When we have something precious to keep, we usually find a very precious container. We put it in a safe place and enjoy watching it from time to time. However, some of us end up appreciating the container more than what it contains, right?
A museum is a space that conserves a collection of artifacts.
Therefore, a museum is a container.
Sometime ago, I published 17 Architecturally Amazing Fashion Stores in which I explained how retail architecture was somehow a container of art too. Visuals play an important role here, light and color change our perception of space, movement and even time. Items displayed are supposed to be the main characters in this game, but not in these cases I’m afraid. These buildings speak for themselves as unique art pieces.
My favorite is #1, yours?
1. ABC Museum
Location: Madrid (Spain)
Architect: Aranguren & Gallegos Architects
Year: 2010
Description: Probably one of my favorite spots in my dear Madrid, the new ABC Center of Drawing and Illustration, comes with a willingness to be an artistic international reference and a cultural symbol. The installation in the old factory building in Amaniel Street has to be a suitable intervention in a historic building without sacrificing the character of expressing a contemporary center with a diverse range of cultural and artistic institutions. Read more here.
2. Sifang Art Museum
Location: Nanjing (China)
Architect: Steven Holl Architects
Year: 2011
Description: This absolutely amazing museum is located at the gateway to the Contemporary International Practical Exhibition of Architecture in the lush green landscape of the Pearl Spring near Nanjing. It explores the shifting viewpoints, layers of space, and expanses of mist and water, which characterize the deep alternating spatial mysteries of early Chinese painting. The exterior staircase it’s a piece of art itself. Read more here.
3. Tchoban Foundation – Museum for Architectural Drawing
Location: Berlin (Germany)
Architect: SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov
Year: 2013
Description: This building is very special because the architect, and passionate collector Tchoban, has finally realized his dream to create the ideal setting for architectural drawings. The Museum for Architectural Drawing is an exceptional example of contemporary architecture in its construction, design and choice of materials. The powerful expression of its formal language cannot be overlooked though it still responds sensitively to its surroundings. Read more here.
4. Soumaya Museum
Location: Mexico City (Mexico)
Architect: LAR + Fernando Romero
Year: 2011
Description: The museum’s distinct shape and strong presence represents its sculptural concept. A skin of 16 000 hexagonal tiles of mirrored steel, references the traditional colonial ceramic-tiled building facades and gives the museum a diverse appearance depending on the weather and the viewer’s vantage point, while optimizing the preservation and durability of the entire building. Read more here.
5. Centre Pompidou-Metz
Location: Metz (France)
Architect: Shigeru Ban Architects
Year: 2010
Description: Although the strategy of this museum was to create sculptural architecture in an internationally unknown city to draw tourism, it has a strong connection to the site. To establish contextual continuation with the city, the large picture windows at the ends of the three gallery tubes frame views to the city’s monuments. For instance, the picture window of the uppermost Gallery Tube 3 frames the view to the cathedral, the symbol of Metz. Read more here.
6. Jewish Contemporary Museum
Location: San Francisco (USA)
Architect: Daniel Libeskind
Year: 2008
Description: This remodelation of an old power plant adjacent to the Yerba Buena park is an ode to dialogue, inserting its angled, glowing blue steel-clad structure within the historic red brick power plant from the 19th century. The panels change color depending on the time of day, the weather, and the viewer’s position, creating a dynamic, living surface. Read more here.
7. Memory Museum
Location: Santiago de Chile (Chile)
Architect: Estudio America
Year: 2010
Description: I was very lucky to have a chance to visit this museum right after it opened its doors. Its magnificent architecture is based on a pure volume, on which every effort has been put into the structure, cantilevering between two ponds on which a line of shadow on the base make the volume gravitate. Finishes are simple, with no pretension. Read more here.
8. MAXXI Museum
Location: Rome (Italy)
Architect: Zaha Hadid
Year: 2009
Description: The Museum of Arts of the XXI century took ten years to get built. As declared by the architect, the museum is ‘not a object-container, but rather a campus for art’, where flows and pathways overlap and connect in order to create a dynamic and interactive space which brought out the question if the concept of de-constructed fluidity matched with the identity of a “static” city as Rome, and with its classical heritage. Read more here. Read more here.
9. Ningbo History Museum
Location: Ningbo (China)
Architect: Wang Shu
Year: 2009
Description: Fragments of Chinese history are conserved in the facades of this building conceived as a kind of artificial mountain. The Ningbo Museum sits on a massive unpopulated plaza in Yinzhou, a district in the city of Ningbo with a 5,000-year history that looks like it was established last year. In the distance, the silhouettes of newly built residential towers and half-finished office buildings imply a bustling future, but for the moment the area exists in a kind of temporal limbo – its past abandoned, its future not yet arrived. Read more here.
10. Fashion and Textile Museum
Location: London (UK)
Architect: Ricardo Legorreta
Year: 2001
Description: The museum was founded by the famous British fashion and textile designer Zandra Rhodes, who is noted for her extremely colourful work. The building started life in the 1950s as a garage, and the late Ricardo Legorreta, a Mexican architect also known for his use of colour, was commissioned to design the conversion. It is one of his few works outside the American continent. Read more here.
11. Aga Khan Museum
Location: Toronto (Canada)
Architect: Fumihiko Maki
Year: 2014
Description: Toronto’s cultural brand has moved into a new galaxy. After four years of construction, the Aga Khan Museum, designed by Pritzker Prize–winner Fumihiko Maki, opens its doors. Despite the austerity of its exterior, hexagonal skylights cast delicately patterned shadows into the interior’s permanent gallery on the museum’s ground floor and temporary galleries on the second. Read more here.
12. New Art Museum
Location: New York (USA)
Architect: SANAA
Year: 2007
Description: This museum is a classic, even a cliché. Ok architects get over it, this building is amazing. The location context, Lower Manhattan, with its squared blocks and buildings, can be considered as starting point for the Museum image: it replies the boxes surrounding, and stacks them one on top of the other in various sizes and heights, as the plot was a playground for a composition of cubes. By small but significant shifting of the cubes, the building gets dynamic and an attracting shape, being different but similar to the near constructions. Read more here.
13. Maritime Museum of Denmark
Location: Helsingør (Denmark)
Architect: BIG
Year: 2013
Description: The Danish Maritime Museum had to find its place in a unique historic and spatial context; between one of Denmark’s most important and famous buildings and a new, ambitious cultural centre. Leaving the 60-year-old dock walls untouched, the galleries are placed below ground and arranged in a continuous loop around the dry dock walls – making the dock the centerpiece of the exhibition – an open, outdoor area where visitors experience the scale of ship building. Read more here.
14. Perez Art Museum Miami + Miami Science Museum
Location: Miami (USA)
Architect: Herzog & deMeuron
Year: 2014
Description: Recently opened, this building is the new home to a growing collection of international artwork by some of the world’s foremost artists. A cantilevered canopy creates a series of outdoor spaces connecting the museum with the adjacent park, and offers generous views over Biscayne bay. This is another successful project by the amazing Swiss architects. Read more here.
15. Aspen Art Museum
Location: Aspen (USA)
Architect: Shigeru Ban
Year: 2014
Description: Ban’s vision for the new AAM is based on transparency and open view planes—inviting those outside to engage with the building’s interior, and providing those inside the opportunity to see their exterior surroundings. The Grand Stair—a three-level passageway between the building’s woven exterior screen and its interior structure—is intersected by a glass wall dividing it into a ten-foot-wide exterior space and a six-foot-wide interior space making a beautiful exterior-interior transition. Read more here.
16. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Location: Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Architect: Benthem Crouwel Architects
Year: 2012
Description: The existing building of the Stedelijk Museum created in 1895 by the municipal architect A.W. Weismann, is celebrated for its majestic staircase, grand rooms and natural lighting. The new extension does not ask for more of the same, but to supplement by variety and by adding new opportunities for exhibitions. The old remains and forms unity with the new. Read more here.
17. Biomuseo
Location: Panama City (Panama)
Architect: Gehry and Partners
Year: 2014
Description: This atypical, in terms of color, museum is located at at privileged location. The colourful design is intended to represent the narrow land mass now known as Panama rising out of the sea to unite the drifting continents of north and south America three million years ago. Although the museum makes sense to me, I wonder how many times is Gehry going to repeat his building(s). Read more here.
Virginia Duran 
Stunning!
LikeLike
Any favorites on the list?
LikeLike
What a pity! such great museum and I didn’t alreay visit one of them ! it good be good in 2015 to start that
LikeLike
It’s never too late! Any museums close to you? Any one of them you especially like?
LikeLike
I liked the museum that had the cushions/seats in the middle and some children (I think) were reclining there. 🙂
All are fantastic!
LikeLike
Oh the Pompidou-Metz! I’d love to visit it some time soon 🙂
Have you visited some of these?
LikeLike
No, I haven’t visited any. 😦 Have to be satisfied with pictures.
LikeLike
Then I hope some of these are close to your area/future trips 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
thanks for this wonderful post!!
LikeLike
Thank you for stopping by 🙂
Any museum you especially like?
LikeLike
Reblogged this on strikethrough blog.
LikeLike
They’re all visual gems as well as marvelous spaces for human interaction. Number one is simply a tour de force.
LikeLike
Aaahhh number one is just a cosy little corner inside Madrid’s busy downtown! Can’t wait to be back 🙂 Have you been to some of these?
LikeLike
No, but I would love to visit any of them.
LikeLike
Great post as usual. And hard to give a favourite but I like the craggy bulk of the Ningbo gallery and the delicacy of the Aspen gallery. Will return to look indepth at them all.
LikeLike
Thanks for your kind words Colin! The Ningbo Gallery is definitely my second favorite. I had the chance to attend a lecture by the architect, in which he explained the building in depth. The use of materials is simply amazing and how people are using the building it’s even more amazing. The city has been invaded by skyscrapers so old people love being around the museum courtyards just sitting around. The story is amazing!
Have you visited some of these?
LikeLike
BMW Welt would also be on my list 🙂
LikeLike
Will have to do part II of this post 😉
LikeLike
I was happy to see one near where I live . . . but it’s an art museum of some kind, with odd stuff in it.
Perhaps one day I’ll stop in.
LikeLike
So happy that you live close to some of these! Which one is it?
LikeLike
The one in Aspen; a few hours away from me, but I’m not likely to go there in the winter.
LikeLike
Superb architect ,each design is unique and delight to see.Best regards.Jalal
LikeLike
Thanks for stopping by, glad that you liked these museums. Kind regards, Virginia.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Amazing buildings! I have yet to visit them but I’m particularly attracted to the Tchoban Foundation and the ABC Museum, in this order. Fortunately they are not very far from Brussels!
LikeLike
I recently visited the Tchoban Foundation and it’s definitely worth a visit. Is much smaller than you think, but the spaces are amazing- especially the rooftop! If you get to visit it during Spring or Summer try to go up the top 🙂 Have you visited Madrid before by the way?
LikeLike
Oooh I love rooftops!…
No I haven’t visited ”real” Spain yet, just only Barcelona. To be rectified soon with a trip to Malaga, Seville etc. (but yet again, no Madrid)…
LikeLike
I spent many summers in Malaga, beautiful seaside. And Seville is just amazing as a city, but don’t go there in summer unless you can bear 43ºC haha. Beautiful Moorish architecture!
LikeLike
Summer? No way, hahaha… that’s why I’m going in March. And very excited about it too… 🙂
LikeLike
It’s not very extensive, but this article may give you some ideas on what to visit in Seville (#10) https://duranvirginia.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/50-architectural-reasons-to-visit-every-province-in-spain-12/
LikeLike
Just gorgeous! I know already I’ll regret leaving. Thanks so much, I’ll check them out and report back. xxx
LikeLike
I had to come back twice – couldn’t make up my mind. I love them all, but I especially like the last one in Panama City. A great overview.
LikeLike
I haven’t visited that one, but the location seems amazing right? Also, I love the colors and the inner open spaces. Maybe one day 🙂
LikeLike
You have inspired me to revisit the Museum of Vancouver. Thank you!! 🙂
LikeLike
Glad to read this! Looking forward to see some pictures of it 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wow. What an inspirational collection. I’ve been to the old Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, but haven’t been since the renovation. I’ll make it a priority for when I’m next in the Netherlands. 🙂
Still so much to see and explore!
LikeLike
I haven’t seen the Stedelijk, but the renovation looks amazing! Hopefully you’ll get to visit it soon and share some pics with us. Maybe Madrid’s museum (#1) too? so many places to visit 🙂
LikeLike
Soumaya is my favorite. I took like the one in Panama. As for Gehry: he will keep repeating as long as there are customers willing to pay for a “Gehry.”
LikeLike
Got to love biomorphic architecture! And regarding Gehry…haha yes, I still don’t understand how he gets to “repeat” his buildings over and over.
LikeLike
Museum for architectural drawings in Berlin was my favorite with Soumoya in Mexico City a close second. Also liked the Memory Museum in Chile and New Art Museum in New York. Congratulations on your becoming an architect.
LikeLike
Thanks for your kind words! Those are great pieces of architecture indeed. Have you been in any of these? Or at least are you lucky to have some close to you?
LikeLike
No, but when my wife and I travel we do seek out museums and public buildings. In Canada we love the architecture of Douglas Cardinal. Also Erik Erikson is a local icon who livied in nearby Vancouver… he recently passed on.
Every holiday in the States we try to visit at least one Frank Lloyd Wright building – I love his vision of organic architecture. When I was younger I studied architecture, though I ended up as a carpenter. 🙂
Thanks Virginia, for visiting my post on Thomas Merton and peace and the vision of a New Consciousness that my friend Charles Brandt writes about.
All the best with your career in architecture.
LikeLike
No, but when my wife and I travel we do seek out museums and public buildings. In Canada we love the architecture of Douglas Cardinal. Also Erik Erickson is a local icon who lived in nearby Vancouver… he recently passed on.
Every holiday in the States we try to visit at least one Frank Lloyd Wright building – I love his vision of organic architecture. When I was younger I studied architecture, though I ended up as a carpenter. 🙂
Thanks Virginia, for visiting my post on Thomas Merton and peace and the vision of a New Consciousness that my friend Charles Brandt writes about.
All the best with your career in architecture.
LikeLike
This was a surprise! You did architecture too. I admire your passion for Wright, I bet you’ve seen many of his Prairie homes-so beautiful. Every time I am in Chicago I visit Oak Park and the Robie House.
Didn’t know Douglas Cardinal, thanks for sharing. I’ll be doing a bit of research now 🙂
LikeLike
No, but when my wife and I travel we do seek out museums and public buildings. In Canada we love the architecture of Douglas Cardinal. Also Erik Erickson is a local icon who lived in nearby Vancouver… he recently passed on.
Every holiday in the States we try to visit at least one Frank Lloyd Wright building – I love his vision of organic architecture. When I was younger I studied architecture, though I ended up as a carpenter. 🙂
Thanks Virginia, for visiting my post on Thomas Merton and peace and the vision of a New Consciousness that my friend Charles Brandt writes about.
All the best with your upcoming career in architecture.
LikeLike
These are all outstanding buildings Virginia, but my favorite, far and away, is the Tchoban Foundation. This building alone would be worth a trip to Berlin. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. ~James
LikeLike
Hello James, I was very lucky to visit it while in Berlin last year and I must say it was amazing. It is a really small building with a strong presence in the area- very effective. I didn’t take any pictures so I’d go back to Berlin just for that :))
LikeLike
Pingback: 23 Spots You Shouldn’t Miss in Amsterdam If You Love Architecture | Virginia Duran Blog
Hi,
the Astrup Fearnley Museet/Oslo would be on our list too.
All the best
The Fab Four of Cley
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
I haven’t been to that one – thanks for the fabulous suggestion! Any other favourites that aren’t here?
LikeLiked by 1 person
If we visit or remember one we will tell you.
LikeLike
P.S.
Here you find pictures of the Astrup Fearnley Museet
and
A famous staircase is that of Balthasar Neumann in Schloss Brühl – not my taste but very sophisticated.
LikeLike