Today’s museum buildings tend to forgo the stately columns and grand façades of the past. Instead, they reach out to their communities by making the offerings within visible to passersby through expansive glass, incorporating open space and event space, and overall making art and culture more accessible and welcoming.
The following projects include a museum that offers a village of studios for artists, a memorial to enslaved Africans at a site of their arrival in North America, a children’s museum that exposes its building systems to educate visitors, structures that raise art safely above floodplains, and renovations and expansions that open institutions to public parks.
Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts
Little Rock, Arkansas
Little Rock’s Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts opened in 1937 in an Art Deco structure in downtown’s MacArthur Park. Additions over time led to a complex of eight structures in different architectural styles, fortress-like spaces isolated from one another and the surroundings. In a renovation and expansion completed in 2023, Studio Gang of Chicago and local firm Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects brought clarity by inserting a long, curving, glazed atrium through the complex’s heart, connecting the museum’s art school, galleries, performing arts theater, lecture hall, and museum store.
A glass-enclosed “cultural living room” at the atrium’s north end gives residents and visitors a place to relax and socialize. To the south, the atrium’s folded concrete roof fans out over a new entry vestibule and indoor/outdoor restaurant. The landscape architecture firm SCAPE added new plantings, pathways, and trees to further integrate the museum with the park.
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
When the Art Gallery of New South Wales outgrew its early 1900s neoclassical building, the state government launched the Sydney Modern Project to revitalize and expand the free museum. The site sloped steeply, and any new building would have to rest on concrete platforms atop two underground World War II oil tanks and a land bridge covering a freeway. Tokyo-based SANAA and the local branch of Architectus, working with the local branch of engineering firm Arup, created three new low pavilions that step down to the harbor, preserving views. Rooftop terraces, courtyards, and a public art garden provide open space; a glazed multistory atrium offers bay views.
Opened in 2022, the new building nearly doubles the museum’s exhibition space, not only showcasing international art but also giving prominence to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art previously relegated to the 1909 building’s basement. The design team repurposed one oil tank as a gallery, the other as a loading dock. Local firm Tonkin Zulaikha Greer restored and upgraded the historic building.
Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Buffalo, New York
The Buffalo AKG Art Museum hired two New York City–based design firms, OMA/Shohei Shigematsu and Cooper Robertson, to add a third edifice to its complex in the Frederick Law Olmsted–designed Delaware Park, north of downtown. Whereas the two existing structures turned inward, the new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, completed in 2022, displays the activities inside it through a translucent glass curtain wall.
The expansion adds exhibition space, as well as linking the old and new buildings via a glass-enclosed sky bridge. The design team also renovated and updated the existing facilities, added a new east entry connecting to the park, and tucked parking beneath a large park lawn. The team also enclosed the 1962 building’s sculpture garden with a site-specific artwork by Studio Other Spaces of Berlin. The resulting “town square” serves as a public gathering space that has amenities open to the public without charge. A new, highly efficient mechanical plant includes heat pumps. The New York City branch of Buro Happold provided mechanical and electrical engineering, as well as sustainability consulting.
Children’s Museum of Eau Claire
Eau Claire, Wisconsin
Thirty-one whole-tree columns rise through the two-story interior of the Children’s Museum of Eau Claire, providing support in tandem with structural round timber trusses and girders. The use of unmilled, sustainably sourced timbers is a nod to the city’s past as a logging industry hub. By exposing structural elements as well as mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, the facility provides teaching opportunities. Located at the gateway to downtown, the 25,000-square-foot (2,300 sq m) carbon-neutral building includes classrooms and a maker space designed to facilitate STEAM education.
Barklike textured precast concrete clads the exterior. A dozen porthole windows give passersby views inside. The timber sequesters more than 350,000 pounds (159,000 kg) of carbon dioxide. Other sustainable strategies include 21 geothermal wells, rooftop photovoltaic cells, and a highly insulated building envelope. In addition to renting spaces after hours for use in public and private events, the museum partners with local home daycare provider Peace Tree Childcare to offer a preschool and child development program on site.
Chinese Traditional Culture Museum
Beijing, China
Joining the National Stadium and the Water Cube aquatics facility on Beijing’s Olympic Green, along the Yangshan River, the Chinese Traditional Culture Museum anchors a new cultural corridor and houses two museums—one highlighting Chinese arts and crafts, the other showcasing ephemeral cultural heritage such as music and dance. Two entrances give access to the riverbank, to the west, and the square, to the east, and they lead to a shared foyer, a multifunctional hall, and exhibition spaces.
Designed by Von Gerkan, Marg and Partners Architects of Hamburg, Germany, and opened in 2022, the museum consists of three layers: a granite plinth; a glazed midsection; and a copper-colored main volume that extends over the midsection, shades the exhibition spaces, and shelters an outdoor terrace along the perimeter. Backlighting the façade gives the structure high visibility at night, when it appears to float above the Olympic Green. Inside, large column-free areas and movable room-height partitions allow for flexible use.
First Americans Museum
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
When the American Indian Cultural Center Foundation was hunting for a site to build the First Americans Museum, which honors 39 tribes in Oklahoma today, tribal elders suggested placing the facility on an earthen mound, a traditional practice used to elevate sites above flood levels. With earthfill donated from nearby construction projects, the design team—Los Angeles-based Johnson Fain, with associate architect Hornbeek Blatt of Edmond, Oklahoma—crafted a spiral mound covering a thousand square feet (93 sq m) to serve as the heart of the master plan for the facility, which overlooks the Oklahoma River.
The spiral’s interpretive walk includes 10 columns representing the miles per day native people were forced to walk on the Trail of Tears. The roofs of the museum’s two wings follow the curve of the mound walk; the buildings house permanent and rotating exhibitions, theaters, and retail and dining spaces. A prismatic glass “Hall of the People,” 110 feet (34 m) tall, serves as a central gathering space. The museum opened in 2021.
International African American Museum
Charleston, South Carolina
In 2000, then-mayor of Charleston Joseph P. Riley Jr. proposed a museum to memorialize enslaved Africans brought to North America, nearly half of whom arrived at Gadsden’s Wharf and others like it at the city’s harbor. The city purchased the now-empty lot at the wharf and brought in Pei Cobb Freed & Partners of New York City and the Columbus, Ohio office of Moody Nolan as executive architect to create a museum that would convey the stories and experiences of these African Americans and their descendants.
Columns 13 feet (4m) high lift the building above the floodplain, leaving the space underneath open. The surrounding African Ancestors Memorial Garden, designed by Hood Design Studio of Oakland, California, incorporates African and native plants, shade trees, and a stormwater management system. A reflecting pool marks the wharf’s original seawall. A central atrium and large windows at either end of the building bring in daylight and offer views of the port and the city. Opened in 2023, the museum includes nine galleries and a genealogical research center.
Museum of Ethnography
Budapest, Hungary
Part of the redevelopment of Varosliget, a large park in central Budapest, the Museum of Ethnography’s new facility has two wings that gently curve upward from ground level. Shrubs, evergreens, perennials, and 23 trees grow on the publicly accessible roofs. Designed by local firm NAPUR Architect and completed in 2022, the building lets pedestrians walk above the museum’s below-grade floors to reach the park from the street.
An aluminum grid wraps the glass curtain wall that encloses the aboveground portions; the grid’s patterns abstractly represent items from the museum’s collections, including an Estonian glove and a Hungarian weaver’s hammer. One wing holds a restaurant, visitor center, children’s museum, and conference center, and the other houses a café, bookstore, gift shop, specialist library, and administrative offices. Placing most of the exhibition spaces below grade moderates temperatures inside, a process aided by the double-shell façade and green roofs. Geothermal energy, a district heating system, and waste heat from a nearby ice rink supply cooling and heating. A graywater system conserves water.
New Taipei City Art Museum
New Taipei, Taiwan
The New Taipei City Art Museum does not just display modern and contemporary art and visual culture but also provides a village of studios for artists on the facility’s ground level. This art village also includes shops, two restaurants, sculpture terraces, and streets, partially shaded by the eight-story museum block’s mass, which is held aloft on columns. Locals and tourists can wander through the village without charge and take in views of the adjacent Dahan River. The building’s exterior is clad with segmented aluminum panels and sandblasted aluminum tubes of different lengths, meant to call to mind the swaying river reeds that grow nearby.
Constructed on a former brownfield site, and now a short walk from a metro station, the museum features large column-free exhibition spaces for flexibility, as well as offering a restaurant and a public courtyard on the top floor. Three below-grade levels incorporate a children’s museum, a lecture hall, and public parking. KRIS YAO | ARTECH, based in Taipei and Shanghai, completed the building in 2023 for the city’s cultural affairs department.
University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art
Iowa City, Iowa
In summer 2008, heavy rainfall made the Mississippi River crest its banks, inundating multiple University of Iowa buildings—among them, its art museum. Volunteers carried artworks to safety, but the museum was irredeemably damaged. In 2022, a new facility opened, this one elevated above the 500-year floodplain and equipped with the ability to keep the interior humidity and temperature stable for at least 72 hours in the event of another flood. The sub-grade parking structure underneath can double as an overflow basin.
Designed by the Des Moines branch of BNIM, the new museum has a façade of glass and dark bricks that contain manganese, which lends them luminosity. Two outdoor terraces and a three-story lightwell bring in daylight to help orient visitors. To reduce energy use, a heat recovery chiller repurposes waste heat to keep temperature and humidity levels steady. The first floor has a lobby/event space, the second holds galleries, and the third houses education suites for students learning from the collections.
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