Winging It

According to Julian Rose, art museums today “effectively enjoy a monopoly on aura.”

Jul 29, 2025
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  • Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space by Julian Rose. Princeton Architectural Press, 368 pp., $35.

There have been periods during my career as an architecture critic when it seemed the job consisted primarily of traveling to review extensions to American art museums. Atlanta. San Diego. New York. Chicago. Denver. Boston. Minneapolis. San Francisco. Toledo. Miami. Seattle. Houston. Akron. Chicago again. Denver again. San Francisco again. (Partial list!) An alarming number of these new wings were designed by Renzo Piano Building  Workshop, a firm that made its name with a pair of exquisite gallery buildings, Houston’s Menil Collection (1987) and the Beyeler Foundation (2000) in Basel, Switzerland, and now has nearly three dozen museums to its credit, including three separate projects on the same side of a single block: On Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, between Fairfax and Curson, there are the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (2008) and the Resnick Pavilion (2010), bo…

Christopher Hawthorne is senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture and writes the Punch List architecture newsletter (www.punchlistmag.com). His favorite museum building is the 1958 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen, by Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert; he thinks Edward Larrabee Barnes is criminally underrated as a museum architect.

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