Overview
Outstanding architectural talent, combined with financial largesse, both public and private, has resulted in a new wave of museums all over the world. Through compelling photography, this beautiful volume examines the relationship of a museum to its site, context and collections. It presents the museum structure as a dramatic backdrop for the art it contains, and looks at how the building itself is recognized as art.Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Museums are far from mere backdrops to the art and artifacts they display. In Museum Architecture, these buildings shine, each a remarkable and innovative design for engaging the visitor. The book includes floor plans and site plans when available, and striking photographs of the completed museums.Interior Design
But there are other beauties among the less well-known examples. Three museums in Japan by Tadao Ando are particularly striking and seem to provide spatial passages well worth contemplating. Two other Japanese examples by Kisho Kurokawa have their own type of exuberance, as does a spirited Mexican pair by Ricardo Legoretta.Among the others architects represented are Gwathmey Siegel, Renzo Piano, Richard Gluckman, Jose Rafael Moneo, Smith-Miller and Hawkinson, and Maya Lin. In almost every case, interior views are at the heart of the presentations, plans are provided in most cases, and Henderson has provided cogent written explanations of design briefs, materials, lighting, and special problems and solutions. There is also a foreword by Arthur Rosenblatt, longtime vice president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the founding director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, designed by Pei Cobb Freed and surely the most moving of all the museums Henderson shows.
L.A. Acropolis
Museum in the 1990s is booming", author Henderson says, adding that this description "may send a mixed message" of both the negative aspects of "the blockbuster mentality of pop culture" and the benefits of new opportunities for innovative design. For this building type, perhaps more than other, does offer such opportunities.Nobody goes to a museum from nine to five, wearing a suit a suit and watching the clock. They go for education, enlightenment, stories, culture, thrills. They want, and expect, to be intrigued by the architecture as well as the art and artifacts." Here is a splendidly illustrated selection of more than two dozen new museums. Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is here, of course ("A Masterpiece for the Millennium"), as is Richard Meier's Getty Center