A World Reshaped by A.I. Needs Museums More Than Ever

If this is the end of the art museum as we’ve known it, the building type sure is going out with a bang.

In recent months a combination of job cuts, slashed funding and mounting political pressure — with the Trump administration demanding that the Smithsonian “remove improper ideology” from its displays — has left museums in the United States reeling. Arts leaders are also continuing to wrestle with whether to de-accession material long ago looted or, on the other end of that negotiation, how best to exhibit significant objects once they’re repatriated. Even some architects find themselves asking why so many museums continue to chase the sugar high of carbon-heavy new construction rather than reimagining the buildings they already have.

The architecture calendar, divertingly and dissonantly enough, appears almost entirely immune to these developments, at least in the short term. The season brings a bumper crop of museum and other art-world openings by some of the field’s most prominent talents, from Taiwan to Paris to Harlem. (The crowded calendar is in part the long tail of the Covid-19 pandemic, which delayed some projects while allowing others to move forward on an accelerated timeline.) The debuts include stand-alone buildings, extensions, satellite locations and remade landscapes — as well as not one but two presidential libraries, which we might think of as a cousin of the museum.

In design sensibility they include the pastoral, the sleekly contemporary and the neo-Brutalist. (Forget those endless debates last year about Brady Corbet’s movie — the style itself is roaring back, in museum buildings asserting a new frankness and brawn.) Each project is an assertion, in its way, that the in-person communion enabled by the physical museum is more crucial than ever in a world being reshaped by digital technology and artificial intelligence.

It remains an open question which trend will ultimately seem the anomalous one. Is it the idea that the art museum as we’ve understood it is under genuine existential threat, a relic of a battered Enlightenment worldview? Or is it the decision by so many museums in a period of extreme flux, by charging ahead with expansion plans by the dozen, some grander than they need to be, to pretend that nothing has changed?

Three of the most anticipated projects, opening in a span of just 16 days, are shaded by controversy. The Princeton University Art Museum, opening Oct. 31; Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City, Nigeria, on Nov. 11; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, on Nov. 15, each features a design team led by David Adjaye and his firm, Adjaye Associates. The once-ascendant Ghanian-British architect, a lead designer of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., has been an architecture world-exile since the Financial Times reported in 2023 that three female former employees had accused him of sexual harassment and misconduct. Adjaye has denied the allegations.

The design process for all three buildings was largely complete when the news broke, meaning that the museums could not part ways with Adjaye, as clients for other projects did, such London’s planned Holocaust Memorial. Instead, the museums have downplayed his involvement while putting the spotlight on the executive architects (the New York firm Cooper Robertson for the two U.S. projects). Princeton has confirmed that Adjaye will not attend the events marking its museum’s opening.

Each project has its own outsize significance. With a stone-aggregate exterior strongly reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo (1959), the Princeton museum returns the muscularity of Brutalist architecture to the heart of the university campus after an absence of more than five decades. Inside it brings together nine interlocking pavilions, holding the museum’s deep collection of Greek and Roman antiquities and Asian art, among other areas of strength, around a dramatic central hall and grand stair. Two pedestrian “art walks” flow through the building, with an eye toward making it a crossroads and connector on campus.

The Nigerian museum is wrapped in concrete and rammed-earth walls, in what Adjaye has called “a kind of abstraction” of Benin City’s architecture before colonization. The Studio Museum features wide glass doors along 125th Street that can be opened to expose a set of stairs descending into the building — what the museum has labeled “an inverted stoop” and a mark of its aspiration to serve as a community hub for Harlem. The facade, a jumbled stack of oversized frames holding recessed windows, is topped by a roof terrace with landscape design by the Harlem-based Studio Zewde, suggesting the museum’s connections to the rest of New York City and the broader art world.

Landscape, Front and Center

The space around the buildings takes the spotlight in another clutch of art-world projects, beginning with the Sept. 21 opening of Calder Gardens in Philadelphia, which sets sculptures by the artist into a garden by Piet Oudolf while displaying Calder’s beloved mobiles and stabiles inside a long, low building of folded metal planes by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron.

Reed Hilderbrand has wrapped a new three-acre garden, including 150 trees, around the Speed Art Museum in Louisville to create the Speed Art Park, opening Oct. 1. The Baltimore landscape firm Unknown Studio has threaded the Nasher Haemisegger Family Sculpture Garden, due Oct. 18, into nine acres of space around Rafael Viñoly’s 2005 Nasher Museum at Art at Duke University, the first museum in North America by the Uruguayan architect, who died in 2023.

At Dia Beacon, a much-anticipated landscape project by Sara Zewde and her New York firm, Studio Zewde, opening in spring 2026, will add an eight-acre meadow, accessible without a museum ticket, to the space south of the main gallery buildings, bolstering storm resistance while trading sections of lawn for native landscapes. According to Dia, “the meadow will reach its full splendor” in 2027.

What’s a Museum Crossed With a Library? A Museumbrary

Other institutions are looking to prominent architects to help them reimagine the museum typology to one degree or another. In the Texas Hill Country, the San Antonio firm Lake Flato is combining galleries and office space with the familiar idiom of the small-town Main Street storefront in Marble Falls, population roughly 10,000. Its ArtHouse will feature rotating displays from the collection of Mickey and Jeanne Klein, heavy on modern and contemporary art, when it opens in October.

The Japanese firm SANAA, founded by the Pritzer Prize laureates Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, will see the completion of its largest cultural project when the Taichung Green Museumbrary, combining a home for the new Taichung Art Museum with a central branch of the Taichung Public Library, debuts in Taiwan in December. The architect Ma Yansong’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a sleek spaceship of a building near the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, will try to pull off the difficult trick of smoothly integrating George Lucas’s “Star Wars” memorabilia with his collection of figurative art by Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth.

Other museums are sticking with the tried-and-true formula of hiring boldfaced names or talented local firms to help them expand in situ. On the Bowery, Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture have doubled the gallery space at the New Museum by adding an angular wing to complement the stack of boxes that make up SANAA’s original 2007 building. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., has tapped Moshe Safdie, designer of its original suite of buildings, to add more than 100,000 square feet of new gallery and public space.

In Oregon, Portland’s Hennebery Eddy Architects and Vinci Hamp Architects of Chicago have teamed up to add a new entry for the Portland Art Museum, the Mark Rothko Pavilion. (The painter grew up in Portland after his family emigrated from Latvia in 1913.) Clad in white-fritted glass and slipped between Pietro Belluschi’s original museum complex and the former Masonic Temple that the museum purchased in 1994, the pavilion will make its debut Nov. 20.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s David Geffen Galleries, a 900-foot-long concrete behemoth spanning Wilshire Boulevard by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, will officially open in April (following a quick sneak preview two months ago, empty of art). During its long gestation it became L.A.’s most polarizing work of architecture in a generation.

Something more like a twinning than an expansion is in store for the Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City, where a new museum dedicated to Frida Kahlo, Museo Casa Kahlo, will open Sept. 27 inside Casa Roja, a house occupied until recently by Mara Romeo Kahlo, the artist’s grandniece and heir. The building is adjacent to Casa Azul, the Kahlo family home and part of Museo Frida Kahlo, but will be operated separately. While the older museum explores Frida Kahlo’s relationship with Diego Rivera, the new one, designed by a team including Mariana Orozco and David Rockwell, will focus on her early life and development as an artist.

Starchitecture’s Last Gasp

If you listen closely, you can hear the last echoes of the Bilbao Effect reverberating across the museum landscape. The idea, born when Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997, was that the surest path to museum glory was through splashy satellite buildings by globe-trotting architects. It will finally exhaust itself when two gargantuan museum projects are completed on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, in the United Arab Emirates.

Joining Jean Nouvel’s sun-dappled 2017 branch of the Louvre will be the Zayed National Museum by Norman Foster and his giant firm Foster and Partners, opening in December as a monument and memorial to Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan. Gehry’s Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, “on track for completion” by the end of the year, according to the emirate’s Department of Culture and Tourism, includes more than 860,000 square feet of interior space, making it one of the largest museum complexes in the world.

Two other prominent museums are expanding without leaving their city limits. In Paris, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art will decamp from its Jean Nouvel-designed steel-and-glass home on Boulevard Raspail, in the 14th arrondissement, to new galleries opening Oct. 25 inside a 19th-century building on Place du Palais-Royal, in the heart of Paris. The French architect has reconfigured the landmark, originally constructed as the Grand Hôtel du Louvre. (No word yet on the foundation’s plans for the older Nouvel building, which opened to great acclaim in 1994.)

The Victoria and Albert Museum will open V & A East, by the Irish firm O’Donnell + Tuomey, in East London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, next spring. The building, with a pleated facade of sand-colored precast concrete panels, is a short walk from — and not be confused with — the wildly popular V & A East Storehouse, by the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which puts the museum’s archive of some half a million works from nearly every creative discipline on display in an open-shelving cabinet of curiosities. When it opened in May, the Storehouse instantly made traditional museum architecture look stuffy and slow-footed.

In Chicago, the Barack Obama Presidential Center — not officially a presidential library, as it won’t contain archives — will spread across 19 acres in Jackson Park, on the city’s South Side. It includes the low-slung Home Court at the Obama Presidential Center, by Moody Nolan, an angular collection of community spaces and basketball courts, the better to indulge the former president’s hoops obsession, along with the site’s big kahuna, a chiseled 225-foot museum tower wrapped in granite panels, by the New York firm Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.

Just outside Medora, North Dakota, meanwhile, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library will open on July 4, 2026, the country’s 250th birthday, in a rammed-earth complex by the prolific Norwegian firm Snohetta on a bluff overlooking the Badlands, just outside Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Roosevelt first visited the area in 1883 to hunt buffalo, describing it as an ideal landscape to pursue “the strenuous life.”

Beyond Museums, Design Highlights

The massive stone-clad United States Embassy Complex in the Nuevo Polanco district of Mexico City, by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Davis Brody Bond, has been opening in phases, unveiling a design symbolic of a progressive era of U.S. diplomatic architecture now being phased out by the Trump Administration as it pursues a more traditional approach. The State Department confirms staff will move in by the end of the year.

The humpbacked, mass-timber Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation at the University of Arkansas’ Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, is the first project in the U.S. by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, the founders of Dublin’s Grafton Architects. Built largely with wood from Arkansas forests, it opens for fall semester as a demonstration project for the potential of wood construction, all the way down to its rainwater gutters made of glued laminated timber.

A soaring new terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport, opening in mid-October, is the work of the Madrid-based Luis Vidal + Arquitectos. The design features a sinuous roofline and tree-like columns, meant to evoke the city’s hilly wooded terrain.

“Bruce Goff: Material Worlds,” an exhibition opening Dec. 21 at the Art Institute of Chicago, celebrates the work of the idiosyncratic Midwestern architect (1904-1982) whom the critic Charles Jencks once dubbed “the Michelangelo of kitsch.”

Christopher Hawthorne is senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture and the former architecture critic for The Los Angeles Times.

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