Making an exhibition of themselves: new museum projects

Iconic architecture can be found across every building type, but perhaps no more so than in the field of museum design. While museums might not be showy for the sake of it, architects still feel they can imbue the best of these buildings with a sense of civic grandeur.

In Turkey, the recently completed Odunpazari Modern Museum by Kengo Kuma and Associates consists of a number of obliquely stacked blocks, tumbling down the gentle slopes of the old Ottoman town of Eskişehir. Inside, the interlocking, top-lit galleries with pale wooden floors are rendered in white plaster while the outside of the museum is covered with large timber slats, referring to the town's ancient timber market.

A more austere design, David Chipperfield Architects’ James Simon Gallery in Berlin is more a connector than a stand-alone project. Designed to connect a number of museums on the city’s world-famous Museum Island as well as contain stand-alone galleries and an auditorium, the building’s colonnades integrate the project within its context, while its pale, reconstituted stone facade mark it out as a contemporary addition. The interior – meticulously fashioned from in-situ concrete – provides generous circulation spaces for visitors with a calm and contemplative atmosphere.

An altogether more flamboyant design is Jean Nouvel’s National Museum of Qatar located on the Doha waterfront. Inspired by a desert rose, a mineral foundation sometime found in shallow saline pools, the museum is an almost otherworldly composition of large, pale disks surrounding the restored former royal palace. The inside space, sheltered from the intense light and heat by the overhanging elements, defined by their various intersections, is arranged to tell the history of Qatar.

But iconic museums don’t need to have a large footprint. In Norway, Bjarke Ingels Group recently completed ‘The Twist’, a bridge across a river that contains exhibition spaces. Connecting two sides of an outdoor sculpture park, the museum consists of a deceivingly simple, rectangular prism that is twisted 90 degrees as it crosses over the river. Visitors have a chance to see the river and the rest of the sculpture park from a new vantage point, while curators can display smaller, more fragile works of art within.

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