New Museum Design provides a critical and compelling selective survey of contemporary international museum design since 2010. It provides an accessible and analytic review of the architectural landscape of museum and gallery design in the 2010s.
The book comprises twelve case study museum and gallery projects from across Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Each built example is interrogated through an essay and a series of beautiful supporting illustrations and drawings. Where appropriate architectural analysis is cross-scale, extending from consideration of the artefact's encounter with museum space at the most intimate scale, through detailed architectural readings, to the wider perspective of urban/landscape response. Similarly, the book is not confined in its thematic or architectural 'typological' scope, including museums and art galleries, as well as remodellings, extensions and new build examples.
New Museum Design provides a critical snapshot of contemporary international museum architecture, in order to: better understand reasons for the state of current practice; reveal and explore on-going themes and approaches in the field; and to point towards seminal future design directions. This book is essential reading for any student or professional interested in museum design.
About the Author: Laura Hourston Hanks is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham, where she teaches across the Department and is a member of the Architecture, Culture and Tectonics Research Group. She graduated in Architecture from the University of Liverpool in 1995 and gained her doctorate in Architectural History and Theory from the University of Edinburgh in 2002. Laura's research interests coalesce around contemporary museum and exhibition design, and her key publications in this field include the monograph Museum Builders II (2004), the co-edited volume Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions (Macleod, Hanks and Hale, 2012), and chapters in Architecture and the Canadian Fabric (Hourston Hanks, 2011), and The Future of Museum and Gallery Design (2018). Laura's related research extends into the architectural expression of identities, issues of narrative space and place making, and collaborative digital heritage projects such as the recent creation of a VR experience and AR-enabled app of Lincoln Cathedral (Queen's University Belfast, Hot Knife Digital Media).
