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The article discusses the concept of the "white cube" in art galleries and its relationship to the display of artwork. The author explores how the white cube has become the standard for exhibition design, but argues that it should be reimagined to accommodate the diverse artifacts and curatorial programs of contemporary museums and galleries. The author presents a case study of an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) that uses black walls and construction-like displays to bring together the physical and imaginary aspects of the artifacts. The article raises questions about the role of the museum and the decisions made in curating exhibitions. [Extracted from the article]

RAA vice president and chief creative officer Aki Carpenter noted, regarding the role that the institution aims to play in the larger community, "IAAM is a space to address important issues we are talking about in our country, in the place where these things happened." AFTER MORE than two decades of planning, the International African American Museum (IAAM) - designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners with executive architect Moody Nolan - opened to the public on June 27 at Gadsden's Wharf in Charleston, South Carolina. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the design legacy of the Bauhaus German school of design and architecture despite having only existed for 14 years. At its centennial, the Walter Gropius-founded school has been honored with museums devoted to it across three locations in Germany. The global impact of the school as shown in the media and social networks is noted. The story of the Bauhaus's founding until its closing in 1933 is detailed.

The article reviews the architectural design of the National Veterans Memorial and Museum in Columbus, Ohio designed by Allied Works.

The article reviews the architectural design of the landscape project for the WildWoods area at Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta, Georgia by landscape architect Sylvatica Studio and architects Perkins+Will.

The article reviews the architectural design of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.

The article reviews the architectural design of the Musée Unterlinded in the Alsatian village of Colmar in France.

An architectural review is presented for the Messner Mountain Museum Corones in Bolzano, Italy designed by the firm Zaha Hadid Architects.

The article reviews the exhibition "Werdendes Ruhrgebeit" (beginnings of the Ruhr Region), designed by the architect Bernhard Denkinger for the Stiftung Ruhr museum in Essen, Germany, on view from March 27 to August 23, 2015.

The article evaluates the architectural design of the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, California, designed by the architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DSR).

The article evaluates the design of the building addition to the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, designed by the architectural firm Thomas Phifer and Partners.

The article discusses the architectural design of the National Museum of XXI Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome, Italy, designed by the architecture firm Zaha Hadid Architects. Several design elements of the building are discussed including its geometrical structure, connection to neighboring buildings and street grids, and glass roofs. The article presents the perspectives of various individuals on the building including architect Gianluca Racana, curator Pippo Ciorra, and architect Zaha Hadid.

The article features the National Art Center, a mega museum designed by Kisho Kurosawa, located in Tokyo, Japan. The National Art Center's structure appears split into two distinct formal types, a sensual, undulating glazed wall wraps along an entire facade, gripping a large, boxlike structure. At the National Art Center, Kurosawa married the bold idea of a major urban center to symbiosis, focusing attention on human comfort and technological systems.

The author criticizes the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain. He believes that the project, which cost $454 million, is concerned mainly on entertainment and spectacle. He comments on the theater seats in its opera house which hardly allows audiences to see the stage. He considers the inauguration of the project as an infelicitous and relates that many critics were dismayed.

Rotterdam-based MVRDV has won a competition to redesign the Tancheon Valley and waterfront in Seoul, a site currently dominated by surface car parking and elevated highway structures. French architecture practice Moreau Kusunoki with Australia's Genton as local architect have won the international competition to design the new Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. The South HeXi Yuzui Financial District Tower in Nanjing, China, is a 1,640-foot-tall mixed-use building designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the incorporation of a diversity of earthquake-resisting strategies in de Young Museum in San Francisco, California. Corp. of the Fine Arts Museums cites the seismically sensitive location and the need to protect the museum collections as the reason for their decision to require base isolation for the low-rise building that houses the galleries. Two elevator cores compose the tower houses of the museum.

The article describes the architectural design of the Red Location Museum in New Brighton, South Africa developed by Noero Wolff Architects. The architectural firm reconceived common factory construction, then made sure the structure was elegantly built. Noero Wolff created a glassed-in restaurant on one side of the entry doors and a gift shop. The design of the museum makes an international debate on the nature of museums that take on the darkest episodes of humanity.

A review is offered for the Bauhaus Museum located in Weimar, Germany.

This article focuses on the design of the Paul Klee Center in Bern, Switzerland by Renzo Piano Building Workshop. In the 12-acre site, grand, roiling, serpentine forms rising from the pastoral contours of the countryside suggest another side to Piano's architectural persona. Yet, visitors familiar with the small-scale, delicate art of Paul Klee may be disappointed to see the paintings, drawings and watercolors of the lyrical artist installed in two large galleries that omit natural light altogether.

This article focuses on the Chichu Museum in Naoshima, Japan, designed by Tadao Ando Architect & Associates. The Chichu Museum represents a welcome return to the intense, small-scale work that first made Osaka architect Tadao Ando famous. This sanctuarylike museum blocks out extraneous visual information and focuses attention on light and sky. Aptly named chichu, or "within the earth," the new museum is a collection of concrete volumes embedded in a hilly site overlooking Japan's Inland Sea.

The article presents information on a historical museum designed by architect Moshe Safdie at Yad Vashem, Israel's National Memorial to the Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust. Safdie's new history museum crowns Yad Vashem's recently revitalized 45-acre campus. Along with museum designer Dorit Harel, Safdie configured the 42,500-square-foot interior--three times the size of its 1973 predecessor--as a long walkway with side galleries, each providing a chapter in the story.

The article reports on architect Juan Navarro Baldeweg creating a poetic new edge for the city of Cordoba, Spain. Juan Navarro Baldeweg's nearly completed Guadalquivir River Promenade draws a new picture plane across Cordoba, reorienting and vitalizing the main axes of the provincial Andalusian capital. The promenade is anchored at one end by Navarro Baldeweg's renovation and conversion of the Molino de Martos fabric mill into a Hydraulics Museum. A staccato series of slender windows in the exhibition room regulate views of the city's panorama and receding hills.

The article reports on the urban regeneration in two Spanish cities: Bilbao and Barcelona. It portends, arguably, a new way to make cities. The transformation of this once-down-at-heels center of steel and shipbuilding counted on much more than the presence of architect Frank Gehry's eye-popping museum. With broad public support, the pace of urban revitalization has quickened. On the other side of downtown, a railway trench has been reconfigured to accommodate commuter-rail lines that once barricaded the waterfront.

This article reports that from Fort Worth to Manhattan to Paris, Japanese architects are building major museums everywhere. But residents of Kanazawa, a regional city northwest of Tokyo, don't have to leave town to visit one of the most talked-about new museums by a Japanese firm, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in October 2004. Designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, the building consists of a cluster of abstract white boxes rising from an enormous glass circle. In the past, Japan had a habit of building imposing Western-style museums and placing them in isolated parks or on hilltop sites. But the city of Kanazawa, the client for the 21st Century Museum, located the project near the center of town on the grounds of a former girls school.

This article presents the author's comment on contemporary architecture. Once the capital of West Germany, Bonn seems these days to be settling back into the kind of provincial lethargy it knew before the Second World War. Although it was the birthplace of Beethoven, the city does not boast the cultural legacy of most capitals, and it was in part to make up for its loss of influence that the government-controlled Landschaftsverband Rheinland, Köln organized a competition in 1990 to renovate one of its main public cultural institutions, the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, which stands behind the central railway station, close to the old city center in a leafy residential neighborhood.

This article presents information about architect Richard Gluckman. At first, the architect's intervention involved renovating the 24,000-square-foot palace and, on the site of a 1950s patio, creating a two-story, 19,000-square-foot wing for temporary exhibitions. As the project evolved, however, Giménez acquired several unrelated buildings to the east of the palace, all in poor condition. Here, the architects cobbled together a picturesque, 37,000-square-foot collection of structures — some new and others heavily restored or gutted — preserving original facades and massing wherever possible.

This article reports that studio Daniel Libeskind skews walls and slants floors in a formar boathouse to heighten the experience of the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. Lucky is the wanderer who finds the gate into the garden of the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Shielded behind high brirk walls is one of the grea;t oases of downtown Europe. Cool, wet weather gives the trees that extra shot of green. The traffic is sufficiently distant so that the gentle splash of water from a fountain dominates any urban noise. Nearby, a large bronze statue of the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard sits in peaceful meditation. Rus in urbe — the countryside in town.

This article reports that a entrance by the Polshek Partnership opens the treasures of the Brooklyn Museum to a new generation of viewers. For most museums, a new entrance is no big deal. But the 5,000-square-foot crystal arc that's just been added to the Brooklyn Museum is much more than a doorway: "This openness and transparency is about getting people to feel that they belong," said Arnold Lehman, the museum's director, in an interview. Lehman's ambition is to reflect the borough's vibrancy within these massive walls. INSETS: FROM GRAND CIVIC PALACE TO GILDED-AGE SURVIVOR;It took "about a zillion" tries to detail a "jewel-like...

This article presents information on the architectural design of several museums in the U.S. Yet Carol Willis, the founder, director, and curator of the Skyscraper Museum in Lower Manhattan, is elated with her 5,000 square feet at the back of the new Ritz Carlton Hotel in Battery Park City. For one thing, it was free: Millennium Partners, the developers working with the Battery Park City Authority, donated the space in a 67-year lease, where the museum pays only condominium charges. Willis is also elated that Roger Duffy of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, figured out a smoke-and-mirrors strategy to make the horizontal space seem vertical — without the smoke, of course, and with stainless-steel, mirror-finished panels on the floors and ceilings.

This article focuses on new and upcoming exhibitions as of June 2004. Paintings, drawings, and indoor and outdoor objects by the recent Pritzker Prize-winning architect will be featured at Max Protetch Gallery. The first North American exhibition to focus on the work of French designers Ronan Bouroullec and Erwan Bouroullec will be held from June 20-October 18, 2004. The brothers have burst on the international design scene in the past few years with their futuristic furniture, products, and interior designs. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the New York City subway system, the exhibition explores the aesthetics of the subway, featuring a broad range of historic artifacts, archival documents, drawings, and vintage and contemporary photographs from the collection of the New York Transit Museum.

In the early 1990s, architects and engineers at the forefront of the preservation movement were troubled by the problems still faced by historic buildings, particularly historic house museums. Unfamiliar with the dynamics of old construction and eager to satisfy a range of often conflicting requirements for artifacts and occupants, many well-intended owners and designers unwittingly undermined historic fabric when they inserted new systems into existing buildings. While this approach should be applied to any historic project, the complexity will be different for each building, depending on its construction and function. By starting with what the building delivers and intervening only to eliminate the extremes, those buildings that do require additional adjustments will be subjected to less stress and the mechanical equipment will be smaller that will be an advantage in old buildings, which typically have little service space to spare.

The abundance of historic architecture in Spain, including monasteries, churches, palaces, fortifications, barracks and hospitals, and the need to adapt these works for new uses, has promoted an approach to preservation in which contemporary elements or additions are grafted onto to historic structures with great freedom. Well-known examples include architects Enric Soria and Jordi Garcés's adaptation of a string of Gothic palaces for Barcelona's Picasso Museum, or Rafael Moneo's restructuring of a Neoclassical palace for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. For Spain's more recent industrial heritage, the case for a hearty mix of old and new is even stronger, as can be seen in Luis Mansilla and Emilio Turñ&Oacuten's conversion of the former Águila Brewery into the Regional Archive and Library of Madrid.

One of the largest fossil collections on earth inspired the Museum of the Earth. The museum in Ithaca, New York, does have a passion to teach, however, embodied in the energy of its youthful director, Warren Allmon. The Paleontological Research Institute, which built and runs the museum, possesses one of the largest such collections on earth. As the institute, affiliated with nearby Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, contemplated expanding its small exhibition program into a full-fledged museum, Allmon found himself confounded by the task of telling 4.6 billion years of Earth's history in a few thousand square feet.

In adapting a 17th-century flour windmill for use as the Mills Museum of the Balearic Islands in Majorca, Spain. Barcelona-based architects Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats have drawn out and elaborated upon the modest features of the historic building. In so doing, they have created an intimate itinerary through its interior, which features exhibits on the history of this centuries-old structure integral to the Majorcan landscape. For small, high openings, the architects carved light chutes out of the thick, 31-inch walls to redirect light into lower openings, which become display cases in their own right.

This article focuses on the design and construction of architects Takaharu and Yui Tezuka's scheme for the Echigo-Matsunoyama Natural Science Museum in Japan, done in collaboration with architect and engineer Masahiro Ikeda. Commissioned for the 2003 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, a regional event that included public sculpture and new buildings by the Dutch firm MVRDV project occupies a beautiful site 145 miles north of Tokyo where mountains meet fields once cultivated for rice. A clear departure from the glass-and-steel structures typical of many Japanese architects today, the heavily armored museum looks more like an industrial relic than a brand-new cultural facility.

The architectural firm Renzo Piano's recently completed Nasher Center covers 2.4 acres in the heart of Dallas's Arts District in Texas, across the street from Edward Larrabee Barnes's Museum of Art and a block from I.M. Pei's Meyerson Symphony Center. The collection, valued conservatively at $500 million, was stalked by a dozen major museums, including the National Gallery of Art and Guggenheim Museum. The plan of the building, a 55,000-square-foot pavilion, is simplicity itself with five vaulted bays, three housing art and one each for a restaurant and museum shop. As refined as the pavilion, the 1.5-acre garden by landscape architect Peter Walker extends its thin travertine walls amid soldierly rows of native live oaks and cedar elms, terminating in James Turrell's Tending Blue light installation (housed in a structure by Interloop A/D).

The architectural firm Archigram is back, judging by the Kunsthaus, the museum in Graz, Austria, that one of its founders, architect Peter Cook, has designed with architect Colin Fournier. The Kunsthaus in Graz, which Cook and Fournier call the "Friendly Alien," came about when Cook, the chairman of the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College in London, Great Britain, and Fournier, a professor at Bartlett who had worked with architect Bernard Tschumi on Parc de la Villette in Paris, France, entered the Kunsthaus competition in 2000. Under the firm name Spacelab Inc., Cook-Fournier, won the commission, forming a joint venture with two German firms.

This article presents an interview with Victoria NewHouse, an architecture historian. According to her natural light needs to be supplemented by artificial light, and she says that she have no problem with a mixture, but the way natural light shifts in tone affects the way one see the artwork. In some museums, such as architect Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the top lighting makes you subtly aware of the clouds and meteorological changes outside. But in other museums, such as the just-finished Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth by architect Tadao Ando, the light is too homogenized.

The historic Tariff Building in Washington, D.C. gained new life as the grand Hotel Monaco, sparked by a successful collaboration between the public and private sectors. The imposing, block-long marble structure houses a new 184-room hotel whose interiors set colorful furnishings, fabrics, and fixtures against a restored backdrop rich in 19th-century Neoclassical detail. Michael Stanton Architecture, Oehrlein & Associates Architects, and interior designer Cheryl Rowley Design were part of the project team. When a federal commission vacated offices within the building in the late 1980s, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) concluded that the outmoded spaces were no longer suitable as a federal facility. After plans to convert the building into a museum fell through, the GSA sponsored an open competition to develop new adaptive reuse proposals.

"Architecture, if it is not a pleasure, is the worst thing that exists,” architect Alvaro Siza once confessed, after his struggle to complete the Serralves Museum in his native Porto, Portugal, in 1999. To put aside the cares of such large-scale projects, he took refuge for many years in the restoration of a friend's dilapidated country house, the Quinta of Santo Ovidio, in the Douro region of northern Portugal, some 40 miles east of Porto. During weekend site visits, the architect relished working one-on-one with local stone masons, carpenters, and other craftsmen. Set in verdant countryside amid a patchwork of small plots terraced into the hills, the Quinta is the 7.5-acre core of a large farm estate that was probably built in the early 1800s,although precise dates are lacking. Siza, now nearing 70, rarely has time for such small projects, but he was drawn into this one in 1989 by an old friend, a clothing designer, who dreamed of mounting fashion shows in its gardens. The architect took on the reconstruction of the severe, granite-walled main house, the conversion of the former caretaker's cottage into a guesthouse,and the restoration of the grounds.

During the 20th century, many museums, magazines, and expositions sponsored the design and construction of stylistically inventive case-study houses in the U.S. However, the goal of bringing innovative, affordable houses to the mass market has never been fully achieved. Indeed, demonstration houses have varied widely in their ability to influence mainstream taste or building patterns. The mass-circulation magazine 'Ladies' Home Journal' took the pioneering step in 1900 of sponsoring a series of designs for moderately priced suburban houses. Between 1928 and 1946, the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller experimented with a variety of industrially produced shelters. The Museum of Modern Art in New York hired Marcel Breuer to design a model house in its sculpture garden in 1949.

Focuses on the architectural excellence of Renzo Piano Building workshop in the design of a small museum, Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli at the Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy. Architects involved in the workshop; Date of completion of the structure; Design of the building.

Features the Gallery of Horyuji Treasures of the Tokyo National Museum, designed by Taniguchi and Associates in Japan. Physical descriptions; Identification of the distinct Japanese characteristics; Kind of materials used.

Features the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. Design of the museum; Features of the museum; Materials used in the construction of the museum.

Describes the designs and plans for the roofing scheme designed by the architectural firm Buro Happold for the British Museum in London, England. Creation of the grid that supports that canopy; Use of glass and steel; Environmental efficiency of the roof.

Describes the designs and plans for the renovation of the British Museum in London, England by the architectural firm Foster & Partners. Background on the historical significance of the museum; Restoration schemes for major parts of the museum including the Reading Room; Use of space; Lighting; Use of glass-and-steel materials for the roof. INSET: Restoration of Reading Room Dome..

Focuses on the architectural design of the Melbourne Museum in Melbourne, Victoria. Designer of the museum; Blend of steel blade and glass; Information on the museum; Enclosure of the entire structure with steel framework.

Describes the designs and plans for the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts in Texas by Malcolm Holzman. Materials used; Facade; Aesthetic value; Background on Holzman.