These museums are an architect's dream

The Guggenheim Museum in Bibao, Spain.

The Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan, was designed by the Iraqi-British architect, Zaha Hadid. It opened in 2012 and consequently, in 2014, Hadid was awarded Design of the Year by London’s Design Museum. The fluid, ice-cream-swirl-like design doesn’t have a single straight line. It houses a museum, nine floors of exhibition halls, and an auditorium. The museum is dedicated to preserving Azerbaijan’s history, and the life and work of Heydar Aliyev, the nation’s former president. Covering three floors, the museum gives patrons an interactive, in-depth view of the region’s heritage.

Daniel Libeskind's 2001 extension to the original Jewish Museum from 1933 aims to recall and integrate the repercussions of the Holocaust. The new museum doesn’t have its own entrance, but instead requires visitors to enter through an underground corridor from the old structure. Through his design, Libeskind wanted to evoke feelings of absence, invisibility, and emptiness that played a dominant part in the life of Jews. It’s easy to get lost inside the structure: there are dead ends and empty spaces everywhere, illuminated only by slivers of light that seep in from the outside. According to the architect’s website, the symbolic structure was built to understand the history of Berlin (incomplete without the contribution of its Jewish citizens), to merge the meaning of the Holocaust with the city’s consciousness and memory, and for Germany to acknowledge the erasure of Jewish life in its history.

Andalucía’s Museum of Memory gives visitors a chance to discover the region’s history from prehistoric times to the present day. Designed by Alberto Campo Baeza and in line with the central headquarters of the Caja Granada Savings Bank (also designed by Baeza), the unusual structure comprises three floors, the uppermost of which lines up with the podium of the main Caja Granada building. It is built around a circular courtyard, from which elliptical ramps rise to connect the various levels. On one end of this miniature dwelling rises a steep blank vertical slab, which really consists of plasma screens to be used for giant public displays.

Built by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), this Danish museum is situated in the town of Helsingør (also known as Elsinore) between the UNESCO site of Kronborg Castle—that some say inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet—and the city’s Culture Yard. In such close proximity to cultural and architectural landmarks, the Maritime Museum of Denmark makes its mark through its subterranean existence in a former dock. The highest point of the museum is the pinnacle of the glass barrier, three feet off the ground. Sloping bridges inside connect various exhibitions which feature collections of merchant ships and their stories from the past four centuries. In addition to exhibitions, there is also a café and a shop—all underground.

The Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) functions out of three buildings—the Dom João VI Mansion (that was once a palace), a police building, and another structure that was originally a bus terminal—that are linked by a wave-shaped roof, a walkway, and a square. The mansion houses the museum’s exhibition galleries, while the police building houses Escola do Olhar, an education initiative that teaches public school educators about art. The major challenge facing designers Bernardes + Jacobsen> was uniting these three areas.

Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano won an international competition in 1971 to build an “information, entertainment, and cultural centre.” Open since 1977 in Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou now houses a museum of modern art, reference library, industrial design centre, temporary exhibition space, children’s library and art centre, audio-visual research centre (IRCAM), and restaurants. The Pompidou’s multitude of functions is represented in its structure: It’s designed with clear postmodern influences to be “a flexible container, constructed from pre-fabricated parts.” Escalators and elevators are on the outside of the structure, allowing for uninterrupted floor space on the interior, and an incredible panoramic view of the piazza outside.

The oldest museum on this list, New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was commissioned in 1943 but only opened in 1959. Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect behind the structure, died six months before the opening. It’s arguably the most important building he ever built. The museum’s website quotes Paul Goldberger on the impact of this structure: “Wright’s building made it socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense, almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim.” Over the years, the rotund, modernist structure has been shut for restoration multiple times, but it still remains an architectural delight.

Set up by the Tchoban Foundation to reawaken an interest in hand-drawn architectural ideas, the Museum of Architectural Drawing opened in 2013 on the Pfefferberg, the premises of a former brewery in Berlin. The solid lines and angles of the structure have been designed by Sergei Tchoban and Sergei Kuznetsov of Moscow’s SPEECH to remind one of slidable drawers and storage shelves within which such drawings would generally be stored. The crude architectural etchings on the outer concrete walls also tie in with this theme. The five-floored structure has room for a museum shop, exhibition galleries, and a terrace that is used for conferences and a curatorial work space.

Designed by American architect Steven Holl, the museum aims to promote contemporary art through exhibitions of visual art and music. The one-level structure is located on an open expanse of grass mounds very close to an old shirt factory, which also houses a part of the art collection. This and the fact that the city of Herning is rooted in its relationship with textiles and art have both inspired the outline of the structure. Viewed from above, the roof resembles shirt sleeves. The museum, which opened in 2009, consists of exhibition galleries, an auditorium, music rehearsal rooms, a restaurant, and a media library.