I have been reading Béatrice Grenier’s new book, Architecture for Culture: Re-thinking Museums, an exceptionally wide-ranging study of the changing morphology of mostly recent museums, inspired by a visit to the National Archives of Publication and Culture in Hangzhou, although compared to the museums she considers later in the book, this seems a relatively traditional combination of archive, museum and library, which were often combined in the nineteenth-century, as, not least, at the British Museum.  It looks amazing, designed by the inaptly named Amateur Architecture Studio.

The Museum du Quai Branly, so revolutionary in its time, already looks conceptually conservative and, indeed, was criticised at the time that it opened by James Clifford.

Having written myself about the Louvre Abu Dhabi, I admired her very clear account of the way it is structured and there are beautiful photographs of the Museum under construction – a combination of a souk and a universal museum.

Then, there is a description of the Fondation Cartier where she works as Director of Strategic Projects and International Programs.  It looks amazing under construction.  But can movable floors really be made to work ?

The merging of landscape and the museum is a very coherent chapter embracing the remodelling of the American Museum of Natural History by Studio Gang, the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, Bjarke Ingels’s Kistefos Museum in Norway and the sensationally beautiful, but apparently empty Zaishui Art Museum in Rizhao, another conceptually innovative museum in China.

Then we get M+, more as bill board across the water than as collection, although I’m pleased to learn that it owns the Archigram archive.

The book is about conceptual innovation in museum architecture and the expansion of the Museum beyond its walls.  I don’t see it as a primer for the new wing of the National Gallery or, for that matter, the future of the Louvre.