Museums and Libraries: The Latest Architecture and News

Our friends from Manhattan-based Weiss Manfredi have shared their museum design for Ithaca, New York’s Paleontological Research Institution, which houses one of the United States’ largest paleontological collections. Situated in the Finger Lakes region, the natural landforms of the site inspired the architects to take advantage of the existing gradual 40 ft slope – a feature which resulted from a receding ice sheet more than 20,000 years ago. Rather than considering the site as distinct and separate from the museum, this project creates a new topography: a continuous, terraced landscape that fuses architecture and ecology into a cohesive expression of the geologic processes involved in the region’s formation.

More images and more about the museum after the break.

IVANISIN. KABASHI. ARHITEKTI won the open international competition for their design intervention at the River Piva in Mratinje, Montenegro in 2009. The design strategy was to illuminate the natural and engineered elements of the site, located at the Piva-Mratinje Hydro-Power Plant, built in 1975 at the narrowest point of the river. As a whole, the intervention is located on the sunny end of the damn in front of the concrete reinforcement of the cliff.

Conceived in five phases, the architecture is designed in such a way that it can become occupiable at any stage of completion. The project consists of five elements: Tower-Down, Plateau, Tower-Up, Bridge, and Floating Platform. These magnifiers of natural and technological elements seek to address the humility of architecture in this sublime junction of the natural and man-made.

Read on for more on this project after the break.