“Our curators and the architectural team have spent more
than two years in conversations about the nature of our collection, the history of our
installations, the continually changing nature of art, and our opportunities and responsibilities
for engaging our audiences. The outcome of these discussions is a design that accommodates
a global view and new perspectives on modern and contemporary art, and that embodies the
metabolic and self-renewing nature of our institution. — Glenn D. Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art

[...] Peter Zumthor spoke with LACMA CEO [...] Michael Govan about the concepts behind his plans for LACMA's future presentation of its collections. Peter last spoke at LACMA in 2013 in conjunction with the exhibition The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA, when we were in the very early stages of thinking about LACMA's new building. Since that time, Peter and Michael have been working on the concepts behind the building, and Peter and his team have been refining the plans. — Unframed

Just off the Columbia River, the Wanapum Heritage Center is a home for Wanapum culture and artifacts. The building form weaves solidity and light, from a protective repository enclosure that references traditional cliffside cave storage spaces to the glazed welcome area that evokes traditional fishing lanterns. The entry path aligns with the equinox sunrise, a Wanapum 'marker'. The center houses archival items alongside recording studios for oral history, and new gathering spaces. — Mithun, an integrated design firm

The museum is not a singular or path-breaking work of architecture; its design goals have more to do with manipulating light and shadow and with physical substance [...]

Yet taken as a whole the museum offers a range of encouraging signs about the priorities of architecture’s up-and-coming generation. These include a genuine interest in shifting definitions of public space in a digital age and — most important of all — a preference for measured and layered effects over operatic ones. — Christopher Hawthorne - latimes.com

For all of the dubious attention attracted by the “Bilbao Effect” theory [...] a more prosaic, and arguably more important aspect of museum location has received little attention: not which city a museum is built in, but where in that city. Locations that would once have seemed inevitable, such as Chicago parkland, are hugely contentious in the 2000s, while locations previously unthinkable in that year – an abandoned lumbermill in Bilbao [...] – are now commonplace. — theguardian.com

From the outside, not much has changed. After a three-year, $69m renovation, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC, looks about the same as it did when it first opened in June 1978. [...]

Step inside and the differences become clear. The gallery, which reopens to the public on 30 September, has managed to carve out more than 12,250 sq. ft of additional exhibition space without expanding its physical footprint. — theartnewspaper.com

Seattle Art Museum hasn't exactly been forthcoming with details about its plans to build an extension on the Seattle Asian Art Museum into Volunteer Park—and some of the neighbors are already unhappy. [...]

"They're just grabbing public land and trying to keep it under wraps," said Cassandra Trimble, a neighbor who is starting a petition against the glassed-in structure planned for the east side of the building, designed by LMN Architects. — thestranger.com

LACMA isn’t trying to sell fancy condos, it’s trying to sell an art museum. This isn’t about safe deposit boxes in the sky for foreign oligarchs, this a building that will require contributions from art patrons and museum donors, and these renderings speak their language. [...]

More David Hockney than Zaha Hadid, they evoke a feel rather than architectural facts. — peopleplacesspaces.com

What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question might have been almost exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheim’s phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque government to recoup the construction costs within three years, moved the debate on to issues of branding and statement architecture.

Now the discussion has moved on again. — theartnewspaper.com