Museums of the 21st Century: Concepts​,​ Projects​,​ Buildings

In 2007, Culturgest — the cultural foundation maintained by Caixa Geral de Depósitos, presented "Museus do Século XXI: Conceitos, Projectos, Edifícios" ("Museums of the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings"), an exhibition devoted to contemporary museum architecture. The show featured projects such as the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, designed by Shigeru Ban with Jean de Gastines, illustrated through 3D renderings and general views dated around 2005-2006. The exhibition surveyed how architects around the world were reimagining the museum typology, moving beyond the traditional "white cube" toward buildings that function as landmarks, tourist attractions, and urban catalysts in their own right — a trend closely associated with the "Bilbao effect" following Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao. The 2007 edition presented 27 of the most interesting and seminal museum-building projects, designed, completed, or under construction between 2000 and 2010, shown through carefully selected models, photographs, computer simulations, plans, drawings, animations, and videos, with each presentation developed in close collaboration with the respective architect. Specific buildings documented in Culturgest's own program material included the Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart, Germany (2002–2006), designed by UN Studio (Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos). Also featured other landmark buildings of the era, including the Schaulager in Basel by Herzog & de Meuron, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas by Renzo Piano, and the Great Court at the British Museum in London by Foster + Partners — giving a sense of the range of "starchitect" museum commissions the show as a whole was surveying, alongside projects by figures like Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Daniel Libeskind, and Yoshio Taniguchi in related iterations of the traveling exhibition. The broader traveling version of this Greub-curated project (published afterward as the book New Museums, with 27 projects).