These Ten Museums Are Worth a Visit for the Space Design Alone

“Going to a museum” has become an ordinary thing to do, and the appeal of the museums themselves has started to stand out. This roundup might make a good reference when you are picking a travel destination.

A number of striking museums opened over the past year. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, eight years in the making, finally got built; so did the Shenzhen Sea World Culture and Arts Center, designed by the Japanese master Fumihiko Maki. Several well-known museums also emerged from sweeping renovations with new faces. The V&A in London, for one, just finished its largest rebuilding project in nearly a century: a huge new underground gallery, an entrance opened up toward the street, and a central courtyard paved with 11,000 hand-made porcelain tiles.

New museums keep appearing and old ones keep expanding, and both are products of globalization and of building programs pushed at the national level, as well as attempts to meet a growing appetite for art and culture. According to figures published by The Washington Post, the number of museums across the United States passed the combined number of Starbucks and McDonald's outlets long ago.

Once going to a museum becomes ordinary, the pull of the museum space itself starts to stand out. The architecture and design site Dezeen has put together a list of ten museums worth seeing for their space design alone — from last year's much-discussed National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), to the museum of Roman ruins under London, to the small expansion of Sweden's Skissernas Museum... Taking space design as its starting point, the list spans a wide range of design styles.

It might make a good reference the next time you are thinking of a museum as a travel destination.

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), Washington, D.C., David Adjaye

The architect David Adjaye is in high demand right now. Born in Tanzania, in East Africa, and trained at the Royal College of Art in London, he was awarded an Order of the British Empire medal in 2017. The same year, Time named him one of the “100 Most Influential People,” the only architect on the list.

Adjaye was chosen to design the NMAAHC in 2009. The museum sets out to tell the story of what African Americans have contributed to U.S. history through their own experience, and as the first museum on this scale devoted to African Americans, it is treated as an “important turning point” in that history.

Drawing on the Yoruba of Nigeria before the slave trade, and on freed slaves in Charleston and New Orleans, Adjaye gave the building a decorative bronze-colored metal lattice for its facade. It stands next to the Washington Monument, and its overall shape comes from the Yoruban caryatid, a traditional West African wooden column. The interior covers 36,882 square meters over five floors above ground and five below, and holds theater space, galleries and more, alongside the cultural museum itself.

The NMAAHC took the Design Museum London's Beazley Design of the Year award for 2017, and it remains the most important work so far by the British architect of African descent David Adjaye.

London Mithraeum, UK, Local Projects

This museum is cool. It sits underground, converted from the ruins of a Roman temple.

In the third century AD, roughly 200 years after the Romans founded London, they built a temple to the sun god in what is now the City of London. The ruins turned up by chance in 1954 and caused a sensation at the time.

In 2010, after Bloomberg decided to put a building on the site, the company set out to restore the temple ruins. Once work began in 2011, the construction crew dug up more than a thousand artifacts, including over 400 ancient Roman writing tablets. London archaeologists identified them as the oldest written documents ever found in Britain.

Last November the restored London Mithraeum opened to the public for free. It lies nearly seven meters below the Bloomberg building, and was built by Local Projects, the studio behind the exhibitions at New York's 9/11 Memorial Museum.

The exhibition hall occupies a dim underground space, where smoke, light and sound try to bring back the temple as it looked a thousand years ago and give visitors the sense of standing inside it. Local Projects calls this an “emotional way of storytelling.”

Louvre Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, Jean Nouvel

The Louvre Abu Dhabi, which opened on November 11 last year, was one of the buildings most worth watching in the UAE in 2017.

This grand museum on the water sits on Saadiyat Island, next to Abu Dhabi. It cost about US$650 million and opened a full five years later than planned.

Jean Nouvel, the celebrated French architect and Pritzker Prize winner, designed it a decade ago; construction began in 2009. Its vast dome, made of stainless steel and aluminum alloy, weighs as much as two Eiffel Towers. The dome is covered with a dense pattern of star-shaped openings and rests on four giant columns, and because it hides the tops of those columns, from a distance it looks as though it is floating in mid-air.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi holds a good deal of French cultural heritage, including Van Gogh's Self-Portrait and Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare.

Bafen Garden, Shanghai, Yu Ting

Bafen Garden in Shanghai started life as a property sales center. The architect Yu Ting and his studio, Wutopia Lab, have turned it into an art museum showing craft and decorative art, with a café, a reading room, a restaurant, a study and guest rooms attached — a small cultural complex, in other words.

The site runs to a little over 400 square meters, exactly eight fen of land in the old Chinese measure, which is where the name comes from. The finished building has four floors and more than 2,000 square meters of floor area. Perforations shaped like folding fans make up the main facade, and a distinctive Chinese garden landscape surrounds it.

Bafen Garden is also an experiment in vertical urban architecture. The first and second floors are double-height exhibition space, showing the owner's startlingly large collection of enamelware; the third floor is a plainer co-working space; and on the fourth floor each guest room has an aerial courtyard of its own, arranged around a shared central light well.

Remai Modern, Canada, KPMB

Remai Modern stands on the riverbank in the center of Saskatoon, a city in south-central Canada, and was designed by the Toronto architecture firm KPMB.

The museum covers about 11,705 square meters and holds some 7,500 works from the Mendel Art Gallery, which closed in 2015.

KPMB designed it to suit its setting. Saskatoon sits on a wide plain, and each of Remai Modern's four floors, taken alone, is a plain rectangular box; put together, they make an irregular, well-composed whole.

The materials are what make Remai Modern interesting. Glass wraps the facade, with part of it covered in red perforated metal panels, which makes the building read as transparent. The interior is spare and roomy; a central staircase in the atrium winds up to the third floor, and the atrium gives the community a place to gather. The museum's other features include a small outdoor sculpture park, itself part of West Garden.

YSL Museum, Morocco, Studio KO

This museum was built for Yves Saint Laurent alone; his life and his work are the most important things it exhibits.

It stands in Marrakech, Morocco, because Marrakech was Saint Laurent's favorite place while he was alive. He owned a blue villa and a rose garden there, and after his death his ashes were scattered in a garden not far from the museum.

Studio KO designed the building. Its facade, drawn from the YSL archive, is made of bricks laid to form a three-dimensional pattern that looks like woven cloth, and it uses terracotta and earth-toned terrazzo heavily, so that the museum settles perfectly into its surroundings.

Inside are 400 square meters of permanent exhibition space, 150 square meters for temporary shows, a 130-seat auditorium, a bookstore, a restaurant and a library of 5,000 volumes.

Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, South Africa, Thomas Heatherwick

We have written before about the boutique hotel and the museum converted from an old grain silo on Cape Town's waterfront.

Built in 1921, it is a poured-concrete grain silo, 57 meters tall, split between storage space below and an elevator tower above. Everything below the sixth floor is now Zeitz MOCAA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, which opened last September.

Before the conversion, the building was 116 vertical cylindrical tubes and no interior space at all. Thomas Heatherwick's solution was bold: he cut a museum atrium out of the tubes, taking a 3D scan of a single local grain of wheat to arrive at the irregular shape it has now.

The sheer size of the tubes and their exposed, rough-cut cross-sections, plus light coming through the glass and light thrown down from above, already give the interior enough force to astonish. Its 6,000-plus square meters of exhibition space hold more than 80 galleries, finished in plain white walls, showing contemporary African art.

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), United States, Bruner/Cott

MASS MoCA was founded in 1999 and is known for showing avant-garde art from around the world, which earned it the nickname “laboratory of contemporary art.” In 2014 it announced a three-year, US$55 million renovation, and the rebuilt museum opened in May 2017.

MASS MoCA occupies a sprawling complex of 26 buildings, first a textile mill and later an electrical works. Art moving in turned North Adams, a declining industrial town, into a charming one with contemporary art, music and theater, and it now draws well over a hundred thousand visitors a year from around the world. That is why MASS MoCA's model is held up as an example of art reviving an economy.

The latest expansion nearly doubled the museum's size, to 23,200 square meters, making it one of the largest contemporary art museums in the United States today. Bruner/Cott, the firm that carried out the work, has handled the museum's expansion plans ever since MASS MoCA was first being planned in 1996, and its aim throughout has been to keep the brick-and-timber industrial remains and preserve as much as possible of the rough, raw quality typical of American industrial space.

Skissernas Museum, Sweden, Elding Oscarson

Skissernas Museum was founded in 1934. It belongs to Lund University in Sweden and holds the largest archive of artworks in the world. If you are visiting museums in Sweden, Skissernas is a stop not to miss.

The museum is six large buildings from different periods, joined together. Last year the Swedish firm Elding Oscarson expanded it, creating a new entrance that faces the sculpture park.

The new entrance replaces the hall Hans Westman built in 1959, and now holds a shop and a reception area. Its exterior is clad in Corten, the common weathering steel, which gives it a distinctive rusted texture that blends perfectly with the old red-brick buildings next door and the museum's own rough concrete walls. The architects also gave the building windows of different sizes, which bring in light and open views.

Guardian Art Center, Beijing, Ole Scheeren

The Guardian Art Center in Beijing is the first auction house headquarters designed to order by an invited architect. It stands where Wangfujing shopping street meets Wusi Street, near the Forbidden City and directly across from the National Art Museum of China.

The German architect Ole Scheeren built it as a new kind of multi-purpose cultural institution. It contains a series of small rooms, two large auction halls one floor below ground, a 1,700-square-meter column-free main exhibition hall, a restaurant, administrative offices, a bookstore, and an art hotel above it all. The interior is laid out simply and clearly, and can be rearranged to fit an auction house's needs.

The architecture itself shows a neat fit between old and new. To sit within the fabric of old Beijing, for instance, the architect built a series of gray basalt boxes at the base, close in size to a traditional courtyard house. They are stacked on one another, and their surfaces are set with round lenses abstracted from the painting Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, which keeps the building from looking dull. Above the stone base floats a huge cube of glass brick, which gives the building a weighty modern feel.

Cover image from: YSL Museum