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 Harvard Art Museums, during renovation and expansion, showing the new addition. From Quincy Street, you would never know that the overhauled Harvard University Art Museums, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lurks behind the puritanically aloof facade of the neo-Georgian Fogg Museum. Even the long boxy volume of Renzo Piano’s addition, which hoists itself one-story above Prescott Street, behind the rear of the Fogg, doesn’t fully disclose its size, even with showy glass cubes poking out at either end. The Fogg is now just one of three merged collections that opened November 16. To accommodate a daunting array of competing programmatic agendas
Sacré Bleu!: High over the treetops in the Bois de Boulogne, Frank Gehry’s contemporary art museum for a French luxury magnate is an astonishing work of architectural couture.
Annabelle Selldorf was an obvious choice to renovate the venerated museum of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, home to a stellar collection of European and American paintings.
Lasting Impression: Since it opened in 1955, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute has drawn 200,000 visitors annually to see its French Impressionist paintings among 9,000 works of art.
Last month the Clark completed a $145 million campus expansion on its 140-acre site in the Berkshire mountains of Massachsetts. Included is a new visitor center by Tadao Ando Architect & Associates and a renovation of the existing museum by Selldorf Architects.
Catalytic Converter: A new art museum transforms an old coal-conveying platform into a different kind of power generator, jump-starting the redevelopment of an industrial part of Shanghai.
A coal-conveying platform from the 1950s and a parking garage from the first decade of the 21st century act as unlikely form-givers to Atelier Deshaus’s new Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai.