Some of the most striking and innovative works of contemporary architecture are art museums, which are often examples of sculptural architecture and are emblematic works of important architects. The Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum was designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. Its structure includes a movable brise soleil in the shape of a wing that opens to a span of 217 feet (66.1 m) during the day, folding over the tall, arched structure at night or in case of bad weather. 2001. Updates and provides a contrast to the previous austere modernist structure designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes by adding a five-story tower clad in delicately sculpted gray aluminum panels, which change color with changing light, connecting through a wide glass gallery leading to the old building.[10].
The Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind is one of the most prolific contemporary museum architects; He was an academic before he began designing buildings and was an early proponent of the architectural theory of deconstructivism. The exterior of his Imperial Northern War Museum in Manchester, England (2002), has an exterior that resembles, depending on the light and time of day, huge, broken pieces of earth or armor plates, and is said to symbolize the destruction of war. In 2006, he completed the Denver Art Museum's Hamilton Building in the United States, composed of twenty inclined planes, none of them parallel or perpendicular, covered with 230,000 square feet of titanium panels.[11] New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote that "in a building with sloping walls and asymmetrical rooms (tortured geometries generated purely by formal considerations) it is virtually impossible to enjoy art."[12] Libeskind completed another amazing museum, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada (2007), also known as "The Crystal", a building whose shape resembles broken glass.[13].
The De Young Museum in San Francisco opened in 2005, replacing an older structure that was severely damaged in an earthquake in 1989. The new museum was designed to blend into the park's natural landscape and withstand strong earthquakes. The building can move up to 3 feet (91.4 cm) on sliding plates with ball bearings and viscous fluid shock absorbers that absorb kinetic energy. Renzo Piano's Zentrum Paul Klee is an art museum near Bern, Switzerland. The museum blends into the landscape through three undulating hills made of steel and glass. In turn, the other two "hills" contain an educational center and administrative offices.[14].
The Center Pompidou-Metz, in Metz, France, (2010), a branch of the modern art museum Center Pompidou in Paris, was designed by Shigeru Ban, a Japanese architect who won the Pritzker Prize in 2014. The roof is the most spectacular feature of the building; It is a 90 m (98.4 yd) wide hexagon with a surface area of 8 m² (9.6 yd²), composed of sixteen kilometers of glued laminated timber, which intersect to form hexagonal wooden units resembling the stem pattern of a Chinese hat. The entire wooden structure is covered with a white fiberglass membrane and a layer of Teflon protects from direct sunlight and allows light to pass through.
Frank Gehry's Fondation Louis Vuitton (2014) is the contemporary art gallery located next to the Bois de Boulogne in Paris that opened in October 2014. Gehry described its architecture as inspired by the Grand Palais and the enormous glass greenhouses of the Auteuil Greenhouse Garden near the park, built by Jean-Camille Formigé in 1894-1895.[15] Gehry had to work within strict height and volume restrictions, which required any part of the building over two stories to be glass. The interior gallery structures are covered in a white, fiber-reinforced concrete called Ductal. Similar in concept to Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, the building is wrapped in curved glass panels that resemble wind-inflated sails. The glass "Sails" are made from 3,584 panels of laminated glass, each a different shape, specially curved for their place in the design.[17] Within the sails is a group of two-story towers containing 11 galleries of varying sizes, with flower garden terraces and rooftop spaces for exhibitions.[18]
Renzo Piano's Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2015) took a very different approach than Frank Gehry's sculptural museums. The Whitney has an industrial-looking façade and blends into the neighborhood. Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic for The New York Times called the building a "hodgepodge of styles," but noted its similarity to the Pompidou Center, in the way it blended with the public spaces around it. "Unlike much renowned architecture," Kimmelman wrote, "this is not some oddly shaped trophy building into which all the practical elements of a functioning museum must be fitted."[19]
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is actually two buildings by different architects nested together; an earlier (1995) five-story postmodernist structure by Swiss architect Mario Botta, which has been joined by a much larger ten-story white gallery by Norwegian firm Snøhetta (2016). The expanded building includes a living green wall of plants native to San Francisco; a free gallery on the ground floor with 25 feet (7.6 m) high glass walls that will place the art in view of passersby and glass skylights that will flood the upper floors of the offices (although not the galleries) with light. Critical reaction to the building was mixed. Roberta Smith of The New York Times said that the building set a new standard for museums and wrote: "The new building's undulating, sloping façade, riddled with subtle curves and bulges, sets a brilliant alternative to the straight-edged boxes of traditional modernism and the rebellion against them initiated by Frank Gehry, with his computer-inspired acrobatics."[20] On the other hand, the critic for London's The Guardian compared the building's façade to "a gigantic meringue with a touch of Ikea".[21].