Near Brumadinho, Brazil, about 60 kilometers from Belo Horizonte in the state of Minas Gerais, the Instituto Inhotim is an open-air museum that combines art and nature with site-specific contemporary art in a sprawling landscape of botanical gardens. 

Inhotim began in the 1980s when the mining businessman Bernardo Paz acquired land to expand his ranch and protect the surrounding natural environment. Influenced by the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and the artist Tunga, Paz converted the property into a botanical garden to house his growing art collection. The site opened to visitors in 2006 and later transitioned into a non-profit institute that is a pillar of the local economy as well as an international art destination. 

The institute comprises 5,000 acres of environmental preserves with more than 4,300 plant species from every continent. While much of the land remains wild, about 350 acres are open to the public, featuring 20 permanent pavilions and four temporary exhibition spaces. The collection of 700 works includes all media from the 1960s to the present, but is characterized by large-scale commissions that are either integrated into the landscape or housed in structures that are themselves significant works of architecture.

Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion surrounds a 202-meter-deep well equipped with microphones that transmit real-time sounds of the earth’s movements into a circular glass building.

The Galeria Adriana Varejão, designed by architect Rodrigo Cerviño Lopez, is a concrete monolith containing works that explore colonialism as well as Brazil’s history and environment.

A gallery for Yayoi Kusama houses two immersive installations, and her Narcissus Garden floats 750 stainless steel spheres in a reflecting pool, a version of the sculpture first presented at the 1966 Venice Biennale. 

The collection includes works by Claudia Andujar, Ólafur Elíasson, Abdias Nascimento, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, and Doris Salcedo, with about 60 artists from 40 countries.

In 2024 Inhotim opened the Clara Arte Resort, the first and only hotel located directly within the grounds. Because of its relatively remote location and vast scale, visiting Inhotim is more like a pilgrimage than a typical museum visit. It requires effort to get there, and intention to explore its forests, gardens, and galleries. For those who make the journey, Inhotim is an Aruanda of art and nature.

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At Artipelag, a museum overlooking a bay in the Stockholm archipelago, an exhibition by Mats Bigert and Lars Bergström considers the intersection of culture and climate change. I stormens öga (In the storm’s eye) comprises works from 1990 to 2017 focusing on weather, climate, and human activity.

Artipelag was founded in 2012 by the Swedish entrepreneurs and designers Björn and Lillemor Jakobson with a mission that combines art, nature, and cuisine. It is one of Stockholm’s largest art museums, with more than 10,000 square meters, on a 54-acre wooded site about 12 miles east of Stockholm on Baggensfjärden bay. The name “Artipelag” is a combination of Art, Activities, and Archipelago, referencing a multi-disciplinary program set within the natural environment. It is characteristically Swedish.

Bigert and Bergström met at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 1986 and have collaborated together since then, focusing on themes of humanity, nature, and technology with sculptures, large-scale installations, and conceptual projects.

One of their most ambitious works, realized in 2015 and represented in the current exhibition, concentrated on a geo-engineering project on top of Kebnekaise, the highest mountain in Sweden. Kebnekaise has two main peaks, and in recent years the southern one has lost some 25 meters of elevation as the surrounding glacier melts in the warming climate. On the summer solstice in 2015, Bigert and Bergström deployed a 500-square-meter shade cloth on the peak, which is thought to have saved 30 centimeters of glacial ice from melting during the warmest summer month.

In I stormens öga, a remnant of the Kebnekaise rescue blanket covers a replica of the peak, split down the middle so that visitors can pass through a modeled version of the glacier, surrounded by a series of photographs, panoramas, videos, and materials from the 2015 project.

A recent work, Solar Egg, reimagines a sauna as a social sculpture. It was created last year for Kiruna, Sweden, as a meeting place to incubate ideas and conversations about the future. Kiruna is Sweden’s northernmost city, notable for its plan to relocate because of mining-related subsidence. The sauna is a traditional space for Swedes to enjoy warmth and reflection, and Solar Egg was designed to reflect Kiruna’s environment and nurture conversations about the city’s future. After Kiruna, the faceted, mirrored egg traveled to the Institut Suédois in Paris before its installation at Artipelag, where it appears as a folly within the natural landscape.

The exhibition’s featured image, a work titled Winterization, is described as a readymade that Bigert and Bergström found within a natural history museum in Stockholm. Polar bears are an unfortunate representative of climate change as the Arctic environment warms and their numbers decline. This one, shot during an expedition in Svalbard in the 20th century and now used as a prop for winter tires, has something in common with Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

From the duo’s 1991-93 series Climate Chambers I, two installations require visitors to experience environmental extremes from within “inverted sculptures.” In Steam Chamber, a massive steel rhinoceros slowly erodes into rust within a room saturated to 100 percent humidity, and in Storm Chamber, visitors are enveloped in powerful winds, with each sculptural room testing the boundaries between experience and endurance.

I stormens öga examines how weather and climate affect and threaten humans – as well as the inverse – and also functions as a retrospective of the 30-year collaboration of Bigert and Bergström. The exhibition opened on October 27 and continues through February 25, 2018.

Bigert & Bergström from Artipelag.

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On November 11, the Louvre Abu Dhabi opened on Saadiyat Island, a cultural district off the coast of the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. The museum was designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and is the result of a €1 billion agreement between Abu Dhabi and France.

The project was announced in 2007 with a contract in which Abu Dhabi agreed to pay €400 million to use the Louvre brand name for a period of 30 years, and €574 million more for French expertise and loans. The Agence France-Muséums, which includes the Louvre and 16 other institutions, will lend up to 300 artworks during the next 10 years; develop four temporary exhibitions each year for 15 years; and provide management and support for 20 years. The deal also included a €25 million renovation of part of the Louvre’s Pavilion de l’Horologe. Beyond this €1 billion agreement, Abu Dhabi paid for the €600 million construction cost of the new museum.

Jean Nouvel, whose other cultural projects include the Fondation Cartier, Musée du quai Branly, and Philharmonie de Paris, is especially suited for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. One of his best-known works is the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, a landmark building which established a French-Arab connection with Arabic design for a modern and international cultural institution. Nouvel has also designed the National Museum of Qatar, which is expected to open next year.

The 24,000-square-meter Louvre Abu Dhabi comprises 55 individual white gallery buildings arranged as a village on an archipelago in the Persian Gulf. The entire complex is sheltered by a vast dome structure that appears to float above the cluster of museum buildings. The 180-meter dome is supported by only four columns, which are hidden within buildings to create the floating effect. The dome weighs some 7,500 tons and consists of eight layers – four outer layers of stainless steel and four inner layers of aluminum separated by a five-meter steel frame.

The dome is the project’s defining characteristic, and is inspired by cupolas and mashrabiya windows found in traditional Arabic architecture. Its complex pattern results from geometric designs that are repeated at various sizes and angles in each of the eight layers, forming 7,850 star shapes. As the sun passes through, dappled light provides an ever-changing effect named the “rain of light.” At night, the dome becomes like a constellation when it is illuminated from within.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi has about 600 artworks in its own collection so far. The Agence France-Muséums has guided the acquisitions, but some early speculation was that the sheikhs might exclude nudity and non-Muslim religious art. However, a Bellini painting of the Madonna and Child, a Roman bronze of the Apollo Belvedere, and a Yemeni manuscript of the Hebrew Bible are among many works already on view that provide evidence to the contrary.

Unlike the Louvre in Paris, which does not collect, for example, American art or works created after 1850, the Louvre Abu Dhabi aims to be a universal museum with works from all places and periods, including contemporary art. Its inaugural exhibitions are described as twelve “chapters” that are curated thematically rather than by geography or chronology. Examples include Civilizations and Empires, A Modern World?, and A Global Stage, with works that range from a 2,700-year-old Grecian sphinx, to an Impressionist painting by Gustave Caillebotte, to a site-specific commissioned installation by Jenny Holzer.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi is the first universal museum in the Arab world, the Louvre’s first international satellite, and the first museum to open on Saadiyat Island, a $27 billion development off the coast of Abu Dhabi. The island’s planned cultural district includes the Louvre, a maritime museum designed by Tadao Ando, the Zayed National Museum designed by Norman Foster, a performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid, and a Guggenheim museum designed by Frank Gehry.

While the Guggenheim and Zayed National Museum show no signs of progress (the British Museum recently terminated its partnership with the Zayed National Museum), Saadiyat Island does have a marina, luxury resorts and residential developments, a campus for New York University, and Manarat Al Saadiyat, a gallery complex. The emirate estimates that the island will be home to 150,000 people by 2020.

The UAE is a study in modern economics, architecture, urbanization, and now cultural development. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is the result of a unique international partnership described as “a new cultural beacon, bringing different cultures together to shine fresh light on the shared stories of humanity.” The museum, to say nothing of the larger ambition of Saadiyat Island, already changes perspectives and shifts the world’s cultural center of gravity further towards the East.

Louvre Abu Dhabi from The Art Newspaper.

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On September 22, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) opened in Cape Town, South Africa. It’s a major development, locally and globally, and is described in superlatives: the first major contemporary art museum in Africa; the largest museum to open in Africa in a century; and the largest contemporary African art museum in the world.

The museum’s benefactor is Jochen Zeitz, the former CEO of Puma. Zeitz is a major collector of contemporary African art whose collection, assembled with the advice of Mark Coetzee, the new museum’s chief curator and executive director, is on loan to MOCAA for his lifetime.

Zeitz initiated the museum through a partnership with the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, the developer of a 300-acre commercial, entertainment, and residential site adjacent to Cape Town’s shipping port and cruise terminal. The site, at the center of the V&A Waterfront, was a disused grain silo, built in 1921, 100 feet tall, with a honeycomb maze of 42 concrete tubes.

The London-based architect Thomas Heatherwick was commissioned to transform the 100,000-square-foot building. Within its raw concrete shell, he carved out a massive central atrium topped with glass and surrounded by 80 white cube galleries. The galleries occupy six floors in addition to a rooftop sculpture garden, public education spaces, and six research centers dedicated to art education, curatorial practice, performance art, photography, film, and fashion.

The development also included The Silo, a six-floor luxury hotel above the museum. The V&A Waterfront funded the $38 million project and retains ownership of the building, but has given it to Zeitz MOCAA on a 99-year renewable lease. Such partnerships are essential because the museum has no public funding. Jochen Zeitz and the V&A Waterfront will support the museum for a decade, but it aims to become financially independent with a $46 million endowment by 2022 to support operations and acquisitions. It already has support from BMW to sponsor installations in the atrium for three years; Standard Bank for free admission days; and the South African philanthropist Wendy Fisher for 13 curatorial positions.

The museum’s financial model is ambitious, and its large curatorial staff is notable even for a museum of its size. There are three full-time curators and plans to hire eight more, plus three adjunct curators, 11 assistant curators, and four “curators-at-large.” In addition, there are 11 trainee curators and funding for 14 more. These 25 trainees are expected to spend a year or two at Zeitz MOCAA and then move on to other museums and galleries in Africa, developing a professional and specialized infrastructure across the continent.

Zeitz MOCAA is an incredible development within Cape Town, and is set to be influential for the entire continent. Until now, African art was typically relegated to ethnography or represented only by diaspora in contemporary museums elsewhere. This museum may completely shift the narrative with a new forum for African artists and audiences. Keep your eyes on Cape Town.

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The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) has received a grant from the Getty Foundation to support a plan for the long-term care and maintenance of its landmark Brutalist building. The museum has the most important art collection in Latin America, but is most recognized for its modernist architecture and installation design.

MASP was founded in 1947 by Assis Chateaubriand, who appointed the Italian curator Pietro Maria Bardi as the first director. They acquired a major collection of European art by 1960, including works by Titian, Rembrandt, Goya, Monet, van Gogh, and Picasso. The museum’s permanent collection is the most significant in Latin America and the Southern Hemisphere, with more than 8,000 works that include European masterpieces as well as Greek and Roman antiquities, African, Asian, Brazilian, and Pre-Columbian art.

Pietro Maria Bardi was director of MASP for nearly half a century until 1996, but his contributions are less well-known than those of his wife, the architect Lina Bo Bardi. She was only 32 years old in 1947 when she designed the conversion of one of Chateaubriand’s office buildings into a temporary museum. During the next decade she became a Brazilian citizen, co-founded a magazine, joined the faculty at the Universidade de São Paulo, and designed the famous Casa de Vidro.

In 1957 work began for a new museum building on Avenida Paulista, São Paulo’s main financial and cultural center. The chosen site was an important public space and came with the restriction that no building could block its panoramic views. Lina Bo Bardi’s solution was to split the building into two, with one part constructed into the hillside and the other part raised up 26 feet above the ground. The project was completed in 1968 with a Brutalist aesthetic that is a top example of Brazilian modern architecture.

MASP totals over 110,000 square feet. The lower building contains a library, auditorium, restaurant, and operational spaces. Its roof is at street level with Avenida Paulista, forming a public plaza with views onto the city. The upper building hovers 26 feet above the plaza, with its entire mass suspended on four pillars and two concrete beams that span 243 feet.

The box of the upper building contains two floors of galleries with glass walls, open floor plans, and a bespoke modern installation design. Rather than walls, which would interrupt the free span of the galleries, paintings are installed on glass panels and appear to float throughout the space.

In Bo Bardi’s original design, paintings were suspended on tempered glass set in concrete bases, with labels on the reverse of each panel. The glass easels were complementary to the architecture, but more significantly, disrupted the traditional linear, chronological, and hierarchical design of museums in favor of visitors choosing their own paths. It was avant-garde art historical decolonization.

These original installations were removed in 1996, but have been restored under the leadership of MASP artistic director Adriano Pedrosa. The museum’s curatorial team and METRO Arquitetos researched and reconstructed more than 100 of Bo Bardi’s easels, with some updated engineering. The re-installation opened in December 2015 with 117 artworks from the permanent collection.

Lina Bo Bardi designed a number of other cultural projects in Brazil including the restoration of the Solar do Unhao in Salvador, the Teatro Oficina in São Paulo, and the SESC Pompéia. MASP, beyond its modern aesthetics, achieves social and cultural benefits with its plaza as a popular gathering place for Paulistanos and its galleries as a new model for museum exhibition design.

Before MASP, the Getty Foundation awarded a grant to Bo Bardi’s Casa de Vidro in 2016. Because they were constructed with experimental materials and engineering strategies, these works of modern architecture require specific conservation and maintenance plans.

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In Santander, about 60 miles west of Bilbao on Spain’s north coast, the new Centro Botín opened on Friday, June 23. The waterfront arts center was designed by Renzo Piano as a new regional museum along with the redevelopment of an urban park.

Unlike the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Centre Pompidou Málaga (Spain’s most notable and most recent museum projects, respectively) Centro Botín was completely privately funded. It was commissioned by the Botín family, whose Banco Santander is the largest bank in Spain. The Fundación Botín funded the center’s €80 million construction cost and will provide an annual budget of €12.5 million.

Centro Botín is Renzo Piano’s first building in Spain. The 10,285 square-meter structure is comprised of two wings. The west building contains 2,500 square meters of galleries on two floors, and the east building contains classrooms, an auditorium, restaurant, shop, and rooftop terrace. The two wings are separated in the middle and raised up above the ground to extend views from the nearby Jardines de Pereda to the bay.

About €16 million of the construction cost was to redevelop the park adjacent to the museum. The building site was formerly a parking lot, separating the Jardines de Pareda from Santander Bay. By moving a road and a parking structure underground, the project doubled the size of the park, tripled the amount of green space, and reconnected the city to the bay. The park also gained an amphitheater, which functions as an open-air cinema with a screen on the museum’s west façade.

Centro Botín is characteristic of other Renzo Piano museum buildings (he has designed more than 25 to date) with natural light and a carefully balanced relationship to the surrounding environment. The exterior is clad with 270,000 ceramic plates that reflect the colors of the sea and sky. Inside, ventilation systems and lighting tracks are exposed, and full-height windows provide views of the bay.

Before Centro Botín opened, it gave memberships for unlimited free admission to about 80,000 locals and announced a schedule of free programs in the park and amphitheater. The museum was inaugurated by King Felipe VI of Spain, and also opened a permanent sculpture installation in the Jardines by the Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias.

While Centro Botín is a major cultural development, it does not aim to replicate the “Bilbao effect” of mass tourism and blockbuster exhibitions. Its primary missions are research, training, and dissemination. It has a research partnership with Yale University, and the exhibitions program has a particular focus on researching and cataloguing Spanish drawings from the 16^th century. One of the museum’s inaugural exhibitions was a group of 80 drawings by Francisco de Goya on loan from the Prado. In addition to changing exhibitions, the center will show works from the collection of the Fundación Botín.

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After a three-year expansion and renovation, the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened to the public this weekend. The museum has more than doubled in size and is now the largest modern and contemporary art museum in the US.

SFMOMA was founded in 1935 and occupied the Beaux-Arts style War Memorial Building for 60 years. In 1995, the museum opened a building designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta. That same year, interestingly, SFMOMA was one of the first museums to launch an internet website.

The new building was designed the Norwegian firm Snøhetta, whose notable projects have included the Oslo Opera House and the Lillehammer Art Museum. Rather than modify the Botta building, Snøhetta’s 235,000-square-foot expansion rises above it with a white façade that conceals its mass with rippling forms, outdoor terraces, and setback upper levels.

On its first and second floors, the museum’s new building offers some 45,000 square feet of gallery space that is open to the public for free. The inaugural installation includes Richard Serra’s 2006 Sequence.

The new building fills seven floors with gallery space, and three more floors with a library, classrooms, theater, café, shop, and staff areas. SFMOMA now totals 460,000 square feet with 170,000 square feet of gallery space—20,000 square feet more than MoMA in New York.

Four floors contain galleries dedicated to the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, which comprises 1,100 postwar and contemporary works owned by the founders of Gap. The former SFMOMA trustees gave their collection as a long-term loan, with a requirement that the current installation of about 260 works must be repeated once every decade for 100 years.

The expansion project broke ground in 2013, but SFMOMA’s capital campaign began in 2009. The museum raised a total of $610 million by late last year, counting $305 million for construction costs, $245 million for endowment funds, and $60 million for programming and operating expenses. In addition to the new building’s free public gallery spaces, SFMOMA now offers free admission for visitors under age 18.

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The 14^th edition of Art Basel in Miami Beach closed on December 6 and the fair was as stupendous as ever. 267 galleries from 32 countries attracted 77,000 visitors to the convention center, and more than 20 satellite art fairs expanded Miami Art Week beyond South Beach into downtown, Wynwood, and the Design District.

For this post-Basel post, we’re keen to look beyond the fair. Miami’s art institutions are developing at incredible speed, and the city has quickly become a year-round cultural destination.

Last December, the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) celebrated the first year of its landmark building by Herzog & de Meuron. This year, PAMM has a new director. Franklin Sirmans, the former Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA, has just taken the challenge. PAMM does not have a strong permanent collection, its endowment campaign is stalled at $20 million with a goal of $70 million, and there is still contention about the naming of the building for $40 million, notwithstanding that it was the largest cultural gift ever made in Miami.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, which was also in a new location last year, has also just announced a director. Ellen Salpeter, the former Deputy Director of External Affairs at the Jewish Museum in New York, is ICA’s first permanent director since it split from the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. The ICA is in a temporary space in Miami’s Design District, but will be in a new building designed by the Spanish firm Aranguren + Gallegos Arquitectos by mid-2017.

A new arts and cultural center, Faena Forum, will open in Miami Beach in 2016. The geometric building was designed by Rem Koolhaas and will support programming in art, science, technology, politics, urbanism, and Latin American culture as a satellite location of Faena Art Buenos Aires.

Not yet under construction, the proposed Latin American Art Museum could become the world’s largest Latin American art museum in 2018. The $50 million museum is being developed by art dealer Gary Nader along with two residential and hotel towers that will help fund the museum. The $350 million project is designed by Fernando Romero, the architect of Mexico City’s Museo Soumaya.

A smaller but still significant project is the $7.5 million expansion of the Bass Museum of Art. The museum was founded in 1963 and its original building dates to 1933, so the Bass is historic in Miami Beach. The expansion will increase the museum’s square feet by 30 percent when it re-opens in 2016. The project is designed by Arata Isozaki, who designed the 2002 expansion.

There’s also the $300 million Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science set to open next to PAMM in 2016, transforming Miami’s Bicentennial Park into Museum Park. And since 2014, new directors have been appointed to the Wolfsonian-FIU, the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, the Lowe Art Museum, and FIU’s Frost Art Museum.

That’s a lot to consider, but we cannot forget about the fair.

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The Centre Pompidou, France’s national museum of modern art, has opened a satellite location in Málaga, Spain. It is the museum’s first location outside of France, and it opened in the same week as an outpost of the State Russian Museum in Málaga. Together, the two satellite museums are expected to attract 400,000 visitors to the Andalusian city that has become established as a cultural destination.

Málaga is a coastal city of about 570,000 and is popularly known as the birthplace of Pablo Picasso. The city has about 30 museums including the Museo Picasso, which has a collection of 285 works from the artist’s family, and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (CAC), a contemporary kunsthalle museum, which both opened in 2003. The Museo Carmen Thyssen, a private collection of 19^th century Spanish paintings that was previously in Madrid’s Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, opened in 2011.

Francisco de la Torre, Málaga’s mayor since 2000, is credited for much of the city’s cultural expansion. Notwithstanding a debt of €600 million, Málaga has invested €100 million in arts and cultural developments in the past decade. The city has budgeted €4.2 million for the Pompidou this year, including an initial fee of €2.1 million and operational support that will total €5 million over a five-year term. The budget for the Russian museum, which has a ten-year agreement, is €3.7 million, including €500,000 for building renovations and €400,000 for exhibitions.

The Centre Pompidou Málaga is in a retrofitted building known as El Cubo. The harbor-front site was commissioned by the city and designed by the Spanish firm L35 as a commercial and cultural center. The project was completed in 2013, and a €6.7 million renovation converted it into 6,000 square meters of gallery space for the Pompidou with a large cube-shaped skylight as its most recognizable feature.

The State Russian Museum is in a 1927 building that was originally a tobacco factory. Part of the old factory became an automobile museum in 2010, and another 2,300 square meters will host exhibitions loaned from St. Petersburg for the next decade.

The CAC is similarly in a 1939 industrial building that has been repurposed. The Museo Picasso and the Museo Carmen Thyssen are each in palaces that date to the 16^th century. Málaga’s new museums in historic buildings are a notable contrast to Bilbao’s Guggenheim.

The Centre Pompidou Málaga is only the most recent development of the museum beyond Paris under initiatives to decentralize the national collections. Under the leadership of Alain Seban, whose term as President ended this month, the Pompidou launched a program of temporary museums to show its collection of more than 100,000 works.

The museum opened its first satellite in Metz, about 170 miles east of Paris, in 2010 with a €69 million building designed by Shigeru Ban.

From 2011 to 2013, the Pompidou hosted pop-up museums in six French cities that were attended by more than 275,000 visitors. Libourne, which hosted a pop-up in 2011, and Maubeuge, near the Belgian border, have each submitted proposals for satellite museums. Speculation about additional venues indicates Mexico and Brazil as frontrunners, but it is unknown whether Seban’s successor, Serge Lasvignes, will continue the Pompidou’s expansion concept.

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Last summer we explored designs and plans for The Broad: codylee.co/the-broad.

As the project nears completion, we had an exclusive sneak peek on February 15 in advance of the museum’s September 20 opening.

The Broad is a major addition to LA’s Grand Avenue cultural district that includes MOCA and the Music Center. The $140 million building was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with a “veil and vault” concept that permits natural light into the galleries. The much-anticipated museum opened for a preview this Sunday with a rare opportunity to see its third floor – an impressive uninterrupted 35,000-square-foot gallery space – before the installation of partition walls.

The building’s first and second floors are still under construction and unfortunately inaccessible. Rather than the stairway or cylindrical glass elevator that ascend through the vault at the core of the building, visitors on Sunday arrived at the third floor through a freight elevator that will soon transport works by Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, and Cindy Sherman for the museum’s inaugural exhibition.

The honeycomb-like exterior filters daylight into the third floor through the roof and glass walls on the north, east, and south sides. From inside, the veil provides limited views onto Walt Disney Concert Hall, MOCA, and The Broad’s new public plaza that has been planted with 100-year-old olive trees. LA’s perpetual sunshine, permitted through more than 300 skylights, is a primary feature of the gallery. The building’s scale and light conditions make it feel surprisingly understated and not at all austere.

For this one-day event, titled Sky-lit: Volume, Light, and Sound, The Broad commissioned two installations. BJ Nilsen’s DTLA was an audio collage of recordings from neighborhoods surrounding the museum, and after sunset, Yann Novak’s Stillness projected atmospheric images of Los Angeles and Seattle onto the gallery’s 200-foot west wall. The installations emphasized The Broad’s architecture, site, and environment.

When the museum opens in September, it will house 2,000 postwar and contemporary artworks from The Broad Art Foundation and the personal collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. It will operate with an endowment of more than $200 million and admission will be free. Sunday’s preview event sold out within minutes of availability and media buzzed with images all day. Meanwhile, a line formed across the street for admission to the final day of MOCA’s Andy Warhol exhibition.

See codylee.co/the-broad for our earlier post.

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It has been a great few weeks—actually, a great year—for new museum buildings. It gets even better this weekend when the Harvard Art Museums will open a new building. The incredible structure, designed by Renzo Piano, unites Harvard’s three separate museums under a vast glass roof.

The Fogg Museum with American and western European art, the Busch-Reisinger Museum with Germanic and northern European art, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum with Asian, Islamic, and Indian art share administration but previously operated in separate buildings. In 2006, a renovation and expansion project was announced to renovate the facilities and combine the three museums. Renzo Piano was selected as the architect and construction began in 2008.

The red brick exterior of the Fogg’s 1927 Georgian Revival-style building has been preserved, and its original travertine-vaulted courtyard is a significant feature of the renovated space. An entirely new structure, covered in New England-y gray cedar, expands the museum to a total of 240,000 square feet with 43,000 square feet of gallery spaces, a public courtyard, shop, café, theater, classrooms, and research spaces. All of this is contained under the transparent glass roof, which is the most distinctive characteristic of the new facility.

Carefully controlled natural light is a hallmark of Renzo Piano’s museum buildings. At Harvard, the pyramidal glass roof above the historic building streams daylight onto the arcaded courtyard of the original building and into glass-walled spaces of the new building’s upper floors. A system of 1,800 glass louvers over triple-insulated glass panels and automated shades protects artworks from direct light and ultraviolet rays.

Piano has called the glass roof a “glazed lantern” and a “light machine.” Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, calls the museum a “teaching machine” for visitors to learn about the newly combined collection of 250,000 objects.

The Art Study Center allows visitors to request works for close and extended viewing; the Lightbox Gallery provides technology to further explore museum collections and archives; the Special Exhibitions Gallery presents new research on artistic practice; the University Galleries allow professors to set aside specific artworks for study in their courses; and, on the top floor, the glass-walled Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies lets visitors see conservators and researchers at work. The new building, and its programs, extend accessibility and transparency.

The Harvard Art Museums will open to the public on November 16 after six years of renovations and expansion. The project is estimated to have cost around $350 million, including $250 million for renovations and $67 million for operating endowments.

Bonus facts:

– Renzo Piano has designed at least 25 museum projects, including the Broad and Resnick pavilions at LACMA, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’art Contemporain in Lyon, and the Fondation Beyeler near Basel.

– The Straus Center has a collection of over 2,000 pigments that can be used for restoration and are now visible through glass walls.

– The Fogg building’s Calderwood Courtyard was designed after the façade of the canon’s house of the 15th-century church of San Biagio in Montepulciano, Italy.

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This weekend, the Palm Springs Art Museum will open its new Architecture and Design Center in a restored mid-century modern building. The A+D Center is an important extension of the museum’s facilities as well as its exhibitions and programs.

The Palm Springs Art Museum has a permanent collection of more than 24,000 objects with particular strengths in modern and contemporary art, architecture and design, and photography. Its campus, at the base of the San Jacinto Mountains, was designed by the renowned mid-century architect E. Stewart Williams and occupies a prominent site in downtown Palm Springs.

In 2012, the museum opened a satellite location in nearby Palm Desert. The Galen and the Faye Sarkowsky Sculpture Garden, also called the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Desert, includes four exhibitions galleries, an education wing, and a four-acre sculpture garden. The Galen has the distinction of being the first new LEED Silver rated building constructed in Southern California.

Palm Springs is renowned for its concentration of mid-century modern architecture, and the museum’s programs have expanded to include exhibitions and research in architecture and design. Its permanent collection even includes the house and archives of the modernist architect Albert Frey.

In 2011, the Palm Springs Art Museum acquired the former Santa Fe Federal Savings & Loan building in downtown Palm Springs. The 1961 structure is a classic international style pavilion, and was designed by E. Stewart Williams who also designed the main museum campus. The bank building had been vacant for several years but was protected as a historic site. The museum’s restoration removed interior walls to create a large exhibition space, but otherwise preserved the structure, including the bank vault, terrazzo floors, and exterior glass walls.

The Architecture and Design Center is a significant example of mid-century modern architecture, and the Palm Springs Art Museum will develop it as the primary site for archives, research, and exhibitions related to architecture and design. In addition to these, the A+D Center’s programs are expected to broaden the museum’s audiences.

The typical (retiree) demographics of Palm Springs have changed in recent years.  Coachella, Modernism Week, the Palm Springs Fine Art Fair, and the Palm Springs International Film Festival cater to younger audiences with expanding interests in art, culture, and design. The museum’s Architecture and Design Council, before the new facility has opened, already numbers more than 900.

The Palm Springs Art Museum has raised $7.4 million for the Architecture and Design Center to date, with a lead gift to name the facility the Edwards Harris Pavilion, to fund the purchase and $3.8 million renovation of the building. With an expanded audience and donor base, the museum aims to create a $10 million endowment to provide annual support for the A+D Center’s operations as well as free admission.

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On October 27, the new museum building for the Fondation Louis Vuitton will open in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. It was designed by the Los Angeles-based starchitect Frank Gehry with the patronage of the French businessman Bernard Arnault.

Bernard Arnault is the billionaire chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the largest luxury conglomerate in the world with brands including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, and Dom Pérignon. He is also a major art collector with a collection including works by Monet, Picasso, Henry Moore, and Yves Klein.

Arnault selected Frank Gehry to design his museum after a visit to Gehry’s best-known project, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which is archetypal of his deconstructivist style with striking (but functionless) exterior forms wrapped in metal. Other major projects by Ghery include the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

For the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Gehry designed an assemblage of blocks, described as icebergs, surrounded by immense glass panels described as sails. The white iceberg blocks are clad in 19,000 individual panels of fiber-reinforced concrete, and twelve sails, on a frame of steel and wood beams, are comprised of 3,600 individual panels of glass. The building totals 126,000 square feet, containing eleven galleries, an auditorium, restaurant, and bookstore.

Construction began in 2008 and it is reported that costs have exceeded $135 million. The building has achieved a Haute Qualité Environmentale (HQE) certification of Très Performant, which is considered equivalent to LEED Gold. The ground-level entrance hall opens onto a water garden in the Jardin d’Acclimatation to create an active social space in the transition between the building and the landscape.

The building’s position in the Bois de Boulogne is noteworthy. At the western edge of the posh 16^th arrondissement of Paris, the Bois de Boulogne is the city’s second-largest public park and borders the Seine between central Paris and La Défense. Above the treetops, the Fondation gains views onto the city beyond. From afar, the shimmering glass building appears as an oversized and abstracted orangerie. The site remains a public park, and the Fondation has been granted a 55-year lease so that the building will revert to public ownership in 2062.

The museum’s first exhibitions will be announced only a few days in advance of the opening, but some speculations are on installations by Olafur Eliasson, Taryn Simon, and Sarah Morris. The Fondation’s permanent collection includes works by all three, and many others including Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, and Richard Serra.

The museum for the Fondation Louis Vuitton is an expansion of LVMH and Arnault’s cultural patronage, which includes the Open Days initiative in which luxury brands open their ateliers to the public; the LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize; a series of internships and degree programs with professional schools that aim to cultivate a new generation of designers and craftspeople; and a range of commissions and sponsorships. Much of this follows a philosophy that luxury brands, with an association of heritage and tradition, can ennoble themselves by supporting arts and culture.

Learn more at http://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/

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In Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Ólafur Elíasson has transformed the museum’s South Wing into a rocky river landscape with a site-specific installation combining nature, architecture, and art.

Louisiana, along the Øresund about 25 miles north of Copenhagen, is renowned for its collection of modern and contemporary art as well as for its campus of Danish modernist architecture. The complex of glass-walled pavilions and low-profile buildings fits elegantly into the natural landscape, incorporating sculpture gardens and views onto the sea.

For his site-specific installation at Louisiana, Ólafur Elíasson has filled the museum’s South Wing with 180 tons of Icelandic rocks to create a naturalistic terrain, complete with a river of running water.

Louisiana is deferential to its Øresund landscape, but also obscures it with buildings and gardens. Elíasson’s installation suggests the dirt and rocks that were there before, and still are, underneath the museum’s floors. Visitors step across rocks and the small river that flows through the galleries, and the indoors and outdoors become reversed so that the building contains a landscape rather than the inverse. It is land art, on some scale, and is simultaneously representational and real.

Riverbed opened on August 20 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and runs through April 1, 2015. http://en.louisiana.dk/exhibition/olafur-eliasson

Ólafur Elíasson’s works since the early 1990s have frequently joined science, technology, and art for large-scale installations that immerse visitors into singular haptic experiences of natural elements.

In 2003, Elíasson created The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern as part of the prestigious and popular Unilever Series. A large circular disk emitted orange light through a haze of mist, and a huge mirror covered the ceiling of the hall to reflect the light as well as the relatively small figures of visitors below. Some two million people visited the installation over six months to bask in the artificial sun.

With a commission by the Public Art Fund and simultaneous exhibitions at MoMA and MoMA PS1 in 2008, Elíasson installed New York City Waterfalls with four towers of scaffolds and pipes along the East River. The towers, from 90 to 120 feet in height, took up water from the river and let it cascade back as an obviously mechanical version of a natural phenomenon.

In 2011, Elíasson’s Your Rainbow Panorama was installed on top of the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Aarhus, Denmark. The work is a 490-foot circular corridor made of glass in every color of the spectrum. As visitors walk through the structure, they experience views across the city in a transition of colors depending on their location. It is illuminated from within at night, and provides constantly changing sensory experiences.

Ólafur Elíasson’s installations extend aesthetics to replicate the sublime qualities of nature. Perhaps owing to his upbringing in Denmark and Iceland, where there are stunning landscapes and particular relationships light, Elíasson’s recent works have even become ecological. One of them – Little Sun – is actually a humanitarian project to provide lights to the 1.2 billion people in the world who have no access to electricity. www.littlesun.com

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In Boulogne-Billancourt, a western suburb of Paris, an island in the Seine is being developed into an “artistic micro-city” designed by Jean Nouvel. The project for Île Seguin will create artists’ studios, commercial gallery and auction spaces, an exhibition hall, and a conference center to transform the island into a modern cultural hub.

Île Seguin has a long and varied history. It was owned by the Abbey of St. Victor from the mid-12th century, and a bridge across the island linked the primary route between Paris and Versailles in the 17th century when it was known as the Île de Sève. Louix XV acquired it in the 18th century, and it fell under state ownership after the revolution. The island was acquired by Armand Seguin, the eponymous industrialist, in 1794, and by Louis Renault in 1919. Renault built France’s largest factory there, employing more than 30,000 people, and Île Seguin produced cars until the great but antiquated factory closed in 1992. The buildings were razed by 2005, and the island in the Seine became an industrial wasteland.

In 2001, Tadao Ando was selected to design a museum for the Francois Pinault Foundation on Île Seguin. The project was abandoned, and Ando renovated the Punta della Dogana in Venice for the Pinault collection.

In 2011, the municipality of Boulogne-Billancourt launched a private cultural project with the Société Civile Immobilière R4 (SCI R4) to construct an artistic micro-city on Île Seguin as part of a larger urban development project, Trapèze. The Trapèze project, which extends onto the right bank of the Seine at Boulogne-Billancourt, aims to create an entire urban zone of mixed-use development centered on the cultural environment on Île Seguin. Jean Nouvel—the French architect whose projects include the Institut du Monde Arabe and Musée du quai Branly in Paris, and the forthcoming Louvre Abu Dhabi and National Museum of Qatar—was selected as the R4 project’s designer.

Also in 2011, the Fondation Cartier, the Paris-based contemporary art foundation, commissioned designs from Jean Nouvel for a new base on Île Seguin. In 2014, the Fondation announced that it would instead expand its current facilities on Boulevard Raspail, which Nouvel designed in 1994.

Notwithstanding the loss of the Fondation Cartier as an anchor institution, the R4 development will share Île Seguin with the Cité Musicale, a 36,000 square meter concert hall that will include facilities for the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris. The hall was designed by Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect whose projects include the Centre Pompidou-Metz and the very recently opened Aspen Art Museum. The Cité Musicale is backed by a partnership with the Hauts-de-Seine Conseil Général and is expected to open in 2016, with construction having already begun.

R4 is expected to open in late 2017 with more than 30,000 square meters of space to support a visual arts community. There will be dozens of artists’ studios and workshops, twenty commercial galleries, a multi-purpose exhibition hall, a conference center, auction salesrooms, and other spaces to create the infrastructure of an international cultural hub on Île Seguin. Further, R4 aims to develop teaching programs in partnership with universities, and the larger Trapèze development may include office towers, a hotel, and a center for cinema and digital arts.

In advance of construction, Boulogne-Billancourt and R4 have begun a program of cultural events to activate Île Seguin, attracting 500,000 visitors in three years. A temporary Pavillon sur l’île Seguin hosts exhibitions about the island’s evolution and a public garden was designed on the old Renault factory outlines. In 2012, Île Seguin was the site of an exhibition for FIAC, the Paris-based modern and contemporary art fair. The island has also hosted Cirque en Chantier and Cirque du Soleil, a performance by Bjork, and a video art festival.

While not publicly reported, the investment in R4 is estimated to be above €100 million. The project’s founder is the Swiss investor Yves Bouvier, whose company, Natural Le Coultre, specializes in the logistics and transport of art. He is also the founder and president of Singapore Freeport, a company that set up and manages the first Freeport in Asia, and a majority shareholder in freeports in Hong Kong and Luxembourg. The President of SCI R4, Nelly Wenger, is a civil engineer whose own company provides strategic management for urban and cultural development projects.

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