Fondation Louis Vuitton Todd Eberle

While grand museum expansions remained suspect, 2014’s best architecture featured smart, responsive design

In 2014, grand museum expansions by world famous architects remained suspect. Loud dissent erupted in January when the Museum of Modern Art announced its plan to demolish the highly regarded American Folk Art Museum to make way for an ambitious rejiggering and 40,000-square-foot gallery addition by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. In June, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ever so quietly allowed that plans for a gallery-hotel-condo-combo skyscraper by Frank Gehry might be built right across from an already expansive plan to add 410,000 square feet of new spaces by Peter Zumthor, the Swiss architects’ architect. Trying to stop the Frick mansion museum from fulfilling a 70-year-old plan to grow a new wing by deleting a 1972 viewing-only garden has caught on as a cause. 

At the same time, staggering attendance numbers are becoming ever more common. According to an annual survey by the Art Newspaper released in March, the National Palace Museum in Taipei received more than 10,000 visitors a day for two different shows in 2013, while in Paris, masterworks by Salvador Dalí attracted over 7,000 a day to the Centre Pompidou. This July, the Metropolitan Museum of Art reported over six million visitors a year for four years in a row......Continue Reading

> via The Wall Street Journal