Login
Registered users
As a typology, museum architecture is – in its broadest sense – a repository of fragments of history, bringing them back to life and ennobling them. In other instances, the museum itself becomes a symbol, a timeless monument to a place or a city. Indeed, contemporary society has expressed extraordinary constructive, formal, and emotive force through its museums, which have often come to represent the city where they were built and have their roots, becoming a distillate of the memory, traditions, and collective imagination of a place. Over and above its function as an exhibition venue, the museum is also an agora, a space of interaction, a place where a community recognizes its mirror image. The museum’s key importance as an autonomous piece of architecture was summed by the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel in his lectures on the Philosophy of History (1821-1824), when he notes how we only become aware of something when it is on the wane; only then are we able to recall what has been. Museums not only make past history visible; they also become the tool with which to re-write a new narrative.
This is what is happening in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Cultural District soon to be the site of three major museums: Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi (2017), the future Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry, and, from December 2025, the Zayed National Museum, the National Museum of the United Arab Emirates designed by Norman Foster (Foster + Partners). Created to honor the memory of the nation’s founder, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the Zayed National Museum continues the Persian Gulf countries’ cultural strategy of the past 20 years to redefine their identity through culture. The Emirati project is part of an institutional system that looks to the West not only as a technical or curatorial reference, but also as a means of achieving cultural legitimization. Increasingly, the institutions of the Gulf nations are...
Digital
Printed
Green Architecture: Observations and Examples
Wilhelm Vossenkuhl
In his editorial “Green Architecture,” Wilhelm Vossenkuhl argues that true green architecture is not a single model, but a social, technological, ...
Private Residence
driendl*architects
For the Highlights column, Michael Webb discusses a private residence in Purbach am Neusiedler See, Austria, by driendl*architects...
Open House and City Walled
Matharoo Associates
In the Letter from India column, Durganand Balsavar reports on Open House and City Walled in Surat, by Matharoo Associates...
