As treasure troves of human history, we often think of museums as having been around forever. But the museum—both as an institution and as a building type—with few exceptions, is a fairly new phenomenon in the millennia-long time line of cultural production.
The most visited museum in the world, the Louvre, was a former royal residence that opened its collections to the public free of charge in a post-Revolution Paris at the end of the 18th century. Apart from a famously controversial pyramid, most of the Louvre’s architecture is inherited. About a century later, in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art completed its purpose-built outpost in Central Park in the Beaux-Arts style. (Read an in-depth look at the Met’s current transformations).
In the 20th century, museums became coveted commissions for architects, who designed them in every possible way—from the traditional to the Modern, then the spectacular (see Julian Rose’s thoughts on the latter – online soon). What they have in common, however, is a sense of grandeur—from Mies’s completely glass-walled Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1968) to Mario Botta’s patterned brick-and-stone pile for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995), an emblematic presence on that city’s skyline.
But, in more recent years, the museum is undergoing dramatic change, in its programming and its design. To become more accessible to all members of a community, so-called imposing forms and monumental entrances have given way to architectural gestures deemed more friendly. It’s not a new conversation—museums have long explored different measures to avoid becoming white elephants—but it’s one that has grown in momentum with social-justice initiatives.
At the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Frederick Fisher has added a new entrance dubbed the Commons. In contrast to the centralized 1930s entry, marked by wide steps, the Commons has a more casual ground-level “front door” within a glassy curtain wall.
Thomas Phifer takes a different tack. The cover of this month’s issue shows Phifer’s just-opened Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The city’s Palace of Culture and Science, visible in the background, is not quite a museum but it was designed as an amalgamation of cultural institutions. Its towering form—among the tallest buildings in the world when it was completed in 1955—is a sharp contrast to Phifer’s low-slung minimalist museum, in the foreground.
If ever there was an imposing structure, the Stalinist-era Palace in a Poland under Soviet control fits the bill. But Phifer confronts it not with transparency—that go-to antidote that has spawned a generation of museums that look like storefronts, but with heft. At a “Museums of the Future” event with museum leaders and architects that RECORD hosted in March 2023, Phifer, talking about his project, referred to the Palace as a “symbol of oppression.” In its shadow, his new museum “acts as a quiet but forceful foil to the showy Palace,” writes deputy editor Joann Gonchar, who visited it during opening celebrations in October.
The pressures to be more accommodating and accessible are confronting museums across the globe. The architectural response, however, does not need to be an expected or formulaic one, as Phifer’s museum strikingly attests.
