I didn’t do a post last week after I went to hear a public conversation organised by Gagosian between Nicholas Serota and Julian Rose about Julian’s new book about museums, Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture and Public Space. I wanted to read the book. I have now done so (https://papress.com/products/building-culture). It’s very good, based on sixteen conversations/discussions (he calls them interviews but he contributes much more than just the questions) with sixteen major architects who have focused on the design of museums internationally. Because of the layout of the book, they seem to be mostly men, but that is because Denise Scott Brown, Kazuyo Sejima and Annabelle Selldorf all have surnames towards the end of the alphabet.

In the conversation, I came away particularly impressed by the lay-out of the 21st. Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa and hadn’t realised that the original competition was for a museum and community facilities to be treated separately and it was SANAA who suggested putting them together in a way which manages to be both beautifully coherent structurally, but also complex in the way the galleries are arranged.

The interview with Denise Scott Brown makes clear how much of a pioneer she was – more than Bob – in thinking about spatial layouts and the movement of people through the building. She describes the Sainsbury Wing as ‘a pop building in the sense that it considers the populace’.

Cumulatively, it’s a profound meditation on how museums have, and are evolving. I found it particularly interesting in the light of the current competition for the West Wing of the British Museum, not least because there is a long interview with Shohei Shigematsu who works with Rem Koohaas overseeing his museum projects.