Designed by Shigeru Ban Architects Europe. Courtesy Shigeru Ban Architects, Europe.

Digital rendering of Centre Pompidou–Metz, Metz, France, by Artefactory, 2006. Building to be completed in 2010.

October 2008 Field Guide

Firstenberg Curates California

Eugene Carchesio

Cinema Remixed and Reloaded

Dark Continents

Cildo Meireles's Dark Materials

Rivane Neuenschwander

Franz West

Open

Lois and Franziska Weinberger

Tadao Ando's Stone Hill Center

Le Futurisme a Paris

The Tropics: Views From the Middle of the Globe

Nam June Paik Art Center

Frank Gehry Paul Klee Renzo Piano When in Turin for... Artissima 16 When in... Chicago Guggenheim Goes to Abu Dhabi Cult of Personality Five Pritzker Winners to Help Design French Arts Center

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What hath Frank Gehry wrought? Once he unveiled his radical design for the 1997 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain—which, with its titanium contours and space-age flash, has consistently overshadowed the art it’s intended to hold—the international race to build the headiest museum (with the starriest architect name attached to it) was on. Since then, such buildings in locales both aggressively art-minded (LA, Berlin) and less so (Las Vegas, Denver) have gone up at alarming speed even while museum budgets, and the exhibitions they’re meant to fund, have faltered. Going on view this month in Oslo is a show revealing the breadth of the 21st-century museum-building boom. The show presents 27 projects produced since 2000—encompassing Asia, Australia, Europe, and the US—and traces the incipient trends as reflected in museums like Gigon/Guyer’s beauteous Kunstmuseum Basel; the undulating hill-like forms of the Zentrum Paul Klee by Renzo Piano in nearby Bern; Morger, Diegelo, and Kerezs’s black basalt box design for the Kunstmuseum in Liechtenstein; and Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines’s space-station-like Centre Pompidou–Metz in France. Get ready for liftoff, museumgoers.

"Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings"> is on display at National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design from October 10, 2008—November 1, 2008.

"Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.