KAAN Architecten   Belgium   The now controversial Leopold II personally backed an ambitious urbanistic program to improve the quality of life in Belgian cities and promote a cultural awakening, and a fruit of the efforts of the Roi bâtisseur is the monumental building that went

David Chipperfield   China   An outpost of the Centre Pompidou rises on the banks of the Huangpu as part of a project to transform the industrial margin of the riverbed into a new cultural district. The museum takes up three volumes clad in iridescent recycled glass, which stand

David Chipperfield   Germany   The firm of the British architect David Chipperfield has finished refurbishing the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and it will reopen to the public on 22 August 2021. One of the icons of 20th-century architecture, the museum is the only building buil

Christ & Gantenbein Harquitectes   Spain   The team comprising the Barcelona studio Harquitectes and the Basel firm Christ & Gantenbein has won the competition to enlarge and reorganize the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA). A new building on Plaça dels Àngels will contain a

Trazia   Spain   The Valencia-based firm Trazia, headed by Carlos Pardo and Lucía Hernández, has renovated Casa Ayora – on Calle Mayor in Almussafes, a municipality in the comarca Ribera Baja – for museum use. Set between party walls, the building was a Dominican c

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The new Tim Van Laere Gallery of contemporary art in Antwerp goes up in a central location within the New South district (Nieuw Zuid), an ambitious urban redevelopment plan launched by the city council in collaboration with the private developer Trip

Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei   Germany   A building with explicit references to medieval architecture replaces an obsolete brutalist annex that never managed to gain acceptance in the historical core of the city of Frankfurt. An entrance plaza envisioned as an open-air exhibition space divi

SANAA   China   The Japanese firm SANAA, founded by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, has won the competition to build the Maritime Museum in the Dapeng area of the city of Shenzhen. Its scheme, titled ‘The Cloud on the Ocean,’ was one of 88 entries that came from 2

Herzog & de Meuron   With the ambitious idea of giving Hong Kong a world-class artistic hub, the West Kowloon Cultural District envisions an enclave of new spaces for educational activities and the arts within a large park beside Victoria Harbour. The flagship of the ope

Renzo Piano   United States   The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) of the United States, which year after year extols Hollywood movies with its Oscar awards, intends – the pandemic permitting – to inaugurate its much awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on

Snøhetta   Norway   In what is one of Norway’s oldest cities, birthplace of its most universal man of letters, the project of Kengo Kuma – in collaboration with the Norwegian firm Mad Arkitekter – has placed first in the competition to build a library devoted to the pla

Be they coherent additions in dialogue with the preexisting, silent interventions on historic buldings, or constructions raised ex novo, the works conceived by David Chipperfield Architects to harbor museum institutions are luminous supports for art

The firm Reiulf Ramstad has won the invitation-only contest to expand the museum that harbors Fram (Framtid, meaning future in Norwegian), the ship that Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Svedrup, and Roald Amundsen used in their famed expeditions. As part of a s

When the German gallerist Helga de Alvear decided fifteen years ago to install her collection of art in a modernist mansion in Cáceres, in Extremadura region, she approached the architects Luis Moreno Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón and commissioned them t

After twelve years of planning and building, the office of David Chipperfield has completed the new Kunsthaus Zurich extension, the fourth in the history of the neo-Greek building raised in 1910 by Karl Moser, who would be the first CIAM president. U

The Australian architecture firm Hassell has in collaboration with the Dutch studio OMA finished renovating the Museum for Western Australia in the heart of the city of Perth’s cultural precinct. Its new aboriginal nickname, ‘Boola Bardip’ (many stor

Desde su apertura, el Museo de Bellas Artes de Houston se ha nutrido de colecciones legadas por pudientes benefactores que han tenido que acomodarse en sucesivas ampliaciones del edificio neoclásico original. En la estela de las adiciones de Mies van

The Guardian   Kim Willsher   The Pompidou Centre, one of Paris’s top cultural attractions and home to Europe’s biggest modern art collection, is to close from 2023 for four years of renovations, France’s culture minister has said. Designed by architects Renzo Piano and Richard R

The New York Times   Hilarie M. Sheets   The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin is planning a $35 million campus redesign led by the firm Snohetta. It will feature architectural and landscaping improvements throughout the museum’s 200,000-square-foot grounds like a d

For a city planned ex novo as a paradigm of radical speculation, the firm AZPML has won the competition for the Korean Museum of Urbanism and Architecture (KMUA). Its scheme seeks to rethink the role of the discipline in this day and age, in the proc

Albeit decimated during the Shoah and attacked on several occasions in recent times, the Jewish community of Belgium asserts its presence and importance in the country’s history by means of a small museum which in the wake of an international competi

Reminiscent of those rooms in mansions of the European nobility and bourgeoisie that were full of motley objects in a clutter, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen – Rotterdam’s leading cultural institution, which brings together the legacy of the two illus

Maite Paliza Monduate   Bilbao  2019  
Museo Bellas Artes Bilbao   - 212 Pages 

Renzo Piano Richard Rogers   Genoa  2017  
Fondazione Renzo Piano   - 248 Pages 

Renzo Piano   Genoa  2019  
Fondazione Renzo Piano   - 212 Pages 

María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco   Madrid  2014  
Cátedra   - 239 Pages