The list of the participants reads like a who’s who of the world’s best architectural offices, including outstanding designers such as Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Mario Botta, Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Daniel Libeskind, Coop Himmelb(l)au, and Frank Gehry

Spectacular and ambitious, unconventional or adaptable, in harmony with their surroundings or deliberately standing out from them, resembling a spaceship right after landing or conveying the pathos of a seemingly endless adventure park. Today’s museum buildings no longer have anything in common with their predecessors built in the 19th century. Modern museums function as adventure centres, attracting visitors by appealing exhibitions and by using modern media installations as crowd magnets. As “soft location factors”, they contribute to the glamour of major cities, turning them into cultural hotspots. They are seismographs of the prosperity and cultural values of society, often shaping urban landscapes as “cathedrals of modern times”.

The exhibition “Museums in the 21st Century. Ideas Projects Buildings” impressively portrays the abundant possibilities of museum design in the 21st century. In 2005 and 2006 Suzanne Greub, founder of the Basel Art Centre, put together a compilation of the most interesting and promising museum projects and invited the architects to provide the public exhibition with their first ideas and outlines, as well as specific plans, models, and pictures. The result is a fascinating insight into contemporary processes of creation and self-conceptions of museums worldwide.

The exhibition comprises 27 projects, which were realized in the first decade of the 21st century, are still emerging, or aim to be a source of inspiration with their timeless ideas. You encounter them in America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, in the form of exhibition houses for contemporary art, history, or ancient excavations. The Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart and the BMW Museum in Munich add to the exhibition two brand museums of the most important automobile manufacturers. The BMW Museum – created by BMW AG in co-operation with Atelier Brückner, ART+COM, and Integral Ruedi Baur – is regarded as an innovative example of cautiously setting up a modern version of a museum in an existing building. The inside of the museum features cutting-edge scenography, which presents more than 90 years of BMW’s brand and product history in an aesthetic and eventful manner, embedded in a unique multimedia landscape. The numerous prizes and awards the BMW Museum has received since the opening in June 2008, as well as its participation in this travelling exhibition, give evidence of the great success the museum has become. The 27 architectural models, including pictures and blueprints, will be showcased in an exhibition space of about 1,000 sqm on 5 platforms. The complete show looks at how modern museums blend into the structure of a city or a landscape, how they master the challenge of “only” extending already existing buildings, and how they need to be designed to stand out as “architectural diamonds”.