The second temporary exhibition:
Museums in the 21st Century.

Spectacular and ambitious, unconventional or adaptable, in harmony with their surroundings or deliberately standing out from them, resembling a spaceship right after landing or conveying the pathos of a seemingly endless adventure park. Today’s museum buildings no longer have anything in common with their predecessors built in the 19th century. Modern museums function as adventure centres, attracting visitors by appealing exhibitions and by using modern media installations as crowd magnets. As “soft location factors”, they contribute to the glamour of major cities, turning them into cultural hotspots. They are seismographs of the prosperity and cultural values of society, often shaping urban landscapes as “cathedrals of modern times”.

The exhibition “Museums in the 21st Century. Ideas Projects Buildings” impressively portrays the abundant possibilities of museum design in the 21st century. In 2005 and 2006 Suzanne and Thierry Greub, founders of the Basel Art Centre, put together a compilation of the most interesting and promising museum projects and invited the architects to provide the public exhibition with their first ideas and outlines, as well as specific plans, models, and pictures.

The result is a fascinating insight into contemporary processes of creation and self-conceptions of museums worldwide. The list of the participants reads like a who’s who of the world’s best architectural offices, including outstanding designers such as Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Mario Botta, Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, and Daniel Libeskind, as well as Coop Himmelb(l)au, and Frank O. Gehry.