From Texas to Berlin: Discover seven new museums by the world’s starchitects

More than two decades have passed since the Guggenheim Bilbao opened, but the proliferation of flagship, eye-catching or otherwise intriguing museums hasn’t stopped since; in fact, it seems to have accelerated. In 2018, $8 billion was spent on constructing no fewer than 148 cultural institutions around the world, many of them highlighting contemporary art or combining innovative and current work with national holdings or thematic or art-historical displays. In 2019 and 2020, new museums and exhibition venues continue to open their doors—many of them much farther afield than New York City’s The Shed, which famously launched in lower Manhattan in early 2019, or the reimagined MoMA, which reopened in October after a several-month hiatus.

Star architects are usually behind the buildings, although it’s no longer only about the Bilbao effect: ‘[Museums] are one of the easiest places to be an architect,’ says David Chipperfield, who has been commissioned for a long list of museum builds and upgrades around the world in recent years. Indeed, their purpose is straightforward and allows architects a certain degree of visionary thinking. Global audiences, too, have come to expect art’s packaging to be as potentially enlightening as the exhibitions or collections inside, as well as to add cachet to the cities from which they emerge. Some long-awaited venues recently debuted or are slated to open in the next few months. Herewith, a list of the most noteworthy and significant new institutions on the world stage. 

If you build it, they will come. This seems to be Swiss art patron Maja Hoffmann’s credo in erecting a shimmery and jagged 10-story tower of a museum for her Luma Foundation in Arles, France, a Provençal city of around 53,000. Opening in 2020, the building and city are vaguely reminiscent of Bilbao (down to the architect, Frank Gehry), but Luma goes far beyond merely exhibiting Hoffmann’s collection of blue-chip contemporary art. The tower, called the Arts Resource Centre at Luma, will also be a project-based venue that dovetails with the foundation’s other activities, which range from research to environmental conservation. 

Launched in July 2019, this colonnaded, templelike visitor center connects the five existing museums displaying mostly historical Prussian collections on Berlin’s classicist Museum Island. But inside the elongated David Chipperfield-designed structure (named after an important Berlin art patron) is also a hall for rotating exhibitions, an extensive bookstore/museum shop and a large auditorium for discursive events. The British architect has had a hand in Museum Island’s master renovation and building plan since the 1990s. This is the final piece of the puzzle. 

Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District will soon see its flagship museum open, more than 15 years after the project was first announced. Designed by Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron, M+ will be a “museum for visual culture.” The building will be completed in 2020, with the museum itself opening nine to 12 months later, featuring exhibitions focusing on works from the 20th and 21st centuries. The collection spans contemporary art and design. Augmenting it all is a new 1,500-plus-work, 325-artist donation from Swiss collector Uli Sigg, whose holdings of Chinese art are canonical.

Smaller than other museums on this list, Ruby City is all the more impressive for its local-meets-global mission. Opened in October 2019, it spotlights pieces from the collection of late art patron Linda Pace. It also provides a platform for community artists to interact with international players as well as mount social projects. The rust-colored cast concrete exterior was inspired by a dream Pace had of a ruby city, and architect David Adjaye’s Spanish mission architecture influenced the skylights. Inside, the collection features works by the likes of Kiki Smith, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Wangechi Mutu. The building is part of a dynamic art campus. 

From above, French architect Jean Nouvel’s museum, which opened in March 2019, looks like an origami sculpture of circles and angles. Inside, Qatari history is compellingly told. Not a single wall here is vertical, meaning films are projected onto the interlocking geometries, and sound installations can be listened to without distraction. Artifacts abound, but contemporary pieces, too, sneak into the state-of-the-art displays.

It might be the oil money, but Norway’s art scene is undeniably booming with new biennials, sculpture parks, and in Oslo, a growing waterfront art district. In 2020, its vast New Nasjonalmuseet (National Gallery) is scheduled to open on the site of a former railway station in central Oslo and will be the Nordic region’s largest museum. Five thousand works from the existing permanent collection (art, architecture, and design) will be on view. A rooftop hall offers space for temporary exhibitions, and the art district gains another civic-minded public space. 

David Chipperfield’s many museum projects are slowly spanning the globe; in late 2019, his glassy West Bund Art Museum in Shanghai (slated to open in November at press time) makes its debut as part of the area’s 9-kilometer riverside stretch of art venues. Its three vast galleries pinwheel around a two-story atrium. All galleries will act as a satellite location for Paris’ Centre Pompidou over the next five years.

This article was originally published in Art Basel Miami Beach Magazine, available in select locations in the US.

Top image: Exterior of the new National Museum, Oslo.