Museum Design By Kengo Kuma | Suntory Museum Of Art

A "Japanese-style room" in the city was to be the concept of the museum. A "Japanese-style room" is a comfortable space where people are able to relax on tatamis that are laid on the floor, and among the Japanese traditions, is the most relaxing and relieving environment.
In the background lies the phenomenon of the transforming of the city indoors. Communication and transportation technology has destroyed the distance that had existed among objects, and has transfigured the entire city into a massive "indoor" house. Inside large houses there are numerous corridors and dining rooms, yet there is no relaxing "Japanese-style room". There is no "Japanese-style room" where time passes slowly, and generates conversation among familiar people, and among people and objects. In a hope to become the quiet "Japanese-style room" in a clamorous urban environment, I drew the plan for the Suntory Museum of Art.
The people of the 20th century sought for a museum that was an exaggerated "urban monument", yet the people of the 21st century are looking for a peaceful "Japanese-style room". In fact, as the Suntory Museum of Art worked on the theme "Beauty of Life" from an early stage of planning, there is no other museum which is suited to be a "Japanese-style room". This museum should reveal its natural self at the frontier of the global trend.
I felt the "Japanese-style room" building should not be a pretentious bluff. The "Japanese-style room" is constructed by human-friendly materials cherished in our daily lives- for example white porcelain kind to the skin, paulownia which maintains humidity, and white oak used for barrels. A light adjusting device hinted from the design of the traditional Japanese window "Muso-Koshi" was placed on the frontage facing the greenery of the park. This device softens the scenery and light falling into the "Japanese-style room". Japanese people have used these kinds of devices to appreciate the four seasons and the passing time.
Surrounded by beautiful arts, gentle materials and soft light, time passes slowly. The Suntory Museum of Art will become a place where people will be able to deeply appreciate the new relationship among arts and people....images

Taubman Museum of Art,West Virginia | Randall Stout

Located on a prominent northwest corner of Roanoke’s downtown, the new Art Museum of Western Virginia creates a physical and iconographic gateway into the city. As the city’s most contemporary structure, it represents Roanoke’s metaphorical gateway to the future for a city transforming its industrial and manufacturing based economy to one driven by technology information and services. The building’s forms and materials interpret the renowned beauty and drama of the surrounding Shenandoah Valley landscape framed by the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains.

Stratified over three levels, the building program occupies 81,000 square feet. Primary public spaces are located on the ground level, including the museum lobby, large screen theater, café, gift shop, auditorium and education spaces, along with additional support areas associated with the loading dock and art receiving activities. All permanent collection galleries, as well as the temporary exhibit galleries and art storage, are located on the second level. The third and uppermost floor holds the boardroom, director’s suite and all staff offices.

Light defines the primary circulation, fracturing the building at the second floor galleries to emerge into dynamic glass volumes at each end. Representing the hub for the entire facility, the volume of the lobby atrium connects the two floors and rises to a peak of 75 feet. The top floor splits again, causing the roofs to part for clerestory light as it, along with the events terrace, projects outward and over the street below.

The lobby atrium’s translucent, layered polycarbonate roof fills the space with softly diffused light. Undulating roofs and curving walls for other building areas are clad in stainless steel with a specular finish that allows the building coloration to reflect the rich variety of color in the sky and from the seasonally dramatic landscape. The many angular exterior walls, which rise to support the stainless steel roof, are surfaced in shingled cement fiber panels, while interior walls at public spaces feature a local gray dolomite limestone application. These forms and textures emphasize the striations, clefts and eroded rock surfaces found in the region’s famous caverns, cliffs and river gorges.

The Museum’s collection focuses on 18th and 19th Century American Art, Contemporary Art, Southern Decorative Art, Prints and Photographs and Non-Western Art. Through a cooperative program with the neighboring Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), the facility will house advanced state-of-the-art technology for distance learning to serve the entire region of western Virginia. In addition, the museum will feature fiber optic cable links with Network Virginia in order to enhance secondary education access to the arts. The museum will also link with Virginia Tech to provide artistic endeavors via the University’s Computer Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE).

Sustainable design components such as daylighting, passive solar, thermal conserving envelope, and computerized building management systems are incorporated into the building design. The south-facing glass façade of the lobby atrium contains light-shelves for control of sunlight and solar heat gain. Along with the two major atria, clerestories at the upper office level provide generous daylighting throughout the building.

Texts and images: Randall Stout

Estonian National Museum Building Complex | Vincent Callebaut

PROGRAM : International Architectural Competition for the Estonian National Museum Building Complex
LOCATION : The Raadi Manor Complex
SURFACE AREA : 40.000 M²
CLIENT : The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Estonia, The Estonian National Museum and the Estonian Architects Association
PERSPECTIVES : Philippe Steels

“The ENM is an ethnologically (cultural anthropology) oriented national central museum, whose ethnological, cultural research and museology activities aid in the preservation and development of Estonian culture, keeping Estonian identity in an increasingly globalising world and fostering better understanding between different culture.”

For the hundredth anniversary of the creation date of the Estonian National Museum in 2009, the Estonian Ministry of Culture in conjunction with the Estonian National Museum and the Union of Estonian Architects, would like to build a new building complex in Tartu, the second largest city in Estonia. The Raadi Manor Complex is located on the Eastern district of the city of Tartu along the rural municipality.

At the crossing of the Estonian and Finno-Ugric History and cultures, the Estonian national Museum (ENM) presents an architecture that inserts itself as a built geography. Towards a new understanding of the place, it imposes itself like an open field of multilayer strength that compresses the nature of the city and of the dynamic processes which govern it. It is an animated matrix with compressive folds topologically open which forms a common meeting frame between the city and the rural municipality, between the site and the visitor. The museum is at the intersection of new devices able, simultaneously, to generate reactive mechanisms (operating paradoxes) and evolutional spaces (landscapes). It is an interactive field of strengths among other fields, a geography of transition.
Texts and images from:Vincent Callebaut

Museum Chengdu ,Sichuan, China | Sutherland Hussey

The museum requirements extend to over 70,000m2 of development and will include exhibition space for natural history, history and folk, and chinese shadow play as well as a large area for temporary exhibition.
The new city museum will be the most important cultural building in chengdu and needs to assert itself on the tian fu square against a backdrop of ever-increasing commercial development.
The proposal includes the creation of two pedestrian routes through the site – one taking people from the southwest corner of the site to the centre of the square, the other taking people from the northwest corner of the site to the centre of the square.
Cost:£240 million
Texts and images from : Sutherland Hussey