A traveling museum transports urban visitors.

The article focuses on the 45,000-square-foot Nomadic Museum, which opened on March 5, 2005 on Manhattan's historic Pier 54. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban designed the temporary, transportable museum for artist Gregory Colbert's show Ashes and Snow, a collection of settings. At first glance the building could be mistaken for a meticulously stacked pile of shipping containers awaiting pickup by a cargo vessel. Borrowing on the principle for his 1998 design for a small traveling exhibition of furniture, Ban proposed to employ steel shipping containers as the principal building unit for the museum.