Museums & Art Centers

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At an old distillery complex, Rem Koolhaas's Prada Foundation mixes one part creative preservation with one part bold new architecture.

A new campus museum quietly serves up a visual banquet. It’s tempting for designers to try to turn art museums into works of art themselves. But what if the client’s directive is just the opposite? A new campus museum in the Bay Area by the New York–based firm Ennead Architects may disappoint those hoping for a bigger architectural statement.

The bucolic backdrop of the recently opened Fondation Louis Vuitton, set within Paris’s Bois de Boulogne park, inspired a garden building in the tradition of Joseph Paxton’s long-destroyed Crystal Palace. Like that famous structure, erected in London’s Hyde Park in 1851, Frank Gehry’s billowing new museum features vast expanses of glass.

The Fondation Louis Vuitton (FLV), designed by Frank Gehry, may appear transparent, but it is a building that doesn’t easily give up its secrets.

A museum becomes an instant icon for a developing nation while upping the ante for design excellence.