ART SPACES ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN

A surprising trend can be discerned in museum building since the end of the 1990s, one that still seems to be going strong today: an unprecedented number of grand-scale projects have been undertaken in recent years, ont only by private sponsors, but in many cases made possible instead by public funding. This book not only shows new museums , galleries and exhibition venues for the fine arts, but also features unusual buildings housing special collections, as well as museums exhibting material from other fields of knowledge. One central focus of contemporary architecture can be traced particulary well in the examples illustrated in the book: new surfaces that enable the creation of new forms. Astoundingly, parallel to this development another architectural approach which can be already be called classical is also experiencing a Renaissance - the clearly defined, austere cube cloaked in a free-floating glass shell. No less than three buildings depicted here demonstrate the immense variety that is possible within these rigid parameters. The works shown here are no more than five years old and show, what a broad bandwidth can be discerned within a moment's snapshot. There are visionaries like Asymptote and masters such as Günter Behnisch and Tadao Ando, whose buildings span an arc from classical modernism to the architecture of today.