Architecture as Art 

Some museums are famous for their art. Others are known for their elaborate design. A few – the Guggenheim in New York, Louisiana outside of Copenhagen, Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris – master both, where both the content and the surrounding space are worth a visit. In this article, we’ve selected three of our favourite art museums – in Denmark, Italy, and Spain – that we like to visit not only for the artworks but for the architecture as well. 

Mudec, Milan

Mudec (Museo delle Culture di Milano), a centre dedicated to interdisciplinary research on world cultures, expressed through visual, performing, and sound art, as well as art, design and costume.  belong to this category of cultural institutions. 

Located slightly outside of Milan’s city centre, it’s within walking distance from most of the main sights (although a taxi is probably the most comfortable mode of transportation). 

Mudec was designed by David Chipperfield Architects and opened its doors to the public in 2015. 

The area had begun its development already in 1999, when the vision was to create an entire new, cultural neighbourhood in Milan, filled with museums, archives, and cultural laboratories. Eventually, only Mudec would come to be realised. The first time you set out to visit the museum, you will probably wonder if you are in the right place, as the museum has no street front. Instead, it is surrounded on all four sides by existing historical buildings, formerly part of the Ansaldo factory. This makes finding the entrance a bit tricky.

Once you’ve located it, you will soon find yourself in an internal courtyard, a trademark of Milanese architecture. This is also where the new building has been constructed, in gray titanium zinc and fritted mirrored glass.

Once inside, you will see a central hall, formed as a court within a court. 

If the outside buildings are strictly geometrical, here the shapes are organic and curved. 

From this hall, you take the glass stairs up to the exhibition spaces, but before you enter, you will pass through the room that more than anything else has made Mudec famous among design enthusiasts; a light-filled central courtyard, serving as an orientation point to the exhibition galleries that are located around it. 

Every time you complete an exhibition visit, and before you begin the next one, you will pass through here, as a way to relax your mind and reset your focus between exhibitions. 

The galleries were designed based on Adolf Loos’ principle that height should be proportional to the floor area: The larger a room, the higher is the ceiling. 

Even though the building is integrated into an existing structure, there is no lack of natural sunlight – a series of roof light systems ensure that daylight is led into the galleries. 

On the ground level, you will find a bistro, a library (with more than 4,000 titles), and a design store. For those wanting a view, there is an additional restaurant located higher at the top of the building, with an outdoor terrace.  

Glyptoteket, Copenhagen

There is a certain grandeur to Copenhagen that sets it apart from other capitals in Northern Europe. The palaces are statelier, the facades more lavish, and the atmosphere more opulent, perhaps because it is closer to continental Europe than Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki. The inspiration from Berlin, Brussels and Paris is evident, as is the fact that Copenhagen for centuries has been a wealthy and culturally influential capital. 

Brewer Carl Jacobsen, a 19th century magnate and Denmark’s greatest art patron, founded Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek to share his collection with the public. Using the profits generated by his brewery, he had built an extensive collection of art and cultural artefacts. The collection holds over 10,000 works, primarily divided between ancient antiquities and Danish and French sculpture and painting form the 19th century. 

Jacobsen was seen as somewhat conservative by art critics of his time, as he preferred to collect artworks that were traditionally and conventionally beautiful, rather than invest in avantgarde art. But he was convinced that a museum visitor shouldn’t be overburdened with scholarly theories or abstract thinking, but that art should be beautiful and add to a person’s quality of life. This is reflected also in the architecture of the Glyptotek. 

The first space is a large space with palm trees, ponds, and a café, a winter garden for locals to meet for coffee and a chat. Jacobsen wanted this room to be an oasis for the visitor, a contrast to the urban environment outside, especially during the cold Danish winters. As Jacobsen said, when the garden opened in 1906: “I hope that in the winter the greenery can draw people in, and when the see the palms maybe they will also give some thought to the statues.” 

Architecturally, the building is a collage of different styles. Initially, it was designed to be a daylight museum, as Jacobsen thought that art was best viewed in natural light. Later, artificial lighting was added, but daylight is still an important component in the building’s structure. 

The winter garden is covered with a large glass roof. The older building has been joined by a contemporary wing, designed by Henning Larsen, built to protect delicate paintings from sunlight exposure. However, the impressive staircase of the new wing has been designed to place emphasis on natural light, a celebration of the Glyptotek’s original idea of the importance of sunlight when viewing artworks. 

Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is fascinating – the building itself is considered equally important to the art exhibited inside of it. Its organic shapes and strange silhouette are all part of Frank Gehry’s most famous architectural oeuvre. 

It was built in a central part of Bilbao, next to the river Nervión (in an area previously used for industrial purposes), as part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation network of museums, with branches in New York, Venice, Abu Dhabi and Helsinki.

Gehry is one of the masters of modern Deconstructivism (though this was not a term he uses himself), which refers to his way of challenging and unpacking geometric shapes traditionally used in architecture, instead creating unexpected silhouettes. He likes to use unusual materials, such as titanium (which makes the museum’s exterior resemble fish scales), corrugated sheet metal and other metal alloys.

His main principle in work is approach the project in a playful manner, his motto being; “if you know what you are going to do before you do it, don’t do it.”

The interiors of the museum mirror the organic outside, through irregular corridors and varying volumes, interconnected by suspended walkways and stair towers that follow the curved lines of the building structure. In Gehry’ words: “The randomness of the curves is designed to catch the light”.

The atrium is the building’s central point, illuminated both by an upper window and by windows overlooking the river. In total, the museum has 20 galleries, arranged on three levels. 

Equally important is how the large windows connect the interior with the surrounding Basque landscape, making the experience less generic and instead focused on the aesthetic qualities of Bilbao and the Basque Country.

Gehry also designed the area around the museum, including a small artificial lake.

The museum – an initiative of the Basque government – was inaugurated in 1997, as part of a plan to revitalise the town of Bilbao by making it attractive to people with an invested interest in culture. Through Guggenheim, the formerly industrial city was transformed into something else, more vibrant.

The project was an immediate success, with The New Yorker’s art critic describing it as, “a fantastic dream ship of undulating forms in a cloak of titanium”.