Museums

Toward an Architecture (Texts & Documents)

Published in 1923, Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe and remains a foundational text for students and professionals. Le Corbusier urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world. Simultaneously a historian, critic, and prophet, he provocatively juxtaposes views of classical Greece and Renaissance Rome with images of airplanes, cars, and ocean liners. Le Corbusier's slogans--such as "the house is a machine for living in"--and philosophy changed how his contemporaries saw the relationship between architecture, technology, and history. This edition includes a new translation of the original text, a scholarly introduction, and background notes that illuminate the text and illustrations.

Renzo Piano Museums

Creating space for the display of works of art has intrigued Renzo Piano throughout his thirty-five years of architectural practice. Today he is acknowledged the pre-eminent designer in this field, entrusted with the collections of the most distinguished art institutions in the world.

Renzo Piano Museums presents a portfolio of eighteen museum projects, beginning with the revolutionary Pompidou Center in Paris and continuing to the most current designs for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sarajevo. Featured are the Menil Collection in Houston, the Beyeler Foundation on the outskirts of Basel, Switzerland, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Lush color photographs and handsome presentation drawings and plans convey the form and detail of these extraordinary buildings.

Complementing the visual presentation is an essay by Victoria Newhouse, which surveys Piano's museum work and places it in a historical context. In particular, she focuses on the key elements of Piano's aesthetic: natural light, transparency, and the piazza or gathering space. All were introduced at the Pompidou Center and continue to inform the designs.

Towards a New Museum: Expanded Edition

Should art museums be designed to surprise and delight or to instruct and uplift? Should the museum building be a temple of art or an entertainment complex? Architectural historian Victoria Newhouse considers these and other questions about museums in her book Towards a New Museum. Newhouse examines dozens of art museums built during the 1980s and 1990s and describes how the buildings fit into the history of ideas about the proper function of museums. Some museums are like cabinets of curiosities, a hodgepodge of items the collector assembles to delight viewers. Other designers of museums strive to provide a neutral environment that does not distract viewers from the art. However, some architects believe that hanging paintings on white walls in galleries separates the art from its context. Architects and artists have grappled with these ideas and created some stunning and outlandish museums in recent years. Newhouse describes the sinuous, titanium-coated new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the fractured forms of the Fredrick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis. She writes about the artist Donald Judd, who bought most of Marfa, Texas, and made it a museum. These are bold and sometimes beautiful museums. Newhouse wisely includes plenty of good pictures and diagrams of each building.

In different segments of the book, Newhouse discusses: private museums, museums that function as temples of art, museums devoted to one artist, and museums designed by artists. She also devotes a chapter to the unfortunate impact of museum politics on design. This chapter, "Wings That Don't Fly," illustrates some of the more vivid design disasters in recent history, including the "toilet tank" addition to the Guggenheim in New York. Art historians, architects, and people who are connected to museums will find this book an instructive, thoughtful overview of what's going on with museums today. --Jill Marquis

Since first publication in 1998, Towards a New Museum has achieved iconic status as a seminal exploration of the late-20th-century revolution in museum architecture: the transformation from museum as restrained container for art to museum as exuberant companion to art. Author Victoria Newhouse critiqued numerous institutions for the display of art opened in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, culminating in Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao and Richard Meier's Getty Center in Los Angeles. In this expanded edition, she continues her investigation of new museums, assessing the radical, 21st-century changes that have propelled Herzog & de Meuron's De Young Museum in San Francisco and SANAA's 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, to the forefront of this building type.

Among the institutions added to this new edition are the Giovanni and Marella Agnelli Pinacoteca, perched atop an enormous Fiat factory in Turin, Italy, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, both by Renzo Piano Building Workshop; three notable updates of the museum as sacred space, two by Yoshio Taniguchi and one by SANAA; the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati by Zaha Hadid; and expansions of the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art in Madrid by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis by Herzog & de Meuron, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Taniguchi. Finally, the De Young Museum, reflecting its own eclectic conditions, and the 21st Century Museum, consisting of non-hierarchical spaces for every conceivable kind of contemporary artwork as well as facilities for social exchange, are innovative hybrids that propose new directions for the future of museum architecture.

New Museums: Contemporary Museum Architecture Around the World (Universe Architecture Series)

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

Period Rooms in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series)

Museum Buildings: A Design Manual (Design Manuals)

Museums are architectural trend-setters. Culture sponsoring and their increasing role as tourist attractions are guarantees for an ongoing boom in museum construction. A tradition and typology developed over the centuries, the experience gained in recent decades and cutting-edge technology all contribute to the practice of modern day museum building. History and form, site development, floor plan, air-conditioning and climate technology are just some examples of the subjects treated systematically in the first section of this design manual. Some 70 international museum case-studies exemplify solutions and emphasize specific museum design issues such as spatial organisation and arrangement, and lighting. Paul von Naredi-Rainer is an expert on the subject of museum construction and author of the widely read "Architektur und Harmonie" (Architecture and Harmony). Herbert Pfeiffer, Helmut F.O. Müller and Hans Jürgen Schmitz teach at Dortmund University, Oliver Hilger and Gerhard Kahlert at RWTH Aachen.

Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display

Scientists in the medieval and early-modern eras faced many obstacles to sharing their discoveries, among them the lack of organized, comparative collections of specimens. Such assemblages were almost exclusively in the hands of wealthy individuals, and scholars of more modest means had to content themselves with "cabinets of wonder," potpourris of natural curiosities whose message was often no more profound than "behold, death is near."

One of the signal developments of the Victorian era, observes art historian Carla Yanni, was the building of great museums, accessible to both scholars and the interested public, to house large collections of fossils, minerals, and other relics of the natural world. Some of these museums, such as London's Pantherion, offered astonishing and sometimes fictitious spectacles: in the Pantherion, for example, "stuffed animals were staged in frightening battles," while a great artificial swamp filled with sculptures of dinosaurs ringed the Sydenham Crystal Palace. Others, such as the incomparable Natural History Museum of London, became clearinghouses for the exchange of scientific ideas in the age of Darwin and Huxley. By the 1880s, science museums of all kinds had become popular destinations for family outings, and also the subject of considerable debate, with some scholars objecting to the supposed vulgarization of knowledge to which spectacles inevitably led.

But, Yanni notes, in their many forms, these museums also became the "primary places of interaction between natural science and its diverse publics," allowing greater participation in learning and ultimately serving science well. Heavily illustrated with period engravings and architectural renderings, Yanni's book is a useful and entertaining contribution to the history of science. --Gregory McNamee

"Nature's Museums . . . is a major contribution to our understanding of the history of public architecture, scientific practice, and the cultural life of the Victorian era." -- Jim Secord, University of Cambridge
Cabinets of curiosity, glass-enclosed cathedrals stuffed with sea shells, butterflies, lizards, birds, animals, and exotic marvels of all kinds -- our Victorian forebears went to extraordinary lengths to acquire and display the strange fruits of the earth. Their carefully organized collections helped shape our vision of the natural world and form the social and architectural construction of knowledge we confront today.
In this beautifully illustrated book, historian Carla Yanni brings together the history of architecture and the history of science in an engaging study of how the Victorians approached the housing and display of scientific artifacts.

Caring For the Past: Issues in Conservation for Archeology and Museums

Caring for the Past discusses the evolution, philosophy and current practice of conservation. It is intended to encourage a better understanding of what conservation involves, and of how it can contribute to the study and enjoyment of the heritage. Issues affecting conservation and its future development are examined, and illustrated with examples.

The principal focus of the book is on conservation of archaeological, ethnographic and museum objects, with reference to, and comparison with, conservation in other fields such as buildings and monuments, and fine and decorative arts.

Topics include:
* the context and scope of conservation, and its ethical and theoretical basis
* history of conservation
* meaning of objects and its effect on conservation
* change and deterioration in materials and objects
* issues in practice: decision-making, conservation procedures
* working relations between conservators, curators and scientists
* development of a conservation profession, training in conservation
* communicating conservation and attracting public support

Caring for the Past will be of value to those wishing to explore ideas about conservation of archaeological and museum objects, including heritage or collections managers, archaeologists, museum curators, conservators and materials scientists. It will be particularly useful as a text for postgraduate courses in conservation, museum studies and cultural heritage management.

Daniel Libeskind Jewish Museum Berlin: Jewish Museum Berlin : Between the Lines (Architecture)

Building Type Basics for Museums (Building Type Basics)

Here's the essential information you need to initiate designs for art, science, and natural history museums, ethnic art and cultural centers, youth museums, and more.

• Filled with project photographs, diagrams, floor plans, sections, and details.
• Combines in-depth coverage of the structural, mechanical, acoustic, traffic, and safety issues that are unique to museums and cultural facilities with the nuts-and-bolts design guidelines that will start any project off on the right track and keep it there through completion.

Order your copy today!