Hatje Cantz | Neues Museum, Berlin Credit: Photo © SMB / Ute Zscharnt for David Chipperfield Architects

IMAGINING THE FUTURE MUSEUM

What will the art museum look and feel like in five, ten, fifty years? In Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects, New York-based cultural strategist András Szántó engages in conversations with visionary architects worldwide about what sort of “hardware” will be required for the art institution of tomorrow.

What emerges from the 21 dialogues—all conducted between February and September, 2022—is a composite portrait of a generation of architects working to make the museum more flexible, porous, human-centered, culturally responsive, digitally amplified, and environmentally responsible. Among Szántó’s conversation partners are architects already widely acclaimed for the institutions they’ve built. But the majority of the 25 respondents are emerging forces in the world of museum design—their median age is around 50—with many years of museum-making ahead of them.

In his previous book, The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues (2020), Szántó interviewed a group of international museum directors, who espoused an expanding set of goals and functions for art museums. Imagining the Future Museum rounds out that picture by exploring the corresponding evolution of the physical form and experience of the art museum.

THE BOOK INCLUDES DIALOGUES WITH

Kunlé Adeyemi (NLÉ), David Adjaye (Adjaye Associates), Paula Zasnicoff Cardoso & Carlos Alberto Maciel (Arquitetos Associados), David Chipperfield (David Chipperfield Architects), Minsuk Cho (MASS Studies), Elizabeth Diller (Diller Scofidio + Renfro), Frida Escobedo (Frida Escobedo), Sou Fujimoto (Sou Fujimoto Architects), Lina Ghotmeh (Lina Ghotmeh — Architects), Bjarke Ingels (BIG | Bjarke Ingels Group), Kabage Karanja & Stella Mutegi (Cave_bureau), Li Hu & Huang Wenjing (OPEN), Jing Liu & Florian Idenburg (SO – IL), Yansong Ma (MAD Architects), Winy Maas (MVRDV), Roth — Eduardo Neira (Roth Architecture), Stephan Schütz (gmp·von Gerkan, Marg und Partners Architects,), Kerstin Thompson (Kerstin Thompson Architects), Xu Tiantian (DnA_Design and Architecture), Kulapat Yantrasast (WHY Architecture), Liam Young (SCI-Arc).

The book includes an original sketch by each of the architects and photographs of selected projects by the featured studios.

The wide ranging conversations capture a moment of change in museum architecture that mirrors the shifts reflected in the conversations with museum directors in The Future of the Museum. As Szántó writes in his introduction to the new volume, “Just as a generation of museum leaders began to open the museum up to a larger audience, a generation of architects started to move beyond look-at-me statements and to imagine more welcoming and accessible museums, ones that are intentionally rooted in their communities and urban or natural surroundings.”