Museums: The Latest Architecture and News

In 2018, OMA opened the Fondazione Prada in Milan, Italy, housed within a former gin distillery established in 1910. The project which includes a statement facade cladded in 24-carat gold leaf and camouflaged mirrors, comprises the renovation of seven buildings in the Largo Isarco industrial complex on Milan’s southern outskirts, making the foundation neither a preservation project nor a new architecture. Recently, photographer Bahaa Ghoussainy captured the infamous structure in his new architectural photo series.

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Powerhouse Parramata, Sydney’s new largest museum, has been announced to open in early 2025. The museum group overseeing the project sits at the intersection of the arts, design, science, and technology industries. Designed by Moreau Kusunoki in collaboration with local practice Genton, the museum will be located on the south bank of the Parramatta River in Western Sydney, acting as the largest cultural infrastructure project in the Australian capital city since the Sydney Opera House.

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Estonian studio OÜ Kolm Pluss Üks won the international architecture competition for the Tartu Cultural Center. Selected out of a total of 107 proposals, the winning project titled “Paabel” is set to become the cultural heart of the city center, capturing the competition's main goal and developing an outdoor space solution. Kadarik Tüür Arhitektid OÜ took the second position for their design of “Tarte Tatin”, while the third place went to Denmark-based architectural studio Atelier Lorentzen Langkilde Aps.

Michael Rotondi’s buildings—museums, civic centers, education facilities, monasteries, restaurants, and residences—evoke kinetic mechanisms that fold, hinge, twist, and split open. They express the architect’s feelings, thinking, and mood at the time they had been designed, and, on some occasions, during their assembly and construction. Rotondi was born in 1949 in Los Angeles.

He established his RoTo Architects, a research-based firm in his native city, in 1991 after co-heading Morphosis for 16 years with Thom Mayne. Parallel to his practicing career, the architect has been teaching and lecturing at SCI-Arc, Southern California Institute of Architecture, which he co-founded in 1972, led its graduate program from 1978-1987, and was the school’s second director for a decade from 1987 to 1997.

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The Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) has just unveiled a 20-acre project for a Creative District in the historic center of Benin City in Edo State, Nigeria. MOWAA, in collaboration with Adjaye Associates, is planning to establish a comprehensive environment dedicated to the artistic and cultural realms of the past, present, and future. The space provides support and collaboration opportunities for young professionals in the creative and cultural fields while also fostering partnerships with institutions throughout West Africa. At the heart of the project is the Creative District’s role in contributing to economic growth and development.

The Royal Commission for AlUla has appointed Lina Ghotmeh and Asif Khan as the lead architects for two upcoming museums to be added to the cultural oasis of AlUla, a destination in North-West Saudi Arabia displaying 7,000 years of continuous human history. Ghotmeh is set to design the contemporary art museum to house works by artists from the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean in dialogue with their contemporaries from across the world. Asif Khan will design the Museum of the Incense Road, the first museum dedicated to the millennia-old network of major land and trading routes. The architects have been selected following an international competition.

If there is any consistent factor in his work, says Pritzker-winning architect Tadao Ando, then it is the pursuit of light. Ando’s complex choreography of light fascinates most when the viewer experiences the sensitive transitions within his architecture. Sometimes walls wait calmly for the moment to reveal striking shadow patterns, and other times water reflections animate unobtrusively solid surfaces. His combination of traditional Japanese architecture with a vocabulary of modernism has contributed greatly to critical regionalism. While he is concerned with individual solutions that have a respect for local sites and contexts Ando’s famous buildings – such as the Church of the Light, Koshino House or the Water Temple – link the notion of regional identity with a modern imagining of space, material and light. Shoji walls with diffuse light are reinterpreted in the context of another culture, for instance, filtered through the lens of Rome’s ancient Pantheon, where daylight floods through an oculus. Ando’s masterly imagination culminates in planning spatial sequences of light and dark like he envisioned for the Fondation d’Art Contemporain François Pinault in Paris.

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The new Aalto2 Museum, designed by A-Konsultit Architects, will showcase the cultural legacy of the architecture and design of renowned architect Alvar Aalto. The Museum will open to the public on 27 May 2023, fulfilling the architect's desire to establish a venue for the fusion of various mediums and art forms at the Ruusupuisto park in Jyväskylä, in Central Finland.

The Alto2 Museum Centre comprises three buildings: the renovated Alvar Aalto Museum, the Museum of Central Finland, and the new addition of the Aalto2 center which will join them this year. The original Alvar Aalto Museum will open its doors after having undergone structural repairs, and changes in facilities to serve the new Aalto2 concept. The Aalto2 design connects both museums and is based on an international competition held in 2015, which attracted nearly 700 entries worldwide, demonstrating the international appeal of Aalto’s architectural style.

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Two decades in the making, the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) in Cairo is one of the most anticipated cultural buildings, set to be an architectural marvel and a leading scientific, historical and archeological study center. The vast, billion-dollar mega-project occupies a site of around 500,000 square meters adjacent to the Pyramids UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Giza Plateau. Within its halls, what will soon be the world’s largest archeological museum will showcase 3,500 years of ancient Egyptian history, revealed through a collection of more than 100,000 artifacts –many of which will be displayed for the first time.

The world’s largest science fiction event Worldcon will take place in the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. Under construction, the 59,000 sq. m venue that will host the 81st annual World Science Fiction Convention and the Hugo Awards, is set to become a vibrant center of innovation and gathering place for the “leading incubator of science fiction writing in China”. In fact, the city of Chengdu, home to over 20 million residents, is transforming into an important global center of scientific innovation and research.

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In June 2020, the statue of 17^th-century slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in the southwestern city of Bristol in England. Before this, the statue sat on a plinth in a prominent public park, before being hauled into Bristol Harbour by Black Lives Matter protestors. This act has led to a long-overdue reckoning in the UK and other Western nations, a reckoning that has necessitated a deeper analysis of monuments that line cities, and how deeply imperialism can be interlinked with parts of the built environment. The ever-green question is, what do we do with these buildings?

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Across the globe, museums function as cultural landmarks – spaces of significance that quite often become defining symbols of a city’s architectural landscape. Historical examples such as the Museum de Fundatie in the Netherlands and The Louvre Museum in France continue to attract millions of visitors, with contemporary architectural interventions to them redefining their spatial contribution to their local context.

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This article is part of "Eastern Bloc Architecture: 50 Buildings that Defined an Era", a collaborative series by The Calvert Journal and ArchDaily highlighting iconic architecture that had shaped the Eastern world. Every week both publications will be releasing a listing rounding up five Eastern Bloc projects of certain typology. Read on for your weekly dose: Monumental Museums and Memorials.

Museums are complex organizations: curators, exhibition designers, conservationists, editors, and marketers have to work together to ensure that artworks in galleries and exhibitions are properly displayed to the public. Instrumental to this process is the use of effective display cases, which must both protect the art and highlight it aesthetically. Below, we delineate some of these visual and practical considerations with photographic examples from Goppion, giving some indication how one should choose which display cases to use.

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