Artistic license
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan by Zaha Hadid Architects, 2012. The striking façade of pleated stainless steel and glass creates a sculptural feel to the building.
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. The outer skin picks up the play of different directions and orientations by giving each face of a pleat either an opaque or transparent character.
Long Museum West Bund, Shangahai. Atelier Deshaus-designed, vaulted columns come together with an industrial relic to create a contemporary art gallery.
Long Museum West Bund. The building’s form was created by the repetition of a concrete column that curves out towards the top, so that it looks like separated halves of an arch.
Auckland Art Gallery, FJMT and Archimedia, 2011. This restoration and extension relates as much to the organic natural forms of the landscape as to the historic buildings.
Auckland Art Gallery. Carefully selected Kauri has been used for the ceilings of the entrance canopies, profiled into precise geometric patterns and supported on thin shafts.
Kukje art gallery, Seoul, by SO-IL in 2012. The soft building is enveloped in a mesh veil, creating a nebulous exterior that changes appearance as visitors move through the site.
Kukje art gallery. The mesh, made out of 510,000 individually welded rings, is strong yet pliable as it wraps around the building’s irregular geometries and creates an abstract object.
Art Gallery of Alberta by Randall Stout Architects, 2010. A massive ribbon of stainless steel wraps around and through the building, giving a muted glow and letting through plenty of natural light.
Art gallery of Alberta. The museum is crafted of patinaed zinc (mined and manufactured in Canada), stainless steel, and high performance glazing.
The Hepworth Wakefield by David Chipperfield Architects, Yorkshire, 2011. The largest purpose-built space for art in the UK, it displays the work of sculptor Barbara Hepworth.
The Hepworth Wakefield is composed of a grouping of trapezoidal blocks without a dominant façade. This form was driven by the internal programme and organisation of the gallery.
China Academy of Arts by Kengo Kuma. These folk-art galleries are designed to look like a small village, with thousands of curved tiles covering the gabled rooftops.
China Academy of Arts. The outer wall is covered with a screen of differently-sized recycled tiles hung up by stainless wires, controlling the volume of sunlight coming into the interior.
Louvre Lens, France by SANAA and Imrey Culbert, 2012. The museum features a 360-metre-long chain of rectangular volumes of glass and brushed aluminium, with subtle curvature.
Louvre Lens. A subtle distortion of the interior is in tune with the long curved shape of the site, and allows the artwork space to really shine.
Te Uru art gallery, Waitakere, Auckland by Mitchell & Stout. The new building is linked to the old by bridges to the upper-level offices, and to a reconstructed roof terrace.
Te Uru. The ceiling blends into the walls in the main gallery through a large fabric lantern which softly and evenly lights the walls.
Serpentine Sackler Gallery by Zaha Hadid Architects, London, 2013. A synthesis of old and new: the conversion of a classical 19th century brick structure, and a 21st century tensile structure.
Serpentine Sackler Gallery. A set of five interior columns articulate the roof’s highpoints.
The question “is architecture art?” is one that has been bandied about for years, and architecture collective Assemble’s recent Turner Prize win invited another round of intense retrospection on the subject.
In 2014, Patrick Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects, commented that that architects need to “stop confusing architecture and art”, in a rant directed at the judges of the Venice Architecture Biennale.
It is a complex topic, but what is certain is that architectural designs for galleries and art museums are as diverse as the type of art that is exhibited within their walls.
From extravagent, futuristic buildings to projects that are far more understated yet still respond to site and function in a highly imaginative fashion, the 10 designs below allow architecture and art to complement one another, creating a vessel for showcasing artistic creations alongside possibly being an artform themselves.
