the Hackett Hall,
Jubilee Building and Beaufort Street Building 74
4.3 Site plan 75
4.4 Ground floor plan showing the retention of the site’s historic
buildings 77
4.5 View of the Western Australia Museum Boola Bardip from James
Street with extant buildings as important material links to the past 77
4.6 Restored roof of the Hackett Hall with new intervention sailing above 78
4.7 Aerial view demonstrating the privileging of the site’s
nineteenth century past 79
4.8 View from the corner of Francis and Museum Streets 80
4.9 Sectional view showing the pivotal ‘City Room’ 81
4.10 Cross section showing the new cantilevered gallery
overhanging the Hackett Hall 82
4.11 Perforated metal façades, which shine in sunlight and glow
in the dark 82
4.12 Perforated metal façades, which shine in sunlight and glow
in the dark 83
4.13 Museum Street façade, with the Old Gaol reading as an authentic
artefact on display within a glass-fronted museum display case 84
4.14 First floor plan showing circulatory loop 86
4.15 Upwards view through interior circulation space 87
4.16 View from museum to the Old Gaol and ‘City Room’ 87
4.17 Sliced city panorama, sandwiched between the Hackett Hall
roof and new cantilevered gallery 88
5.1 Exterior view of Zeitz MOCAA from the northwest 92
5.2 East elevation of Zeitz MOCAA, adaptively reused from the
original Cape Town Grain Silo 93
5.3 Plan of Level 6 Mezzanine showing the grid of cylinders 94
5.4 Atrium roof showing the cut-away silo ‘tubes’ 95
5.5 Iconic atrium is the defining space of the museum 96
5.6 Sculpted edges of the atrium floor give an ‘upside-down’
aesthetic, with floor and ceiling planes mirroring each other 97
5.7 South elevation showing the glazed link between the grading
tower and silo block 98
5.8 Level 1 Plan showing the galleries surrounding the atrium space
across both original structures 99
5.9 Exterior of Zeitz MOCAA at twilight showing the curved profile
of the silo cylinders, reductive aesthetic of surrounding façades,
and ‘bubble-like’ windows on the upper floors 100
6.1 Aerial view showing Tirpitz bunker in the dune landscape, with
beach and sea in the distance 105
List of Illustrations ix
6.2 Imposing concrete mass of the extant Tirpitz bunker 105
6.3 Architects’ diagram describing the landscape incisions 106
6.4 Concrete retaining walls line the ramped entryways into the
museum 107
6.5 The geological fractures admit natural light during daylight
hours and emit a glow from within after dark 107
6.6 Cross-section (at 1:100 scale) of the museum demonstrating
its continuity with the surrounding UNESCO protected dune
landscape 108
6.7 The central courtyard, which finds agency as an orientation,
relaxation and social space, allows light to flood deep into
subterranean gallery spaces 109
6.8 Double-height glazing admits natural light into the buried
display spaces 110
6.9 Tunnel from new intervention into existing bunker 111
6.10 Darkness of the existing bunker interior has been retained,
with visitors encouraged to explore the space by torchlight 111
6.11 Mirrored door defines the visitor route between old and new,
whilst allowing direct access for large artefacts 112
6.12 Plan of the exhibition level at 1:100 scale, showing flexible
openings in tunnel and new display spaces 113
6.13 ‘An Army of Concrete’ uses bunker-like interventions as
discrete spaces for the telling of personal stories 114
6.14 The bunker has been left largely untouched, as a ‘raw’
authentic artefact 115
6.15 Long section at 1:100, showing the relation between the
existing and new interventions 116
Part 3
7.1 Site plan 127

7.2 View of the transparent glazed entrance pavilion from the south 128
7.3 Ground floor plan showing landscape strategy 129
7.4 The range of five offset pavilions ‘dissolve’, reflecting and
allowing views through the landscape 130
7.5 Ground floor plan showing arrangement of exhibits 132
7.6 View through the Grande Galerie in which artefacts — deriving
from over 5 millennia — are arranged chronologically 133
7.7 Sectional simplicity of the Louvre Lens 135
8.1 The National Museum of African American History and
Culture occupies the last available plot on the Washington
DC Mall 140
8.2 The perceived status of the NMAAHC may be enhanced by the
more established monuments and institutions that surround it 141
8.3 The museum’s overall shape is derived from that of a West
African Yoruban crown, or ‘corona’ 143
x List of Illustrations
8.4 Whilst the museum’s façade replicates the 17-degree angle
of the Washington Monument’s capstone, this relation is not
singular or uncomplicated, but rather nuanced by distortion 143
8.5 The design incorporates a porch-like extension of the building
out into the landscape 144
8.6 Ground floor plan with site showing the porch entryway (1:300 at A2) 145
8.7 The building envelope comprises bronze-coloured aluminium
lattice panels 146
8.8 The perforated cladding creates a play of light and shadow
across the museum’s planes 148
8.9 One of the below ground exhibition spaces exploring the
histories of Black American oppression 149
8.10 Another of the basement exhibition spaces, which start with
displays on slavery and end with the Obama presidency 150
8.11 Visitors cross a wide pool symbolising the ‘Middle Passage’ on
their way into the museum 151
8.12 Underground court of reflection where water cascades through
a circular oculus to the floor below 151
8.13 Third floor plan (1:300 at A2) 152
8.14 Framed view of the Washington Monument 153
8.15 Long section through the museum 154
9.1 North and west elevations of the museum 158
9.2 Site model, showing the museum at the crest of the hill, with
manmade and natural contours below 159
9.3 Aerial view of the museum showing the zig-zagging
landscaped terraces and uncultivated ground beyond 160
9.4 Visitors in the designed landscape that graduates from
‘cultivated’ to ‘natural’ down the contours of the site 160
9.5 View along the west façade from the café terrace down to
the external amphitheatre space, the whole surrounded by
domestic planting 161
9.6 The horizontally elongated diamonds and triangles of the
west façade echo the interiors of traditional Arabian tents 163
9.8 Striking aluminium fins break up the glazed façade and provide
important shading 165
9.9 The museum’s entry foyer, with contemporary language and
vernacular Jerusalem stone 167
9.10 Visitors in the Intimate Terrains exhibition 168
9.11 Family day activities at the Palestinian Museum 168
9.12 East-west long elevation and section 169
Part 4
10.1 Egypt Gallery 180

10.2 Long, narrow Beaumont Street façade of C. R. Cockerell’s
nineteenth century Greek Revival museum building 181
List of Illustrations xi
10.3 Aerial view of site showing original C. R. Cockerell building
and Rick Mather Architects’ 2009–2011 extension 182
10.4 Ground floor plan (1:500 at A4), showing the two principal
north-south axes connecting the old and new buildings 183
10.5 Greek and Roman Randolph Sculpture Gallery in the existing
building 184
10.6 Western atrium in the new extension building 184
10.7 North-south cross section (1:500 at A4), showing the eastern
axis and atrium 185
10.8 Principal eastern atrium of the new extension 186
10.9 Principal eastern atrium of the new extension 187
10.10 Sculptural, ‘cascading staircase’, in main atrium 187
10.11 One of the many transparent bridges, plugged into gallery
spaces, which increase visual and physical connectivity 188
10.12 Rick Mather Architects made extensive use of physical
models — such as this sectional card and timber model —
for both design and presentation purposes 189
10.13 The architectural and display design of the galleries form
layered exhibition narratives full of cultural cross-references 191
10.16 Second floor Music and Tapestry Gallery 193
10.17 Perspective cross-section drawing, showing the museum’s
urban, architectural and artefactual relations 194
11.1 Rijksmuseum’s northeast original entry façade, bounded
by the Singelgracht canal 198
11.2 Rembrandt’s The Night Watch in its original position in
the Gallery of Honour 199
11.3 Long section through the museum showing the Gallery
of Honour at second floor level on the central axis 200
11.4 Site plan showing the location of the new Ateliergebouw to
the south of the museum, and the Asian Pavilion adjacent to
the museum’s southwest façade 201
11.5 Southwest elevation of the museum showing the new
Ateliergebouw (4), and the contrasting forms of the
Asian Pavilion (1) 201
11.6 The cycle route through the building was retained, follow-
ing an official objection to its removal, and now the glazed
passageway provides entry points into — as well as an iconic
image of — the museum 203
11.7 Architects’ maquette or model showing the lowered floor levels 203
11.8 View from the west court showing the newly connected
and contiguous plaza, with public cycle- and walk-way above 204
11.9 Details of the large-scale ‘chandelier’ insertions 205
xii List of Illustrations

11.10 Detailed cross-section of central glazed thoroughfare,
showing the continuation between new and old structure 206
12.1 Isometric of the west elevation showing the new James-Simon
Galerie, with the Pergamon Museum to the left and the Neues
Museum behind 212
12.2 Site plan 213
12.3 View from the Schlossbrücke 214
12.4 Upper foyer, with main internal staircase leading to the
Archaeological Promenade 215
12.5 Lower ground floor plan 216
12.6 Temporary exhibition space 217
12.8 Long section 219
12.9 View towards the main entrance 219
12.10 West elevation 220
12.11 View towards the Pergamon Museum 220
12.12 View towards the Lustgarten 221
12.13 View from the terrace towards the Pergamon Museum 222
12.14 View from the terrace towards the Neues Museum 222
12.15 Upper foyer 223
12.16 Connection with the Pergamon Museum 223
12.17 Short section 224
List of Illustrations xiii

New Museum Design
Introduction
Now, perhaps more than ever, ‘[m]useums are important. They serve to
preserve our history and reinforce our understanding of our own culture.
It is possible that they even make us better, more creative and more tol-
erant people.’1 Museums offer unparalleled insight into our societies and
selves.
The effects of contemporary museum design are very considerable, even
transformational: ‘In the best cases, architecture creates community, uniting
what was previously separate. In the realm of museum architecture, espe-
cially, it can bring together people, cultures and emotions. It can even capture
what doesn’t exist, it can tie reality to possibility, and it has a mission.’2 The
new or reimagined museum has, surprisingly in the global economic context,
retained its position as one of the most prevalent building types under construction
in the 2010s.
Museums offer unparalleled insight into our communities and attitudes.
This property of museums has been long understood, with Georges Bataille
opining nearly a century ago now that, ‘[t]he museum is a colossal mirror in
which man contemplates himself from all angles …’.3 It is in part the use of
the silent material artefact to ‘speak’ of its many aspects to its many audi-
ences, which imbues the museum with this reflective property: ‘[o]bjects are
used to materialise, concretise, represent, or symbolize ideas and memories,
and through these processes objects enable abstract ideas to be grasped,
facilitate the verbalization of thought, and mobilise reflection on experience
and knowledge’.4 This conception of the museum –– as a field in which the
invisible is made visible –– has been a recurring motif, if conveyed in different
ways. At times this is intriguingly suggested as a spatial, as well as conceptual,
gap: ‘Museum(s) are fundamentally about interpretation — about attempting
to bridge the gap between things and systems’.5 The museum, ‘presents and
questions the space between objects and conceptual systems’.6 Critically, in
this relationship between artefact and idea as expressed in the museum, the
artefact can be up-scaled to refer to the museum building itself, and New
Museum Design considers this space between the object of contemporary
museum architecture and various ‘conceptual systems’. In other words, it
explores the many meanings inherent in the manifestations of new museum
designs.
From their inception museums have signified wealth and power, both in
the material opulence of their architectures and collections, but also in the
metaphysical realm of ideas. From the Renaissance the ‘studiolo’ embod-
ied a very specific knowledge-power interdependency, ‘… reserv[ing] to the
prince not only the knowledge of the world constituting his supremacy, but
New Museum Design 1

the possibility of knowing itself’.7 Over time the actors changed, but the
dynamics remained: ‘the wealth of the collection is still a display of … wealth
and is still meant to impress. But now the state, as an abstract entity, replaces
the king as the host.’8 And even today, although the museum is a much more
democratised and public field, vestigial traces of such power relations may
still be discerned in the institutional workings, architectural authorship and
exhibition narrative ‘voices’. Maybe more perceptible is the contemporary
museum’s fixity to identity. No longer concerned with the identity of the
‘prince’, the museum now identifies with renowned individuals, groups of cit-
izens, corporations and institutions, and ethnic collectives, being of and for
these identities. The memorialisation of the victims of the September 11th
United States terror attack is one such extreme and emotive example of this
representation of identities at Davis Brody Bond’s 9/11 Memorial & Museum
in New York. See Figures I.1–I.6. Whatever the identity on display, however,
the museum encourages encounters with the self via others.
Whilst a fascinating barometer of wider political and societal issues,
museums are also eminently worthy of study in and of themselves. Museums
have agency, being a particularly productive field of enquiry for a number of
reasons.
The museum is information-giving –– or pedagogical –– and at its core is
a physical store for material culture; a fundamentally Enlightenment ambition.
In the words of Michel Foucault;
…the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general

archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all
tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of
time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organising in this sort
of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place,
this whole idea belongs to our modernity.9
The most revealing part of this act of collecting is the manifold choices made
and in turn what they denote: ‘Are the exclusions, inclusions, and priorities
that determine whether objects become part of the collections, also creat-
ing systems of knowledge?’10 In this reading the museum is now not only the
protector of culture and hence knowledge, but also a generator of ways of
knowing.
Museums facilitate narrative encounters, or ‘… experiences which
integrate objects and spaces –– and stories of people and places –– as
part of a process of storytelling that speaks of the experience of the eve-
ryday, as well as the special and the unique’.11 The narrative potential of
the museum far exceeds that of most functional building typologies, as the
museum’s raison d’être is to tell stories of places, ideas and people; through
its artefacts, exhibition design and interpretation, and through the muse-
um’s physical and spatial articulation. Across scales and media, the museum
tells these stories both explicitly and implicitly, and this narrativity reveals
shifts and patterns in the processes and agendas of museum making. Unlike
other narrative-dominant typologies –– such as the theatre and cinema ––
the museum necessitates movement, constituting an embodied spatial
2 New Museum Design

ffFigure I.1
Figures I.1—I.6 9/11
Memorial & Museum
The subterranean
insertion by Davis Brody
Bond architects lies on
the site of the former
World Trade Center
Twin Towers, which were
infamously attacked on
September 11, 2001.
It relates to all of the
book’s themes; being
an inherently sited
commemoration of a
tragic event (Re-Place),
incorporating fragments
or spolia from the
original towers (Re-Use),
memorialising the nearly
3000 victims’ identities
(Re-Present), whilst
constituting a radical
reconceptualisation of the
original site (Re-Imagine).
It lies below The
Memorial’s twin reflecting
pools, each almost an
acre in size, which were
designed by Michael Arad
and Peter Walker and
feature the largest man-
made waterfalls in North
America.
(Source: © Davis Brody Bond)
ffFigure I.2
New Museum Design 3

ccFigure I.3
eeFigure I.4
(Source: © James Ewing)
4 New Museum Design

ffFigure I.5
ffFigure I.6
New Museum Design 5

experience centred on the often authentic material artefact. This unique set
of material, corporeal and spatial alignments provides an array of challenges
and opportunities, and makes the museum a particularly compelling focus
of study. And paradoxically, this strength of the museum –– its drive to tell
stories –– is also a key part of its fallibility: ‘In so many cases the inherently
fragmentary, complex and ambiguous nature of life itself and its incomplete
and sometimes inconvenient stories is suppressed in the name of, at best clar-
ity, and at worst, control’.12 The methods and functions of the museum’s own
storytelling and spatial experience-making potentialities will be explored;
particularly as increasingly digital communities crave real-life, bodily spatial
and social experiences, never more so than during, and presumably in the
wake of, the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, the museum occupies an intrigu-
ing position in relation to the digital: ‘[t]he institution of the museum’s former
sovereign claim to ‘knowledge’ and ‘culture’ has been transferred into a digi-
tal space partially created through a kind of swarm intelligence by visitors
and users of the museum’s online platforms’.13 Digitisation is now temporally
wrapped around the museum visit –– with pre- and post-visit applications –– as
well as altering and enhancing the design and experience of museum visiting.
No aspect of museum making has been untouched by this revolution.
Any consideration of the range of implications of physical museum build-
ing automatically includes an understanding of the use and social success of the
spaces –– both civic and private. In an increasingly, and often stealthily, privatised
urban landscape, the civic spaces in and around the museum are becoming ever
more important. As we will see, they can become important sites of activism
as well as active engagement. In an increasingly closed-off, individualistic and
introspective society, in which the home is tending to a more self-contained and
self-supporting universe, as further underscored by the Covid-19 pandemic,14
there is an arguably even greater need for freely accessible, quality social
spaces. The museum can and should provide these if social health and inclusion
are to be more than rhetoric. However in addition to this vital social agency of
the museum, this volume also unashamedly considers the semiotic and narrative
implications of the designs in question. It has been lamented that;
[o]ther debates relate always to form. Architects and critics will talk about
the architectural rigour or intended symbolism of a design more than
its social contribution. Again disconnected from everyday life, debates
about form operate in a wholly abstract realm, working to always sepa-
rate architecture and its discussion from real world concerns.15
Such detachedness from the social contribution and responsibilities of the

museum is certainly blinkered and worryingly indifferent to critical notions of
social justice, but to completely negate the aesthetic and symbolically mean-
ingful role of museum architecture is also to reduce the museum’s purposes
and potential to enrich experience, story and encounter. Just as, ‘every line on
an architectural drawing should be sensed as the anticipation of a future social
relationship, and not merely as a harbinger of aesthetics or as an instruction to
a contractor’,16 so these lines should also be invested with notional meaning,
making the museum building more than a sum of its practical, aesthetic and
6 New Museum Design

social parts. This richness of form matters –– in relation to its implied meanings
and messages, who and what it promotes, and what it tells us about ourselves
and our outlook on the world.
The museum, then, provides a multitude of spaces: spaces of encounter
and challenge; spaces of creativity and artistry; and spaces of intellectual free-
dom. It constitutes ‘… a safe place for new and unsafe ideas.’17
However, most probably as a result of these myriad potential advan-
tages, the museum has become invested with a heavy set of ambitions:
The demands placed on the museum have been positively utopian: it

is required to be an accessible visitor magnet; a place for ambitious
study and conservation of cultural treasures; a reflection of the socio-
cultural ‘pulse’; an economic attraction helping to revitalise its urban
surroundings; and an iconic landmark. It is called to be both innovative
and respectful of tradition. In addition, it is increasingly expected that
museums should be partially or wholly self-supporting, rather than rely-
ing on state or private funding. This has occasioned an inexorable com-
mercialisation. Museums have become products, consumer goods that
can be reproduced anywhere around the world.18
As well as bearing this unrealistic burden, the contemporary museum is also

riddled with inherent contradictions or paradoxes.
They are real sites in a virtual world. According to Damien Whitmore,19
‘[m]useums of today are not buildings, because most people experience
museums online…’.20 Although a rhetorical exaggeration, Whitmore rightly
highlights the increasing virtual presence of the museum. However, rather
than weakening the hold of the physical museum housing its material arte-
facts, the imposition of the digital may actually be dialectically strengthening
it. As Katharina Beisiegel argues, ‘[u]pcoming decades will show what tech-
nological progress will mean for digital museum culture. From our present
point of view, it would seem that a symbiotic link between the virtual museum
and the actual museum building is ideal.’21 Here, the digital is conceived as a
useful and productive foil to the original analogue museum building.
Another existential challenge to museums may be their fixity in an
increasingly fast-paced world. The traditional model of the museum as
architectural ‘monument’ complete with static artefacts imbues author-
ity and legitimacy through a sense of timelessness, but tacitly resists rapid
change. Designers and curators have foreseen this challenge and sought to
answer it in various ways: through temporary exhibitions; with digital dis-
plays;22 via satellite museums; through travelling exhibitions; using in-situ
temporary exhibitions beyond the museum’s walls; and through fast-paced
‘pop-up’ displays, which can disrupt time-honoured rules of programming
and location. In the realm of the large-scale, capital-intensive project, how-
ever, such intentional transience is difficult to find. The Shed –– an adaptable
and expandable cultural centre in Manhattan, New York, by Diller Scofidio
+ Renfro –– may be one of the most innovative solutions to this fastness to
date, but it is still far removed from a real disruption to the traditional pace
of static architectures. See Figures I.7–I.13.
New Museum Design 7

eeFigure I.7
Figures I.7—I.13 The Shed
Located on Manhattan’s
West Side, The Shed
is an innovative
eight-storey building
comprising gallery,
theatre, rehearsal and
creative lab spaces. It is its
‘McCourt’, however –– an
inventive, moveable
element –– which
responds to this growing
need for displacement and
transience in the museum.
It is, ‘… an iconic space for
large-scale performances,
installation, and events …
formed when The Shed’s
telescoping outer shell
is deployed from over
the base building and
glides along rails into the
adjoining plaza.’23
(Source: © Photography
by Iwan Baan courtesy of
The Shed)
[View of The Shed, 15 Hudson
Yards and The High Line]
eeFigure I.8
(Source: © Photography
by Iwan Baan courtesy of
The Shed)
[Evening north elevation view
of the Shed from Hudson Yards]
8 New Museum Design

ccFigure I.9
(Source: © Diller Scofidio +
Renfro) [Nested shed section]
Figure I.10
(Source: © Diller Scofidio
+ Renfro) [Deployed shed
section]
New Museum Design 9

e
eFigure I.11
(Source: © Diller Scofidio
+ Renfro) [Fixed building
axonometric]
eeFigure I.12
Façade detail: ETFE,
bogie wheel assembly and
operable walls
(Source: © Photography by
Iwan Baan courtesy of The
Shed)
10 New Museum Design

ffFigure I.13
Performance view of
Soundtrack of America,
McCourt (Source: © Photogra-
phy by Iwan Baan courtesy of
The Shed)
The museum is also pushing against the tide with its still predominantly
curatorially-authored narratives in an era of autobiographical posting, citizen
journalism and increasing scepticism of expertise. It is still largely reliant on
old hierarchies of knowledge, and therefore power. This positions the museum
as the epitome of the institutional in a sceptical world, in which mistrust of
experts and fact-based analysis has led to ‘alternative facts’. Again though,
this challenge or counter-culture may only serve to bolster the position of the
museum; as a bastion of research-based knowledge and dissemination in an
era of blogging and ‘fake news’.
The paradoxes keep coming. New museums are expensive in a
recession-hit global economy. Why then, with this economic backdrop,
are multi-million pound museums still being initiated, extended or creat-
ing new off-shoots? The reasons are complex, overlapping and of course
vary from project to project: to spark economic regeneration; to extend the
reach of an existing institution; to portray a civic, regional or national iden-
tity; to honour or memorialise a particular individual or group; to provide
long term revenue; to promote a company or product; to add to a touristic
offer; to act as a vehicle of positive publicity for a city, nation-state, or com-
mercial brand; or to display artefacts previously ‘hidden’, to name a few.
Whatever the impetus, the ability of the museum sector to keep growing
through economic instability is as interesting as it is anomalous. However,
in another stark contrast, this bill of health for new, capital-intensive pro-
jects –– whether they be new builds, adaptations or reconfigurations –– is
not mirrored in the rest of the sector, where widespread swingeing funding
cuts have led to museum closures, wage stagnation, redundancies, and a
concomitant loss of expertise.24 Contentiously, ‘flagship’ projects appear to
have largely avoided these fates, and this tells us much about current attitudes
and aspirations.
New Museum Design 11

Another prevalent tension that is hard to ignore is that between museum
displays and architectures, and ‘[t]he alchemy of the balance between the con-
tents and container is the key to success…’.25 This multidimensionality –– or
interplay between the architectural and artefactual, as well as spatial, material
and textual –– increases the museum’s significant potentiality as an interpreta-
tive environment and conveyor of narratives.26 However in many cases there
is a contradictory pull between internal artefacts and building as artefact,
and these dissonances often stem from professional ‘siloing’, and mistrust,
as well as out-of-sync programming. Where exhibition designers are brought
into multi-disciplinary teams earlier in the design process, projects may be
strengthened, and a nascent profession of architects-cum-exhibition design-
ers are cutting through professional and media divides, creating ‘joined-up’,
cross-scale and often narrative experiences that are consonant and affecting.
The lack of a terminology to describe this multiscale, holistic approach to
exhibition design –– or ‘archibition’ –– may be holding this young creative
sector back.
A final and complicated contradiction here concerns the local and
the global. Museums are inevitably locally sited in a globalised world ––
often espousing a universal aesthetic in their particular settings. In an era
of the seeming fragmentation of –– or at least stress upon –– supranational
organisations, along with rising nationalism and separatism, is the local
and its distinct identity becoming more valid and sought-after, and uni-
versal instincts becoming increasingly challenged now the rush to extreme
capitalism and globalisation have been problematised? The new V&A, or
Victoria and Albert Museum,27 in Dundee provides an interesting case in
point here, with its hybrid affiliations to a universal aesthetic and interna-
tional institutional reach for the V&A, alongside more local national and
civic agendas and aesthetics on the other. Reactions to the museum’s nom-
ination for the European Museum of the Year Award 2020 illustrate this.
Whilst Philip Long, the Director of V&A Dundee, proclaimed, ‘[t]his is a very
exciting moment, recognising the international significance of creating
Scotland’s first design museum’, the leader of Dundee City Council, John
Alexander, rather drew attention to the local: ‘Our stunning museum is now
very firmly part of the cultural fabric of the city’.28 The museum’s design
reflects these overlapping but divergent ‘pulls’, as neatly encapsulated in
a recent V&A Blog titled, ‘Think global, act local: a museum context’.29
Please see Figures I.14–I.21 here.
Museums are as complex as they are fascinating then. The purpose
of this book is to provide a critical and compelling survey of a dozen con-
temporary international museum designs. The primary aim is to provide an
accessible and analytic review of the architectural landscape of museum and
gallery design in the 2010s. Following this introduction, the discussion is
focused around twelve case study museum and gallery projects from across
Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Each
built example, opened since 2010, is interrogated through a critical essay
and series of supporting professional architectural drawings, photographs
and diagrams used to substantiate and further evaluate the points raised.

ffFigure I.14
Figures I.14—I.21 V&A
Dundee
With curving concrete

walls anchoring two
and a half thousand
pre-cast rough stone
panels, the design of the
V&A Dundee by Kengo
Kuma & Associates was
intended to create the
appearance of a Scottish
cliff face; also of course
a universal natural
reference. Similarly, this
tension between the local
and global is perfectly
captured in the building’s
ship allusions, which speak
both of the site and city’s
trademark boat-building
industrial past, and also Architectural analysis is cross-scale, extending at times from consideration
of the region’s seafarers of the artefact’s encounter with museum space at the most intimate scale,
who embarked on global through detailed architectural readings, to the wider perspective of urban/
adventures in these
vessels. landscape response. Similarly, the book is not confined in its thematic or
(Source: © NAARO/PiM.studio
architectural ‘typological’ scope, including museums and art galleries, as well
Architects) as remodellings, extensions and new build examples. The main objective is
to provide a critical snapshot of contemporary international museum architec-
ture, 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.
ffFigure I.15
Architects)

ccFigure I.16
(Source: © KKAA)
[Site/ground floor plan]
eeFigure I.17
Architects)

ccFigure I.18
(Source: © KKAA)
ffFigure I.19
Architects)

eeFigure I.20
Architects)
Figure I.21
Architects)

Museum historiography over the last half century has been characterised
by a series of extraordinary moments or paradigm shifts:
The opening of the Centre Pompidou in 1977 and the enormous aesthetic
and cultural shock that followed culminated in a swing to museums that rang
in a new era. Hereafter, architecture placed itself at the service of museums
and became inscribed in the urban landscape as a societal marker.30
Whilst this interpretation risks oversimplification and overstatement, all the

museums included here can –– not just temporally, but notionally –– be classed
in this ‘post-Pompidou’ legacy. Rather amusingly Ronnie Self notes the ten-
dency to define each successive era as the ultimate with regards to the pro-
liferation of museums: ‘Since at least the 1930s, writings on museums have
portrayed each successive period as the period of unprecedented museum
growth.’31 With heightened circumspection in light of this, it is still probably
fair to categorise the 1980s and 1990s as ‘boom years’ in museum project out-
put, a growth which if anything accelerated across the millennium, aided in the
United Kingdom and other nations by millennium specific Grands Projets.32 The
critics are again in virtual consensus over the next pivotal moment, which came
in 2007–8 with the Global Financial Crisis.33 ‘The period (2000–2010) ended
with economic recession, pessimism, and projections that the museum ‘bub-
ble’ had burst.’34 In light of this seismic economic downturn –– the most severe
since the Great Depression –– one might expect an ensuing decade of derailed
or delayed projects, but interestingly this has largely not turned out to be the
case. As Self explains, ‘[w]ith several important structures already opened since
2010 and more projects on the horizon from London to Los Angeles and from
China to Abu Dhabi, the bubble may still be intact’.35 Certainly many high pro-
file, high cost projects drove on through the austerity of the post-crash years,
but Beiseigel notices subtle changes to the museum making landscape, which
will be further explored in the following case study sections:
…we once again note a paradigm shift in museum debate. After the
financial crisis of 2008 it became clear that so-called mega-museums,
Bilbao babies and satellites of A-list institutions are not necessarily mod-
els for success. A certain humility and return to essentials have come to
predominate. In addition to well-known, iconic mega-buildings, there
are many smaller projects devoted to the specific task of redefining what
objects of cultural value worthy of preservation might be.36
So since the completion of Museum Builders II in 2004,37 substantive changes

have taken place within the realm of museum curation and design, as well as
outside the walls of the museum, so it is both fascinating and opportune to
reflect once more on the state of contemporary museum making. This chal-
lenge is undoubtedly heightened when trying to assess such a recent past,
but the temporal proximity certainly provides an exciting, relevant and shifting
terrain within which to operate.
A global perspective was favoured, in part to shed light on any geo-
regional differences, but also to allow the assessment of potential trends

common across the world. In particular it would be difficult to justify the
exclusion of burgeoning developing nations such as China from the review:
Since the reform policy and opening up to the world market in the late
seventies, museums have become fixtures in Chinese cities and expe-
rienced an unprecedented building boom.38 The country’s 2000th
museum opened in 1999,39 and by the end of 2012 there were already
3,866 Chinese museum open to visitors.40
A good geographical spread of case study museums was sought, and with the
exception of South America –– and exciting projects such as Diller Scofidio +
Renfro’s Museum of Image and Sound come to mind here –– this was achieved.
The cases range from Denmark to Washington D.C, and Perth to Palestine,
demonstrating the global vitality of, and fascination with, the museum.
The case study examples are presented in loosely affiliated groups or clus-
ters, each with the common prefix ‘re’, meaning ‘about’ and/or ‘again’. The
sections are: Re-Place; Re-Use; Re-Present; and Re-Imagine. These themes
draw out, and map onto, the predominant concerns in each case. Fascinatingly
nearly all of the museums could be easily explored in nearly all of the streams,
showing the richness of the cases and currency of the thematic categorisations.
In Re-Place, the designs’ relations to their natural/topographical, man-made/
vernacular, cultural/artistic and biographical places are explored, within a macro
context of competing globalisation and localism –– or ‘glocalisation’. In Re-Use,
all the museums are examples of adaptive reuse, having been designed ‘off’ an
extant building or buildings. The existing structures date from the nineteenth to
the mid-twentieth centuries, and the cases are presented in chronological order
according to these origins. In Re-Present, the cases all address the represen-
tation of identities, be they ethnic, corporate or national. And in Re-Imagine,
whilst all the projects do involve new build elements, the cases are predomi-
nantly reconceptualisations of existing museums or groups of museums.
As well as for their richness and thematic fit, the cases were selected
to provide variety in terms of: location, scale, ambition, audiences, collec-
tions, approach, existing built environment, curatorial strategy, symbolism,
materiality and representativeness/uniqueness, to name a few. Many thou-
sands of museums have been built across the world in the ten years since
2010, and so there could of course be no aim for overall representativeness.
Rather the cases were chosen as they exemplified an interesting aspect of
contemporary museum making, therefore adding a particular character or
dimension to the group of selected cases. The author was also reliant on
museums and architectural practices kindly offering images, and so this
practicality inevitably impacted to some degree on the museums included.
The number of architects from the UK and Ireland gaining inclusion may be
a reflection of the author’s own interest, and one practice –– that of David
Chipperfield — features twice. Ideally a greater range of architectural prac-
tices –– including more nascent ‘up-and-coming’ firms –– would have been
included, but museum designers form a notably closed field. This is no
doubt due to the high stakes and high cost investment for such capital
intensive projects, making a gamble on new firms almost unheard of.41

Conclusion
‘In the best cases, architecture creates community, uniting what was previ-
ously separate. In the realm of museum architecture, especially, it can bring
together people, cultures and emotions. It can even capture what doesn’t exist,
it can tie reality to possibility, and it has a mission.’42
The new or reimagined museum has, surprisingly in the global economic
context, retained its position as one of the most prevalent building types
under construction in this decade so far. This continues a post-millennial trend
noted by Self: ‘They were the most notable buildings — and museums — in
the United States in the first decade of the twenty-first century.’43 Museum
‘starchitecture’ has swerved the severe economic consequences putting such
pressure on smaller institutions, and is continuing to ‘headline’ in the architectural
press and profession.
Along with their prevalence, the vivid diversity of contemporary museum
projects is startling. This multiplicity is based on vastly divergent institutional
types, themes, approaches, scales and siting, amongst many other factors,
and the subsequent cases aptly demonstrate this plurality. It is interesting to
consider whether this eclecticism can be seen as a symbol of a schizophrenic,
uncertain age, or one of great creativity and dynamism. Are we witnessing
the exuberant final death throes of the museum, or seeing evidence of a mul-
tifaceted industry, experimental, ambitious and confident? History may help
us here, as the museum has repeatedly defied the odds and flourished in the
face of widespread critical and expert doubt as to its ability to withstand the
existential pressures levelled upon it.
The contradiction between the struggles of more modest existing
institutions and the flagship designs of the new museums adds to the
already long list of contradictions inherent in the contemporary museum,
being: real sites in a virtual world; permanent in a transient era; reliant on
expert narratives in an age of self-authored social media; institutional in a
sceptical era; hugely expensive in a time of austerity, and negotiating the
inescapable tension between the universal and local. Do these seemingly
oppositional or binary positions undermine the agenda of the museum, or
actually enhance it through the dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis?
It is eminently clear that there is nothing predictable or easy about assess-
ing museum design, which is abundantly varied. There are as many agendas and
agencies as there are museums. Success in this field is also hard to gauge, as it
is has multiple different measures: ‘The success of a space for art is determined
at many levels from the conceptual to the experiential to the detail.’44 However,
despite these difficulties and differences, museums have one thing in common:
they tell us, whether wittingly or not, about ourselves. ‘New museums, whether
only imagined, planned or already under construction, reflect current debate
about sustainability, technology, consumption, research and the future signifi-
cance of culture.’45 Despite, or maybe indeed because of, all the contradictions
and contestations at the heart of the contemporary museum, the type retains its
unique potentiality to speak beyond itself and of ourselves, or to ‘capture what
doesn’t exist’ and ultimately to ‘tie reality to possibility’.

Notes
1. Beisiegel, Katharina, “Keeping the Past Alive in the Future: A New Digital
Museum Age”, in Beisiegel, Katharina, New Museums: Intentions, Expectations,
Challenges, Basel: Art Centre Basel, 2017, p. 9.
2. Stara, Alexandra, “Cultivating Architects. History in Architectural Education”, in
Bandyopadhyay, Soumyen, Lomholt, Jane, Temple, Nicholas and Tobe, Renée
(Eds.), The Humanities in Architectural Design. A Contemporary and Historical
Perspective, London and New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 30.
3. Bataille, Georges, Documents 5, 1929.
4. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture,
London and New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 111.
5. Lord, Beth, “Representing Enlightenment Space”, in MacLeod, Suzanne (Ed.),
Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions, London and
New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 148.
6. Lord, Beth, “Representing Enlightenment Space”, in MacLeod, Suzanne (Ed.),
Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions, London and New
York: Routledge, 2005, p. 153.
7. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, London and
8. Duncan & Wallach, in Tony Bennett The Birth of the Museum, London & New York:
Routledge, 1980, p. 456.
9. Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics, vol. 16, Spring 1986, p. 26.
10. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, London and
11. Macleod, Suzanne, Hourston Hanks, Laura, and Hale, Jonathan (Eds.). Museum
Making: Architectures, Narratives, Exhibitions, London and New York: Routledge,
2012, p. xix.
2012, p. xxii.
14. For example with material deliveries and digital entertainment systems.
15. Macleod, Suzanne, “Image and Life: Museum Architecture, Social Sustainability
and Design for Creative Lives”, in Beisiegel, Katharina, New Museums: Intentions,
Expectations, Challenges, Basel: Art Centre Basel, 2017.
16. Awan, Nishat, Schneider, Tatjana and Till, Jeremy. Spatial Agency: Other ways of
Doing Architecture, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 30.
17. O’Toole, Shane, “Building Palestine”, Architecture Ireland, no. 289, Sept./Oct.
2016, p. 41.
19. Former Director of Programming at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
22. Which are more fast-paced and responsive, but still have a considerable ‘shelf life’.
23. The Shed Fact Sheet, 3 April, 2019.

24. https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news-analysis/
01122019-review-of-the-decade - accessed 08/12/2019.
2012, Manifesto.
27. The original V&A is located in London’s South Kensington.
28. https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/info/european-museum-of-the-year-nomination
- accessed 10/12/2019.
29. https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/think-global-act-local-a-museum-
context - accessed 10/12/2019.
30. Marin, Jean-Yves, “Museums of the 21st Century”, in Beisiegel, Katharina, New
Museums: Intentions, Expectations, Challenges, Basel: Art Centre Basel, 2017, p. 6.
31. Self, Ronnie, The Architecture of Art Museums: A Decade of Design 2000–2010,
Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2014, p. vii.
32. This term was originally applied to the architectural programme of French
President, François Mitterand, at the end of the twentieth century. This pro-
gramme saw a range of modern monuments being constructed in Paris, to sym-
bolise France’s role in global economy, art and politics.
33. And associated societal flux: ‘… the major social upheavals of the last decade
have also led to a paradigm shift in museum architecture’. Greub, Suzanne, in
Beisiegel, Katharina, New Museums: Intentions, Expectations, Challenges, Basel:
Art Centre Basel, 2017, p. 7.
37. Hourston (Hanks), Laura, Museum Builders II, Chichester & London: John Wiley &
Sons, 2004.
38. For museum development in China, see Zhang Gan, “The Modern Museum in
China”, in Anderson, Jaynie (Ed.), Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and
Convergence, Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2009, pp. 1032–35.
39. Claire Jacobson. New Museums in China, New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 2014, p. ix.
40. “Mad about Museums”, The Economist, December 21, 2013, http://www.
economist.com/news/special-report/21591710-china-building-thousands-new-
museums-how-will-it-fill-them-mad-about-museums - accessed 20/07/2016.
41. The usual progression is from associate architect to project architect.
42. Stara, Alexandra, “Cultivating Architects. History in Architectural Education”, in
Bandyopadhyay, Soumyen, Lomholt, Jane, Temple, Nicholas and Tobe, Renée
(Eds.), The Humanities in Architectural Design. A Contemporary and Historical
Perspective, London and New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 30.
43. Self, Ronnie. The Architecture of Art Museums: A Decade of Design 2000–2010,
Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2014, p. vi.
44. Self, Ronnie. The Architecture of Art Museums: A Decade of Design 2000–2010,
Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2014, p. vi.

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Macleod, Suzanne, “Image and Life: Museum Architecture, Social Sustainability and
Design for Creative Lives”, in Beisiegel, Katharina, New Museums: Intentions,
Expectations, Challenges, Basel: Art Centre Basel, 2017.
Marin, Jean-Yves, “Museums of the 21st Century”, in Beisiegel, Katharina, New
Museums: Intentions, Expectations, Challenges, Basel: Art Centre Basel, 2017.
O’Toole, Shane, “Building Palestine”, Architecture Ireland, no. 289, Sept./Oct. 2016.
Self, Ronnie. The Architecture of Art Museums. A Decade of Design: 2000–2010,
London and New York: Routledge, 2014.
Selwood, Sara, “Ways of Seeing”, Museums Journal, December 2011, vol. 111,
no. 12.

SendPoints Publishing Co. Museum Design: Architecture/Culture/Geographical
Environment, Hamburg and Berkeley, California: Gingko Press, 2016.
Stara, Alexandra, “Cultivating Architects. History in Architectural Education”, in The
Humanities in Architectural Design. A Contemporary and Historical Perspective,
Bandyopadhyay, Soumyen, Lomholt, Jane, Temple, Nicholas and Tobe,
Renée (Eds.), London and New York: Routledge, 2010.
Stephens, Simon, “New Forms”, Museums Journal, May 2015, vol. 115, no. 5.
Tzortzi, Kali. Museum Space: Where Architecture Meets Museology, London and
New York: Routledge, 2015.
Van Uffelen, Chris. Contemporary Museums: Architecture. History. Collection,
Salenstein, Switzerland: Braun, 2010.
Zhang Gan, “The Modern Museum in China”, in Anderson, Jaynie (Ed.), Crossing
Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2009.

Part 1: Re-Place
Messner Mountain Museum

Turner Contemporary
China Academy of Art’s Folk Art Museum
Re-Place: Introduction
In considering the current situation and future direction of museum making

around the world, certain issues and opportunities present themselves; nota-
bly around the formulation of place.
Significant shifts in the political sphere in recent years may be prompt-
ing the reassessment and reassertion of place identities. The hegemony of
pervasive globalisation is being challenged by political devolution, economic
uncertainty arising from the Global Financial Crisis, a widespread rise in popu-
list nationalism, certain aspects of environmentalism, and the predominantly
national and regional –– rather than international –– response to the Covid-19
pandemic. Long-standing international alliances and identities are under pres-
sure, and all these forces appear to have set in motion the entrenchment or
reimagining of personal and collective attachments to place. The national and
local appear to be gaining ground. Within this altered politico-cultural land-
scape, place and its depiction may be taking on greater significance. Part 1
suggests the possibility that an increasing exploration and privileging of place
may define one future direction in the making of museums and galleries.
The global museum-going public has become used to a paradoxically
reassuringly familiar –– whilst inherently placeless –– pan-national white/
black box museum model. This startling interior uniformity is a legacy of the
historic typological conformity of museums and galleries: the basic enfilade
of display spaces, then variously arranged in pavilion, circular, courtyard or
hybrid layouts. The relegation or recession of the museum’s interior aesthetic,
to greater enhance the impact of the artefacts, also contributes to this sense
of international similitude. And the relatively small group of practices –– with
their named ‘starchitects’ –– which monopolises contemporary high-profile
museum making, has further emphasized this architectural homogeneity. In
Rykwert’s terms, ‘[h]owever locally anchored’, museums have become ‘cult
buildings of a global religion’.1
This familiar model has, however, become increasingly scrutinized in
our changing times, with intensified attention to sitedness in museum and
exhibition design. As museum design evolves in the twenty-first century and
museums and galleries strive to make distinct offers to their visiting pub-
lics, audience experience may be increasingly inspired by place. Interpretive
designers are being charged with an amplified social responsibility –– to
curate and enhance the ‘site’ of the museum in order to create both con-
nections and collisions with visitors’ own personal place identity constructs.
Moving forward, the visitor may be more attracted to a distinct experience of
place in the museum; and in turn may be more engaged and even challenged
by it. ‘Museums and galleries, of course, no longer shun the outside world, the
contingencies of its light and life …’.2
In Norberg-Schulz’s terms, the role of architecture –– and in this case
museum architecture –– is ‘… to concretise the genius loci’,3 or as Nesbitt
contends, ‘to make a site become a place, that is, to uncover the mean-
ings potentially present in the given environment’.4 As the three museums
in this Part attest, qualities and specificities of place can be hugely affecting
and influential for their designers. Kenneth Frampton argued that Critical
Regionalism should ‘… [b]e regarded as not a style — ‘a received set of
aesthetic preferences’ — but a process, applicable to a range of situations
and more or less independently realized in a variety of locations’.5 The archi-
tects of these three museum buildings revel in this process of uncovering
meanings of their respective places, and these meanings are as disparate as
the devices deployed to portray them. Such Critical Regionalism is seen by
some as: ‘[a] laudable attempt to reverse the trend of placelessness caused
by mass culture, and at the same time it resists the simulations, the pseudo-
places, of vernacular and historic revivals’.6 However Sorkin observed that
‘[a] consequence of the profession’s current preoccupation with ‘context’ is
a kind of collective confidence about the possibility of adding on. There’s
an implicit argument that architects, duly skilled and sensitized, should be
able to intervene anywhere.’7 Such confidence may be liberating, but at
times it may also be misplaced. For example Self, in The Architecture of Art
Museums: A Decade of Design: 2000–2010, draws attention to the hazard
of superficiality that such an approach may engender: ‘… a response to con-
text often has little to do with an intimate comprehension of place. Rather,
projects rely conceptually on narrative and metaphor …’.8 Such reliance on
narrative and metaphor may actually be appropriate to museums though,
being themselves examples of storytelling institutions, which ‘… are in fact
extended metaphors or allegories, representing the deep beliefs of civiliza-
tions and society.’9
26 Re-Place
This projected privileging of place would naturally lead to a greater
degree of cultural specificity within the museum, and Part 1 explores cur-
rent practice of such enhanced situatedness through three contemporary
museums: the Messner Mountain Museum in Italy’s South Tyrol; Turner
Contemporary in the British seaside town of Margate; and China Academy
of Art’s Folk Art Museum in the city of Hangzhou. At the Messner Mountain
Museum, the sublime intervention by Zaha Hadid Architects was intended to,
‘… make architecture more like landscape,’ and in so doing it connects physi-
cally and aesthetically not only with the dramatic alpine mountain-scape, but
also with the biographical story and experience of the museum’s subject, the
mountaineer Reinhold Messner. It is of and for its place. In Margate at Turner
Contemporary, David Chipperfield Architects take this personal affiliation
to place even further, siting the building in the exact location of the guest-
house where Turner stayed during his frequent trips to the town. Here place
is everything: a light-washed artistic view; a romantic attachment; an historical
landscape; and a resonant memoryscape. Finally, In Hangzhou on a wooded
hillside, Kengo Kuma Architects have responded to both natural and cultural
aspects of the site, in a way at once both specifically evocative and detached:
‘… both profoundly rooted in its place and yet disintegrated and ethe-
real.’10 So all three museums demonstrate the conscious engagement with
site propounded, and hint at the possibilities and pitfalls for designers and
the museum visiting public of this enhanced situatedness both now and into
the future.
A literal ‘re-placement’ is the defining feature of Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s
The Shed; a cultural centre in Hudson Yards, Manhattan, New York, which
opened in 2019. Here, ‘[t]he McCourt, an iconic space for large-scale per-
formances, installations, and events, is formed when The Shed’s telescoping
outer shell is deployed from over the base building and glides along rails
onto the adjoining plaza.’11 The highly engineered animation of the build-
ing transforms place; from an open civic plaza, to a covered urban space, at
once a home for events and an extension of the cultural centre institution.
The Shed therefore epitomises a literal interpretation of Re-Place: actually
moving the museum into a different site, or ‘re-placing’ it. Other trends with
regards to place in the museum are also emerging and accelerating. In an
increasingly decentralised landscape, the museum is reaching out more and
more to its peripheral constituencies. This variously is taking the form of
institutional offshoots, temporary and/or pop-up community outposts, and
outreach activities in schools and increasingly other local venues and sites.
These new approaches offer flexibility and agility, and ultimately the chance
to democratise more deeply the museum visiting experience. A book like this
one, focusing on the centralised monuments of museum experience, may
be seen as a quaint anachronism in years to come, or maybe more likely
although counter-intuitively, these resource- and symbolically-intensive hub
institutions may prove more resilient than could logically be expected: just as
cinema adapted and maintained its hold in the televisual age.
In all, this Part will consider the future directions and usefulness of such
a sited approach to museum making. It will question how this approach can
Re-Place 27
challenge and satisfy contemporary audiences, and remain relevant and rev-
elatory into the future. Overall Part 1 aims to expose and elucidate these
strategic responses to place, and to point to their increasing potential in
future museum and gallery making. The sociologist, George Ritzer, coined
the term ‘glocalization’, or, ‘the interpenetration of the global and the local
resulting in unique outcomes in different geographic areas’,12 and perhaps
this offers designers a nuanced way forward. In any case, it seems likely that as
Katharina Beisiegel predicts, ‘[i]t is not the iconic buildings that will dominate,
but rather intelligent ongoing strategies that tie the museum to its location
and thus make possible a singular, local visitor’s experience’.13
Notes
1. Rykwert, Joseph. The Seduction of Place. The History and Future of Cities, New
York: Vintage Books, Random House, Inc., 2002, p. 236.
2. Caiger-Smith, Martin, ‘Beyond the White Cube: A New Role for the Art Museum’,
Architecture Today, vol. 219, 2011, p. 38.
3. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture,
New York: Rizzoli, 1979, p. 23.
4. Nesbitt, Kate (Ed.). Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of
Architectural Theory 1965–1995, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996,
p. 422.
5. Eggener, Keith L. Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism, Wiley
Online Library, 2006, p. 229. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1162/104
648802753657932?needAccess=true - accessed 23/02/2020.
6. Ingersoll, Richard, “Critical Regionalism in Houston: A Case for the Menil Collection”,
in Canizaro, Vincent B. (Ed.), Architectural Regionalism. Collected Writings on
Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition, New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
2007, p. 387.
7. Sorkin, Michael. Exquisite Corpse: Writing on Buildings, New York and London:
Verso Books, 1991, p. 148.
8. Self, Ronnie. The Architecture of Art Museums: A Decade of Design: 2000 – 2010,
Oxon, UK and New York, USA: Routledge, 2014, p. viii.
9. Sikes, Michael. ‘Interpreting Museums as Cultural Metaphors’, Marilyn
Zurmuehlen Working Papers in Art Education, vol. 10, pp. 2–3. Iowa Research
Online: https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1199&context=mzwp -
accessed 23/02/2020.
10. Self, Jack, “Dark Silence”, Architectural Review, vol. 237, no. 1418, April 2015,
p. 57.
11. https://dsrny.com/project/the-shed - accessed 24/02/2020.
12. Ritzer, George, in Beisiegel, Katharina. New Museums: Intentions, Expectations,
Challenges, Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2017, p. 11.
13. Beisiegel, Katharina. New Museums: Intentions, Expectations, Challenges, Munich:
Hirmer Verlag, 2017, p. 11.
28 Re-Place
Messner Mountain Museum
(MMM) Corones, South Tyrol,
Italy
Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), 2015
Introduction
In the Alpine province of South Tyrol, the Italian mountaineer and extreme
climber, Reinhold Messner, has inaugurated a multiple museum project dis-
persed across six discrete locations: Firmian; Juval; Dolomites, Ortles; Ripa and
Corones. Three of the museums –– at Firmian, Juval and Ripa –– occupy extant
castles, and MMM Dolomites, at the Cibiana Pass at Monte Rite, is housed in
an old fort. All the outposts’ exhibition contents and narratives address dif-
ferent aspects of mountains and mountaineering, and as Messner himself has
defined, each museum outpost has a seminal relation to its landscape context:
For each museum I found a special geographical position: the ice

museum, MMM Ortles, is built under an icy mountain where avalanches
are common. MMM Dolomites, is a museum in the clouds, on a high,
rocky mountain and is open only four months of the year because the
rest of the time there is so much snow nobody can go up there. From
that summit you can see more than 1,000 rock peaks.
MMM Ripa is about the people of the mountains and is situated
in a castle where visitors can see hundreds of mountain farms. The holy
museum, MMM Juval, is also a castle and is located where a frozen
mummy called Otzi was found 20 years ago.
The museum of traditional alpinism is in a position from where you
can see the Dolomites –– the most beautiful rock climbing area of the
world –– and on the other side there are classical granite mountains.1
Site Considerations
The physical setting of the final intervention in the series, MMM Corones,
which lies at an altitude of 2,275 metres on the Kronplatz plateau, is intrinsic
to all major aspects of the project. Located between the Gader Valley, Olang
and the Puster Valley in the German-speaking part of the Italian Alps, it is
dedicated to the exploration of the traditions, history and discipline of moun-
taineering, and bears particular meaning for Reinhold Messner. Messner
achieved fame becoming the first person to climb Mount Everest without the
aid of tanked oxygen –– which many contemporary mountaineers and doctors
thought impossible2 –– and the first to climb all 14 global mountains over
Messner Mountain Museum Corones, South Tyrol, Italy 29

eeFigure 1.1
Site plan
(Source: © Zaha Hadid
Architects)
8000 metres in altitude. Away from these worldwide achievements, to Messner

this site holds strong personal resonance, being linked to both his formative
years and later mountaineering exploits. As he explains, ‘[t]he museum is a
mirror of the world of my childhood - the Geislerspitzen, the central buttress
of the Heiligkreuzkofel (the most difficult climb in my whole life) and the glaci-
ated granite mountains of the Ahrn Valley.’3 The orientation of the scheme is
influenced by this personal, autobiographical connection of Messner to the
surrounding landforms. Drawing on his long and intimate acquaintance with
the landscape, he stipulated the exact directions in which the museum’s three
‘downslope’ but above ground elements should face: ‘In the first, a window
looking out southwest to the peak of the Peitlerkofel mountain, in the sec-
ond, another window should look south toward the Heiligkreuzkofel peak,
in the third, a balcony should face west to the Ortler and South Tyrol.’4 See
Figure 1.1. Put plainly, ‘[t]he building was constructed so that it was directly
orientated to the mountains where Messner comes from.’5 Here is compelling
congruence between topography and biography, which, as we will see, is fur-
ther underscored by the exhibition contents and architectural design.
The placement of the museum is nothing short of audacious. The muse-
um’s form, embedded in the mountainside, finds release from its anchorage
only at the canopied entry sequence to the northeast of the site, and at the
three extruded forms which fan out through the site’s south to west quadrant.
This was achieved through excavation of 4000 cubic metres of rock and soil
during construction, which was then replaced around the sides and top of
the completed structure, partially burying or encasing it within the mountain:6
A small knoll on the southwest side of Kronplatz was removed, a deep

hole dug and concrete for a three-story building poured. … Once the
concrete was in place, the mass of scree was replaced on top of the build-
ing so that from outside it appears to the underground, and visitors per-
ceive the passages in the interior like the meandering tunnels of a mine.7
30 Re-Place
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Y venido el día señalado, que á
entrambos nos puso casi
deffuntos en la sepoltura, no fué
poco poder en él sustentar la vida
que no se acabase del todo ó no
mostrar tan claramente que todo
el mundo lo conociera cuán
difficultosamente podía sufrirse
una prueba tan áspera como el
Amor en nosotros ambos hacía.
Yo traía mis ojos hinchados por
arreventar con las lágrimas; un
nudo hecho en mi garganta que
apenas hablar me dexaba; tenía
las fuerzas tan perdidas, que con
difficultad moverme podía, y en
fin, andaba tal, que no tenía otro
remedio sino mostrarme muy
enfermo, para que nadie podiesse
conocer mi verdadera dolencia.
Ya cierto en este tiempo lo que
Belisia hacía no parecía fingido,
que las señales y muestras que
daba eran de verdadero amor y
agradecimiento.
Y así aquella noche antes que
nos partiésemos se dió tan buena
maña y la ventura nos favoresció
á entrambos de manera, que nos
dió lugar para pasar mucha parte
della juntos, y puesto yo en su
presencia le decía: «No sé,
señora mía, cómo podrá este
cuerpo vivir ausente de ti, que
eres más ánima suya que la que
consigo trae; de una cosa podrás
estar cierta, que la que yo tengo
queda contigo, y que conmigo va
sólo mi cuerpo con el deseo de
que siempre andará acompañado,
no teniendo otra vida sino la
esperanza de tornar á verte y
servirte, pues yo no puedo
emplearme en otra cosa ninguna
que fuera desto pueda darme
contentamiento».
Diciendo estas palabras, mis
lágrimas eran tantas, mis sollozos
y sospiros eran tan grandes, que
no me dexaron pasar adelante. Y
Belisia, viéndome casi sin aliento,
ayudándome con la mesma
congoxa que yo tenía, mezclaba
sus lágrimas con las mías, porque
los ojos de entrambos estaban
hechos manantiales fuentes, y
dando un profundo sospiro me
respondió:
«Nunca pensé, Torcato, que á tal
extremo me traxera la affición y
verdadero amor que para contigo
dexé aposentar en mis entrañas,
el cual me tiene tal que no sé
cuándo podré tener una hora de
alegría viéndome ausente de ti,
aunque nunca te apartaré de mi
pensamiento porque ya no soy
parte para hacerlo si quisiese, ni
tengo la libertad pasada con que
hacerlo en otro tiempo pudiera. Y
así el tiempo que no te viere,
estaré desamparada y sola, como
viuda y triste y desconsolada, sin
esperanza de bien ninguno, hasta
que mis ojos puedan tornar á ver
la luz que agora pierden en
perder de poder mirarte para su
descanso, como hasta agora
hacían».
Con esto, juntando una boca con
otra, llorando la cercana partida,
pudo tanto el dolor en el tierno
corazón de Belisia, que no
pudiendo socorrerle con sus
flacas fuerzas, le tomó en mis
brazos un desmayo que sin
sentido ninguno la dexó, y
pareciéndome que la muerte le
ponía asechanzas, rodeando por
todas partes para hallar manera
cómo sin vida la dexasse, á mí
me tenía casi sin ella, estando
con una pasión tan crecida y un
dolor tan áspero y fiero, que
agora en pensarlo me espanto
cómo pude sufrir una experiencia
tan fuerte y poderosa, la cual me
puso en tal extremo, que por más
muerto me contaba que la mi
Belisia; y no hallando otro
remedio con que socorrerla
pudiesse, la abundancia de mis
lágrimas socorrieron á la falta de
la agua para echarle en su
hermoso gesto, las cuales,
despidiéndolas mis ojos por mis
mejillas y cayendo en él, fueron
causa para que más presto en sí
volviese diciendo:
«No fuera pequeño descanso,
Torcato, si en tus brazos se
feneciera la vida que de aquí
adelante se pasará con tanta
tristeza y tan desventurada
muerte; mejor fuera que me
dexaras morir que buscarme
remedio que tan caro me costará
todo el tiempo que viviere».
«No quiera Dios, mi señora, le
respondí yo, que tu muerte sea
primero que la mía, ni á mí me
venga tan gran mal que yo ver ni
saberla pueda. No me pesa de
que sientas el tormento de
nuestra partida, porque por el
tuyo conozcas el que yo siento, y
acordándote dél hayas lástima de
mí, como de tu verdadero siervo,
aunque no querría que tu
sentimiento fuesse tanto que no
pudiesse encubrirlo y pasarlo sin
que con señales de tanto dolor lo
manifiestes. Y pues ningún otro
remedio nos puede valer en esta
adversidad sino la paciencia,
suplícote, ánima mía, y por el
verdadero amor que me tienes y
yo te tengo te conjuro que tú la
tengas hasta que yo busque y
procure cómo los tiempos se
muden y truequen, para hallar
otro descanso del que agora
tenemos, que yo no pienso perder
la esperanza estando tan
conformes las voluntades».
«Yo lo haré, me respondió, como
lo dices, ó á lo menos procuraré
hacerlo, y pues la noche se nos
acaba y el día se nos muestra en
enemigo para apartarnos
forzosamente, forzado será que tú
te vayas. Y porque no tengo
prenda mía que pueda darte para
que de mí te acuerdes, con este
cordón de mi camisa quiero ligar
tu mano derecha, con la cual me
diste tu fe, porque no puedas
mudarte ni trazarla sin que te
venga á la memoria la injuria que
haces á quien tan verdadera la
tiene y tendrá siempre contigo,
que jamás hallarás en ella
mudanza».
«Ya poca necesidad hay, le dixe
yo, de prendarme con ninguna
cosa más que con aquel amor
que tan gran fuerza tiene que
ninguna prosperidad ni
adversidad bastará para quebrar
su firmeza. Y pues yo voy tan
prendado, queda, señora, segura
que yo el mayor consuelo que
llevo es pensar que voy seguro de
que nuestras voluntades es una
mesma voluntad, sin haber entre
ellas differencia».
Con estas palabras nos
abrazamos, y acompañados el
uno y el otro de lágrimas y
sospiros nos apartamos, yendo yo
tan cargado de cuidados y fatigas,
que no me acordaba de otra cosa,
y así entre dos luces me torné al
ganado, sin que de ninguno de
los pastores que cerca estaban
fuesse sentido. Y venido el día,
puestos todos á punto, nos
partimos; pero antes en lo público
estando todos juntos, Belisia y yo
con los ojos nos dábamos á
entender lo que los corazones en
esta partida sentían, y no fué
poco poderlo encubrir de manera
que los que estaban presentes no
lo conociessen. Assí nos
apartamos, yendo los unos por
una parte y los otros por la otra; y
si yo quissiese contar ni
encarecer el sentimiento que
llevaba, imposible sería que mi
lengua podiese decirlo, porque yo
iba tan fuera de mi juicio, que ni
entendía lo que me hablaban ni
oía lo que me decían, porque
todos mis pensamientos y
sentidos llevaba ocupados en la
contemplación de mi desventura
teniendo el retrato de la mi Belisia
en el alma de tal manera que los
ojos espirituales, que mirándola
estaban siempre, también
ocupaban á los corporales para
que en otra cosa ocupar no se
pudiesen; llegados que fuimos á
nuestra aldea, muchos días
anduve con esta triste vida
buscando la soledad de los
desiertos y montes deshabitados,
trayendo mis ganados por los
riscos y peñascos, huyendo de
los otros pastores y de cualquiera
otra compañía que apartarme del
pensamiento de la mi Belisia
pudiese, porque sola esta era mi
gloria y en solo esto hallaba
descanso y alivio; muchas veces
á voces la llamaba, llevándolas en
vano el viento sin ser oídas, y
otras estaba hablando con ella
contándole mis passiones y
trabajos, como si presente la
tuviera; pero después,
hallándome burlado de ver cuán
lexos de mí estaba apartada,
tornaba á mis principiadas quexas
conmigo solo, de las cuales hacía
muchos días testigo á esta clara
fuente donde agora estamos,
porque sola ella las oía. Y
andando con este cuidado,
determiné de escrebirla una carta
dándole cuenta de mi vida y
rogándole que me enviase algún
consuelo con que sustentarla
pudiesse; lo cual ella hizo con
muy amorosas razones, de
manera que en mi salud y
contento se pareció la alegría que
con ella había recebido. Passado
algún tiempo, la ventura me
descubrió cierto negocio y
ocasión con que lícitamente pude
ir á la aldea donde sus padres
habitaban; y llegado sin haber
sentido cansancio ninguno en el
camino, con la agonía que
llevaba, aunque la mi Belisia me
recibió con alegre semblante y
palabras amorosas, el corazón,
que pocas veces suele
engañarse, me daba á entender
que no hallaba en ella aquella
fuerza de affición con que otras
veces eran dichas, antes me las
representaba con una tibieza que
por una parte me espantaba y
ponía temor y por otra no la creía.
Pero al fin, dándome audiencia en
secreto, con alguna importunidad
que me puso en mayor sospecha
y parecióme hallarla con alguna
más libertad que solía, aunque no
de manera que pudiese tener
razón que por estonces bastase
para agraviarme, y habiéndome
detenido tanto espacio cuanto el
negocio requería, el cual yo dilaté
todo lo que pude, fueme forzado
volverme, dexando el ánima con
ella y llevando conmigo solo el
cuerpo y el cuidado que me
acompañaba, porque ya yo iba
algún tanto sospechoso,
adivinando el mal que esperaba
de las señales encubiertas, que
hacían á mi atribulado corazón
adivino, y assí entreteniéndome
algún tiempo la esperanza
confiando en la fe que había en
un tiempo conocido y en las
promesas que con tan gran
hervor y voluntad se me habían
hecho, determiné de tornar á
descubrir tierra, y para ello le
escribí una carta, la cual le envié
con mensajero cierto, y si queréis
oirla, decírosla he, porque la
tengo en la memoria de la mesma
manera que fué escrita.
Grisaldo.—Antes te lo rogamos
que lo hagas; pero bien será, si te
parece, Torcato, que primero, por
ser passada tanta parte del día,
comamos algún bocado si en tu
hatero traes aparejo para ello,
que ya la hambre me acusa y á
Filonio creo que le debe tener
fatigado.
Filonio.—Antes os hago ciertos
que casi de hambre y de sed
estoy desmayado; porque ayuno
me vine esta mañana, y como no
me sustento en amores, de la
manera que Torcato lo hace,
hasme dado, Grisaldo, la vida con
tu buen aviso de acordarlo á tan
buen tiempo.
Torcato.—Yo confiesso que no
ha sido pequeño mi descuido en
no convidaros, y aunque no esté
tan bien aparejado como vosotros
lo merecéis y como lo estuviera si
fuera avisado de vuestra venida,
todavía no faltará qué comáis,
que aquí tengo un pedazo de
cecina de venado que mis
mastines este invierno, por estar
herido en una pierna, mataron;
también hallaréis parte de un
buen queso y cebolletas y ajos
verdes, y el pan, aunque es de
centeno, tan bien sazonado que
no habrá ninguno de trigo que
mejor sabor tenga.
Filonio.—Yo traigo conmigo la
salsa de San Bernardo para que
todo me haga buen gusto; pero
bien será, Torcato, que también tú
nos ayudes, porque sin comer ni
beber mal pueden los hombres
sustentarse, y, como suelen decir,
todos los duelos con pan son
buenos.
Torcato.—Quiero hacer lo que
me dices, que no es poca mi
flaqueza ni la necesidad que
tengo de socorrerla.
Grisaldo.—En mi vida no comí
cosa que mejor me supiese; ¡oh
qué sabroso está todo y qué
bueno! que aunque nos esperaras
no estuviera más á punto, ni nos
pudieras hacer convite que más
agradable nos fuera.
Filonio.—Dame, Torcato, el
barril, que no es menor mi sed
que mi hambre, y quiero que se
corra todo junto.
Torcato.—Vedlo aquí; y aunque
yo no lo he probado, por muy
buen vino me lo dieron.
Grisaldo.—Passo, Filonio, que
no lo has de acabar todo, que á
dos vaivenes como ese apenas
nos dexarías una gota.
Filonio.—No había bebido tres
tragos cuando ya te matabas; ¿no
miras que tiene el cuello muy
angosto y que sale tan destilado
que casi no le he tomado el
gusto?
Torcato.—Bebe, Grisaldo, que
no faltará vino, porque acabado
esse barril otro está en aquel
zurrón, con que podréis tornar á
rehacer la chanza.
Grisaldo.—¡Oh, qué singular
vino, mal año para el de San
Martín ni Madrigal, que ninguna
ventaja le hacen!
Filonio.—Por tu fe, Grisaldo, que
ordeñes aquella cabra negra que
tan llenas trae las tetas de leche
como si el cabrito no hubiera hoy
mamado; que pues hay barreños
y cuchares en que la comamos,
no vendrá á mal tiempo para
tomarla por fruta de postre.
Grisaldo.—Bien has dicho; harta
tiene para todos, aunque, según
tú tienes las migas hechas, no
parece que te bastaría toda la que
traen las cabras y ovejas del
rebaño.
Filonio.—No las hago todas para
mí, que muy bien podrán
repartirse, y assí haz tu de la
leche; bien está, para mí no
eches más.
Torcato.—Pues harta tenemos
yo y Grisaldo en la que queda.
Grisaldo.—Dios te dé muchos
días de vida, Torcato, que así nos
has socorrido.
Filonio.—El barril vuelva á
visitarnos, que la hambre ya la
maté como ella me mataba.
Grisaldo.—Toma y bebe á tu
placer; paréceme que no hay
sacristán que mejor ponga las
campanas en pino.
Filonio.—De ti lo aprendí cuando
fueste monacino, que solías hacer
de la mesma manera á las
vinajeras antes que se desnudase
el clérigo que había dicho la misa.
Grisaldo.—Hora sus, pues
estamos hartos. ¡Dios loado!
recoge, Torcato, lo que queda,
que no dexará de aprovechar
para otro día.
Torcato.—Bien me parece que
seas en tus cosas tan bien
proveído; y pues todo está ya
guardado, ved qué es lo que más
os agrada que hagamos.
Filonio.—¿Qué es lo que hemos
de hacer sino que nos digas la
carta que á Belisia escribiste, con
todo lo demás que sobre tus
amores tan penados te hubiere
sucedido?
Torcato.—Por dos cosas
quisiera dexarlo en el estado que
habéis oído: la una era por pensar
que con mi largo cuento os tenía
enfadados, y la otra porque no
podré decir cosa que no os dé
sinsabor y enojo, entendiendo
cuán contrario fue de aquí
adelante el fin de mi porfía á lo
que de razón hubiera de serlo,
según los buenos prencipios con
que el Amor me había
favorescido; y para que entendáis
cuán poderosamente executó
contra mí sus inhumanas fuerzas,
escuchadme la carta, que
después os diré lo demás:
CARTA DE TORCATO Á
BELISIA
«Mi mano está temblando,
ánima mía;
mi lengua se enmudece
contemplando
lo mucho que el dolor decir
podría.
Tantas cosas se están

representando
juntas con gran porfía de
escrebirse,
que yo las dexo á todas
porfiando.
Porque en mi alma pueden

bien sentirse;
mas mostrar cómo están es
excusado,
pues nunca acabarían de
decirse.
Su confusión me tiene
fatigado,
aunque lo que me da mayor
fatiga
es verme estar de ti tan
apartado.
Mi poca libertad es mi
enemiga,
pues quiere que te escriba mis
pasiones
sin estar yo presente que las
diga.
No me falta razón; mas las

razones
con que entiendas mi mal yo
no las hallo
si tu en mi torpe lengua no las
pones.
Mis cuitas y trabajos, porque

callo,
me dan mayor fatiga y más
cuidado,
y el remedio se alexa en
procurallo.
No sé qué me hacer,
desventurado,
que todo me aborresce en no
tenerte
presente ante mis ojos y á mi
lado.
En todo cuanto veo hallo la

muerte,
todo placer me daña y da
tormento,
todo me da pesar si no es
quererte.
Los campos que solían dar

contento
con los montes y bosques á
mis ojos,
estrechos son agora al
pensamiento.
Las ovejas y cabras, que

despojos
de lana y queso y leche dan
contino,
en lugar de esto me causan
mil enojos.
No hay monte, valle ó

prado, ni camino
donde halle holganza ni
reposo,
que en todos me aborrezco y
pierdo el tino.
A las fuentes me llego

temeroso,
por no hallar en ellas mi figura
que en verme cuál estoy mirar
no me oso.
Ell alma tiene en mí la

hermosura
con tenerte á ti en sí
representada,
que el cuerpo casi está en la
sepoltura.
La vida trayo á muerte

condenada
si tú no revocares la sentencia
que mi pena cruel ya tiene
dada.
Porque no pasarla en tu
presencia
no es pena, mas es muerte
muy rabiosa,
ó que me da fatiga con tu
ausencia.
En esta vida triste y

trabajosa
paso mis tristes días
padeciendo,
teniendo á mi esperanza algo
dudosa.
Las noches, si las paso, es

no durmiendo;
los días sin comer, gemidos
dando,
y en verme que estoy vivo no
me entiendo.
Susténtase mi vida
contemplando
cuán bien está empleado mi
tormento,
y por algún favor tuyo
esperando
con que pasarlo pueda más
contento».
Inviada esta carta, Belisia la

recibió, según supe, mostrando
poca voluntad, y pidiéndole la
respuesta de ella, como ya las
velas de su voluntad y affición
estuviessen puestas en calma, ó
por ventura vueltas á otro nuevo
viento con que navegaban, no la
quiso dar por escrito, sino que
con gran desabrimiento de
palabras me invió á decir que no
curase más de escrebirla ni
importunarla, porque su
determinación era de despedir de
su memoria todas las cosas
passadas, las cuales estaban ya
fuera de ella, y que si alguna vez
se acordaba de ellas era para
pesarle, y que estuviesse cierto
de que jamás haría conmigo otra
cosa de lo que me decía, y que
tendría por muy enojosa
persecución la que yo le diese si
quissiese proseguir en mi porfía
más adelante, de la cual no
sacaría ningún fruto, si no era
ponerla en mayor cuidado, para
que de mí y de mis
importunidades con gran
diligencia se guardasse.
Venido el mensajero, el cual yo
esperaba con alegres nuevas
para mi descanso, y recibiendo en
lugar dellas esta desabrida
respuesta, ya podéis sentir lo que
mi ánima sentiría, que muchas
veces estuve por desamparar la
compañía de mi atormentado
cuerpo para procurar por su parte
algún alivio de sus passiones;
pero no habiendo acabado de
perder del todo la esperanza, y
pensando que este nuevo
accidente podría presto hacer otra
mudanza, quise sustentar la vida
para poder ver con ella la razón
que Belisia me daba, mostrando
la que tenía para tratarme con
tanta crueldad y aspereza.
Y comenzando á mostrar en mi
gesto la tristeza que me
acompañaba, desechando de mí
toda alegría, andaba cargado de
cuidados y pensamientos, no
sabiendo qué decir ni qué hacer
que aprovecharme pudiesse; no
dormía ni reposaba; mi comer, era
tan poco que difficultosamente
podía sustentarme; la flaqueza y
la falta del sueño, que me traían
casi fuera de mi juicio.
Y lo que mayor pena me daba era
que á ninguno osaba descubrirla,
ni con nadie la comunicaba para
recibir algún alivio. Anduve ansí
muchos días, más muerto que
vivo, y pensando que Belisia por
ventura lo había hecho por
probarme para saber de mí si
estaba firme con la fe que
siempre le había mostrado,
determiné de tomar el camino
para su aldea, lo cual puse luego
por obra; y llegando allá ninguna
manera ni diligencia bastó para
que Belisia oirme ni escucharme
quisiesse, á lo menos en secreto
como solía, que en lo público no
podía decirle nada que á nuestros
amores tocasse, y con tal
disimulación me inviaba como si
jamás entre mí y ella ninguna
cosa hubiera pasado; estaba tan
seca de razones y tan estéril de
palabras, que, en verlo, mil veces
estuve por desesperarme.
Y, en fin, queriendo tornar á
probar mi ventura, me determiné
de escribirle otra carta,
encaresciéndole mi pena y
passión todo lo que pude,
pensando que aprovecharía para
que dello se doliesse, y la carta
era ésta, porque aquí tengo el
traslado della:
CARTA DE TORCATO Á BELISIA

«Los golpes de los azadones,
Belisia mía, que cavan en mi
sepoltura, con su temeroso son
ensordecen mis oídos; y el clamor
de las campanas, con su
estruendo espantoso, no me
dexan oir cosa que para mi salud
aprovechase. La tristeza de los
que con verme tan al cabo de mi
vida se duelen de mí, me tiene
tan triste, que ni ellos bastan á
consolarme ni yo estoy ya para
recebir algún consuelo. En tal
extremo me tienes puesto, que lo
que con mayor verdad puede
pronunciar mi lengua es que me
han rodeado los dolores de la
muerte y los peligros del infierno
me han hallado. Desventurado de
mí, que vivo para que no se
acaben mis tormentos muriendo,
y muero por acabar de morir si
pudiesse. Mas ha querido mi
desventura que mi pena rabiosa
tenga mayores fuerzas que la
muerte, la cual, viéndome tan
muerto en la vida no procura
matarme, antes, espantada de
verme cual estoy, va huyendo de
mí con temor de que no sea yo
otra muerte más poderosa que
pueda matarla á ella, y cuando la
crueldad viene en su compañía
con intención de ayudarla, para
acabarme, movida á compasión
de mí se pone á llorar conmigo
mis fatigas; y tú, más cruel que la

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New Museum Design 1st Edition Laura

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HANKS AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW MATERIALS AND

Laura Hourston Hanks is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and

Laura Hourston Hanks

New Museum Design 1

Part 3: Re-Present 119

Part 4: Re-Imagine 173

I would like to thank the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham

1.1 Site plan 30

viii List of Illustrations

7.1 Site plan 127

10.1 Egypt Gallery 180

xii List of Illustrations

List of Illustrations xiii

New Museum Design 1

…the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general

2 New Museum Design

New Museum Design 3

4 New Museum Design

New Museum Design 5

Such detachedness from the social contribution and responsibilities of the

6 New Museum Design

The demands placed on the museum have been positively utopian: it

As well as bearing this unrealistic burden, the contemporary museum is also

New Museum Design 7

8 New Museum Design

New Museum Design 9

10 New Museum Design

New Museum Design 11

12 New Museum Design

With curving concrete

New Museum Design 13

14 New Museum Design

New Museum Design 15

16 New Museum Design

Whilst this interpretation risks oversimplification and overstatement, all the

So since the completion of Museum Builders II in 2004,37 substantive changes

New Museum Design 17

18 New Museum Design

New Museum Design 19

20 New Museum Design

New Museum Design 21

22 New Museum Design

New Museum Design 23

Messner Mountain Museum

In considering the current situation and future direction of museum making

For each museum I found a special geographical position: the ice

Messner Mountain Museum Corones, South Tyrol, Italy 29

8000 metres in altitude. Away from these worldwide achievements, to Messner

A small knoll on the southwest side of Kronplatz was removed, a deep

Tantas cosas se están

Porque en mi alma pueden

No me falta razón; mas las

Mis cuitas y trabajos, porque

En todo cuanto veo hallo la

Los campos que solían dar