All city commissioned; Bilbao and Phaeno aimed for attraction; site by bridge - connecting; CAD, advanced materials
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, 1991-97
1. No longer subject to the restrictive policies of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, and hoping to combat the violent impression produced by underground terrorist groups demanding secession from Spain, the Basque government sought to ensure the region’s vigorous future by remaking its public identity. The officials thought an international institution of contemporary art would bring them newfound cultural prestige and a steady stream of tourism to Bilbao. The government and Guggenheim foundation selected Gehry’s innovative, dramatic and daring design for it fulfilled all the visions they had.
2. Built alongside the Nervion River in the old industrial heart of the city, the museum seamlessly integrated into the urban context, and serves as a transition between downtown and riverfront. The high visibility of the riverfront also allows a sculptural symbol for the city.
3. The interior of the building is designed around a large, light-filled atrium with views of Bilbao's estuary and the surrounding hills of the Basque country. It is more than 1.5 times the height of Wright’s Guggenheim rotunda. In addition to the giant, long, boat-shaped gallery, there are 18 other galleries for either living artists or dead ones. Half of which follow a classic orthogonal plan that can be identified from the exterior by their stone finishes. The remaining galleries are irregularly shaped and can be identified from the outside by their swirling organic forms and titanium cladding. Many of the galleries receive natural light through skylights, and supplemental light is provided modestly.
4. Spanish limestone is used for some of the exterior surfaces, but titanium is used to clad the more sculptural forms. The cost of the usually expensive material was reduced due to lucky economic coincidence and the use of a repetitive module of panels of titanium.
5. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao not only changed the way that architects and people think about museums, but also boosted Bilbao's economy with its astounding success. In fact, the phenomenon of a city’s transformation following the construction of a significant piece of architecture is now referred to as the “Bilbao Effect.” Twenty years on, the Museum continues to challenge assumptions about the connections between art and architecture today.
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Phaeno Science Center, Wolfsburg, Germany, 1998-2005
2. The science center is located in Wolfsburg, home for Volkswagen, a company town since 1938.
1. It is a hands-on science museum built to broaden the city’s range of attractions. It is part of a series of cultural buildings that were built from the 50s in order to produce enough synergy and urban media to rescue the industrial city, as happened with Guggenheim Bilbao.
2.2 The 12000 m2 museum is located on a triangle site, in junction of the industrial area to the north and residential area to the south, adjacent to the railroad station and Volkswagen’s Autostadt theme park and factory. Its location against the canal create a connection between the two areas of the city, also let Hadid create a plaza on the south side, “a public terrain” facing the city.
3. The building is elevated above the ground with 10 concrete cones that are curving and canted structural elements of different sizes. By doing so, Hadid created a large, covered public space under the building, an extension of the outdoor plaza in front. Hadid set rhomboid-shaped lights into the underside of the building to prevent this artificial topography being too dark.
While all the cones are structural, they also contain functional space, such as gift store, auditorium, entrance hall, and cafe. Here, the structure becomes program. The open, uninterrupted interior is characterized by irregular and articulation of space, where there is a clear division of planes and spaces, but sudden openings between a wall and the other empty and referrals from unexpected perspectives. Large glass surfaces offer a panoramic view of the landscape.
4. The cantilevered volume is made of reinforced concrete, specified self-compacting concrete for the complex geometry and precast panels with openings for glazing, calculated with computer aid. The roof, exposed inside, is made of a grid of massive steel elements, cut by computer-controlled machinery.
5. As Hadid’s other motion-inspired projects, the architecture itself becomes the study in scientific potential. The organic form, being able to adapt and mold itself to the terrain, is made possible by curvilinear methodology that can corporate a multitudinous form without fragmentation, like in Gehry’s Bilbao Museum and Calatrava’s Milwaukee Museum.
6. The Phaeno Science Center is an intriguing hybrid that brings together the enduring notion of architecture as sculpture with a more contemporary search for expressing the dynamic relationships of an information-driven world.
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Milwaukee Art Museum, Quadracci Pavilion, Wisconxin, 1994-2001
1. Calatrava’s Quadracci Pavilion is a complex extended upon the existing War Memorial. It was designed as the entry and temporary exhibition space, also a complement and enhacement of the existing building and site.
2. The pavilion is built on the lakefront of Lake Michigan, occupying 7500 m2 of space. It forms a link between the city of Milwaukee and Michigan Lake, without disrupting the view of the water.
3. Movement from the War Memorial to the new pavilion is directed perpendicularly by an extended pedestrain bridge, which also connects the Museum to downtown.
4. The grand entrance hall is Calatrava’s postmodern interpretation of a Gothic Cathedral, complete with flying buttresses, pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and a central nave topped by a 90-foot-high glass roof.
4.2 Responding to the culture of the lake: the sailboats, the weather, the sense of motion and change, Calatrava designed the Burke Brise Soleil, forming a moveable sunscreen with a 217-foot wingspan.
4.3 The structure incorporates both cutting-edge technology and local craftsmanship. The hand-built structure was made largely by pouring concrete into customized wooden forms.
6. With this crowning element, the building becomes formal – completing the composition, functional – controlling the level of light, symbolic – opening to welcome visitors, and iconic – creating a memorable image for the Museum and the city.

National Museum of Roman Art, near Guadiana River, Spain, 1980-84
1. The museum is dedicated exclusively to art and Roman culture in Merida. Moneo's commission for the museum came in 1979 as part of the Spanish government’s celebration of the bi-millennial anniversary of the founding of Emerita Augusta. It was a replacement for the 1838 museum.
2. The museum is very site-specific. It is located in Merida, a historical city founded by Augustus and Caesar as a habitat for Roman veterans, and it is proximate to Roman antiquity with an amphitheater and a theater nearby.
3. Occupying the space across the street from the theater, the museum is contains within a lofty, above-ground building, where space is articulated by a series of soaring brick arches. This part of the building is a modern take on basilica, with upper-story exhibition spaces replacing galleries along an open, amplified central “nave.” Natural light pours in from skylights above the thin arches and fills the space with a warm glow. Beneath the ground level, a subterranean “crypt” immerses visitors into a pristine Roman-era excavation of the old city, allowing the museum to simultaneously conserve and exhibit the archeology of the site while interpretively replicating its architecture.
4. Thin, elongated brickwork, distinctly non-Roman in its shape and perfect uniformity, gives the museum its trademark appearance. Walls, columns, and arches are made of the same material, but the appearance is far from monotonous, because the dramatic overhead lighting gives it golden hues. The choice of brick is fundamental to its nature – it’s the most ample material at site, and it ties back to Roman tradition in an abstract way.
5. Moneo articulates a strong polemic on antiquity and modernity by freely borrowing ancient motifs and contemporizing them in a way that is neither blindly imitative nor satirically reductive. The triple-banded arches are allusions to the brickwork of the Roman theater across the street, engaging the entirety of the archeological site in a continuous dialogue while asserting a character all their own. The bricks are precise, rhythmic, and beautifully scaled to evoke a sense of refinement only conceivable in a modern project, particularly when partnered with the sleek iron railings and floating concrete slabs of the upper floors. Yet, there is something fundamentally timeless about the simplicity of the structures and their clear invocation of Roman precedent.
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Jewish Museum, Berlin, 1989-99
1. The Berlin Museum dedicated a new building to bring a Jewish presence back to Berlin, and Daniel Libeskind’s radical, zigzag design was chosen.
2. The museum is located in what was West Berlin before the fall of the Wall, at the intersection of Markgrafenstrasse and Lidenstrasse. There are taller apartment buildings around the periphery of the site, which means people living in the upper levels are looking down on this structure, as it’s appended to the more conventional 18th century building of the old Berlin Museum.
3. The two buildings have no visible connection above ground. But there is no door on the street for entering the Jewish Museum, because the idea is that people have to follow a more complex route, and go back to the depth of Berlin’s history to understand Jewish history in Berlin. In order to enter the new museum extension one must enter from the original Baroque museum in an underground corridor. A visitor must endure the anxiety of hiding and losing the sense of direction before coming to a cross roads of three routes.
The plan is deliberately unconventional to give an experience of dislocation. – it’s a rupture of a series of lines. In the zigzagging exhibition spaces a line of "Voids" slices linearly through the entire building - a continuous pathway is violated intentionally. Here, the nonvisible has made itself visible with the voids, marking the absence of Jewish in Berlin’s history.
4. The interior is composed of reinforced concrete which reinforces the moments of the empty spaces and dead ends where only a sliver of light is entering the space. The significance in its scale, its composition, and its unique choice of slot light windows and using the traditional zinc material, which would change, oxidize thru time, to coat the exterior, made the journey through the museum extremely emotional.
6. Said Libeskind, The Jewish Museum is conceived as an emblem in which the Invisible and the Visible are the structural features which have been gathered in this space of Berlin and laid bare in an architecture where the unnamed remains the name which keeps still.
Three conception Libeskind considered while building the museum: the impossibility for understanding history of Berlin without understanding the enormous intellectual, economic and cultural contribution of Jewish citizens; the necessity in integrating the meaning of Holocaust, both physically and spiritually into the memory and consciousness of Berlin; acknowledging the erasure and void of Berlin Jewish life can history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.
His design implemented a radical, formal design as a conceptually expressive tool to represent the Jewish lifestyle before, during, and after the Holocaust.
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Yad Vashem, Mount of Remembrance, Jerusalem, 1993-2005
1. Yad Vashem was built to preserve the memory of the Holocaust with a building that cannot or should not be reused for remembering other thing.
2. It is located on the Mount of Remembrance overlooking Jerusalem’s valley.
3. The Holocaust History Museum, the most essential component of Safdie's 800,000-square-foot project, and the complex's new core, is mainly hidden within the mountain, with its 500 ft elongated, angular spine exposing on the ground to convey a sense of its true scale.
3.2 On the spine, there is a continuous skylight illuminating the walkway, along which a network of galleries locate, below. The galleries, hidden from view when entering the museum, present the Holocaust chapter by chapter, along its historical and thematic course, as visitors proceed along the walkway. The movement along the galleries is directed, which can be seen as an analog to the “directed” life in the camps.
3.3 At the end of the historical narrative the "Hall of Names" forms the final, dramatic display space. The 30 feet high conical structure, open to the sky, houses the personal records of millions of Jewish Holocaust victims. A reciprocal cone, dug out of the natural bedrock, honors those victims whose names will never be known.
4. At one end of the spine, closest to the Museum's entrance and to the Visitors Center, a large triangular prism cantilevers outward over the valley floor, seemingly floating into space. At the opposite end, the museum's low-slung, slender walls burst to form the curved pair of cantilevered wings that mark the Museum's exit.
3.3 The transition from the dark galleries to an open terrace with panoramic view of Jerusalem forest is an architectural gesture for hope, so as the museum itself.
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Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Ohio SU, 1983-89
1. The center is designed to be a multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art. The project was given to Peter Eisenman.
2. It is located on the eastern edge of the campus of Ohio State University.
4. The center is a three-story building thrusts out between two existing structures of Mershon Auditorium and Weigel Hall. The structures are a series of sculptural elements which repeat on the exterior requirements of the interior. To walk thru the site, you see the plinths, the slowly rising grid of scaffolding, and the floating roof top extrusion mimicking the landscape and the horizon. The sense of incompleteness is in tune with the Eisenman's deconstructivist tastes.
3. Once entered from the lower lobby, the interior spreads out as both plain and skyline. The narrow ascending ramp to the galleries provides introduction and a vista of the entire length of the building. Modulated by the play of light from the clerestory and glass-enclosed spine, the three upper galleries flow into one another, their geometric forms producing moments of openness and closure. Strong grid systems dominate the formal language of the building. The black box theater at the northern end is therefore wrapped by grid. Traditional fixed theater elements give way to modular, mobile gear and seating and equipment that allow for performance flexibility.
Also prominent on the museum are a set of red brick turrets that dramatically clash with the hyper-modern aesthetic of the scaffolding. They are allusions to a medieval-style armory that was bulldozed to make room for the museum, an eerie tribute to construction’s destructive side.
5. Most museums built in the 19th century have called upon previous museum architecture for their legitimacy, such as the high neo-classical styled National Gallery of Art and Brooklyn Museum. They firmly establish the posture for art museums and identified them as elevated temples of humanism. Thus taking few if any cues from the past, the design and structure of Wexner building suggest a new and different future for the arts and art centers.
6. This great museum as a testament to the price of translation between theory and actualization.