Art Centre Basel’s third museum architecture exhibition since the year 2000, Museums in the 21st Century: Beyond the Building – goes a step further than merely looking at museum buildings. It rather examines another interesting phenomenon of the continued museum building boom since the 1990s: Just as in Bilbao, many new museums are built in abandoned or derelict urban areas, or, as in the Gulf, in newly constructed cities.
By means of the so-called “Bilbao Effect”, the deliberate grafting of a spectacular museum building into formerly unspectacular areas, it is intended to revive a neighbourhood, a city or an entire region economically and culturally by the formation of cultural clusters. This will attract cultural tourism and consequentially generate further inward investment and cultural growth. Equally significant and worth examining is how these clusters change or assimilate the environment and are, in turn, changed by it.
The exhibition will display 15 selected building-projects in a cultural cluster context. Each project will be presented by means of:
The exhibition can be booked for a duration of 3 months per venue during the period from 2012 through 2017. We suggest that 600 m² or more would be required for a generous exhibition design.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive, richly illustrated scholarly catalogue, printed by a renowned European Publisher (yet to be designated), and will be an architectural book in its own right.
The concept and volume will be similar to our first and second publications on modern museum architecture (please check our detailed list of catalogues here).
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