Let me be the first to declare my list of 2007’s highlights (and lowlights) of new museum architecture to be far from definitive. Certain obvious absences are not unintentional, however, particularly Steven Holl’s Bloch Building at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri [RECORD, July 2007, page 92], which critics overwhelmingly praised. However, after I wrote two negative paragraphs about Holl’s Simmons Hall dormitory at MIT [RECORD, May 2003, page 204], he shot off an angry letter summoning me to his office for what he called “re-education,” a term I last heard during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution as a euphemism for the persecution of intellectuals.
Naturally, I ignored Holl’s invitation, and knowing that the only thing architects hate more than a bad review is no review at all, I gave his Nelson-Atkins addition a pass. Certain drumbeat buildings demand every critic to weigh in, like it or not: Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, Yoshio Taniguchi’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) expansion, and Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum wing come to mind. But beyond such rare media blowouts, skipping one museum or another nowadays seems less a sin of omission than necessary triage. Here, then, is my highly opinionated, wholly arbitrary, glaringly incomplete, and gleefully polarizing list of the best and worst new museums of the preceding calendar year, in ascending order from the ridiculous to the sublime.
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