There is a good deal to admire about the architecture of the new Barnes Foundation, which opened May 19 on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, just down the road from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The sober, handsome, and exquisitely detailed museum, designed by the increasingly busy New York City architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, offers a rare combination of material richness and spatial ingenuity.
Taking cues from the designs of Louis Kahn, Carlo Scarpa, and Edward Larrabee Barnes—masters of the late-Modern museum—the new Barnes shows its architects (who are best known for their modestly sized, now closed American Folk Art Museum in New York City) working at a high level. Most impressive of all is the thoughtful sense of procession that carries visitors through the $150 million complex, first from the outside in and then from the museum’s airy common spaces almost inexorably toward the smaller-scaled galleries.
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