Buoyed by some of the largest donations in the city's history, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will unveil a $450 million project today that envisions its campus as the cultural heart of the city. [...]

The project, by Steven Holl Architects, is the most exciting in the institution's 90-year history, board chairman Richard Kinder said. The plan, named the Fayez S. Sarofim Campus, is so transformational that in five years Houstonians might not recognize the 1000 block of Bissonnet. — chron.com

[...] a gallery dedicated to design and architecture will soon also be added the Centre.

Like the “Galerie de Photographies," which is housed in former technical facilities, the future design gallery will be located within the existing Piano + Rogers-designed building. “Eventually, there should be almost no offices in the building, and we'll keep only the technical facilities that are strictly indispensable," said Seban. — news.artnet.com

The Board of Supervisors has approved a road map for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as it plans a $600-million makeover that would tear down and rebuild most of its Miracle Mile campus [...].

If there are no serious bumps in the road ahead, the plan would yield a streamlined, curving 410,000-square-foot new museum building designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor that would open in 2023, spanning Wilshire Boulevard with an enclosed bridge that doubles as gallery space. — latimes.com

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, is preparing to launch its first major expansion effort in more than 50 years. [...]

In 2012, the board commissioned the architectural firm Snøhetta to produce a master plan for future growth, but the details of this project have remained under wraps. Museum leaders told the Buffalo News that they are interested in holding an architectural competition for design proposals following their meetings with the public. — theartnewspaper.com

The Guggenheim plans to research “productive and hospitable office space designs”, staff will be glad to hear, and it is also considering whether to hold a competition to find an architect.

The expansion plan comes just over 60 years after the Guggenheim commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design its original space and more than a decade after it abandoned a scheme for a second, Frank Gehry-designed museum downtown. — theartnewspaper.com

The director of the Museo Reina Sofía, Manuel Borja-Villel, has just announced that Madrid’s main Modern and contemporary art museum will expand its permanent exhibition space by a total of 3,000 sq. m by the end of 2015. In an interview with EFE news agency, Borja-Villel said the project will “finally” join the Francisco Sabatini-designed building, which fully opened as an art museum in 1992, with the extension by Jean Nouvel, completed in 2005. — theartnewspaper.com

More than 3,000 homes are to be built at the eastern edge of Canary Wharf after Tower Hamlets council gave the green light for the project, the first extension to the financial district since the banking crisis struck in 2008. [...]

Its centrepiece, at 211m the tallest building, is a 57-storey cylindrical residential skyscraper facing the waters of South Dock, designed by Herzog & de Meuron [...] — theguardian.com

After 14 years of talking, of battles, and of construction, and in one of the more ambitious reimaginings of a regional museum ever, the art-rich Clark has opened a new building, plopped a lake behind it and expanded to a 140-acre campus.

It opens July 4, and it is magnificent—mostly—but we’ll get to that. — news.artnet.com

Putting aside Rocky—though that's hard to do these days—there's a bigger problem looming over Gehry's expansion plans. That problem is Gehry. Not for all the reasons that Gehry's critics like to cite, chapter and verse, about why he doesn't deserve to be an ambassador for cool architecture. In fact, Gehry's critics may find plenty to admire in his plans for the Art Museum. Frankly, it's not very Gehry. — citylab.com

This, if it is a harsh way to describe the British Museum's attempts to update itself over the last two decades, with the help of the most famous architects in the land and hundreds of millions in generous donations, nonetheless reflects what's going on. Like large cultural institutions everywhere, the museum finds itself dealing with similar pressures to those of commercial players in the fields of leisure and entertainment [...] and it reaches for similar solutions.. — theguardian.com

Through case studies, surveys, and construction-cost analyses, the Cultural Policy Center report found that the museum building boom didn't bring the net benefit to communities predicted by the so-called Bilbao Effect. [...] Beyond the standard gentrification effect [...] supply may have outstripped demand over the course of the U.S. arts center building boom—leaving some cities with the responsibility to maintain or even pay for cultural centers that they don't entirely need. — citylab.com

Switzerland’s two largest art museums are building extensions, although Basel is moving faster than its neighbour and sometimes rival, Zürich. In Basel, construction is proceeding apace on the Kunstmuseum’s project, across the street from the original museum. [...]

Meanwhile Zürich’s Kunsthaus has become embroiled in a dispute which has halted work this month. The Swiss environmental group Archicultura is objecting, and permission to build is being withheld by a canton court. — theartnewspaper.com

In 2002, CINTRI, a branch of Canadian firm Cintec Environment Inc., was granted an exclusive 50-year contract to collect commercial and residential waste in Phnom Penh and keep the city’s main streets clean. The exact details of the company’s agreement with city hall have never been made public, but since the deal was inked, Phnom Penh’s population has swelled from just over one million to two million people. The population boom and its attendant urban sprawl seem to have caught CINTRI off-guard — nextcity.org

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will soon debut Making a Classic Modern: Frank Gehry’s Master Plan for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an exhibition showcasing the first images of Frank Gehry's master plan to renovate the museum. The exhibition will also feature large-scale models, site plans, sections, and renderings. The exhibition opens July 1 through September 1 at the Dorrance Galleries. — bustler.net