Shedding New Light on Art Museum Additions

Front Stage and Back Stage Experiences

Altaf Engineer, Kathryn H. Anthony

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367207854
• eBook ISBN: 9781315443140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Vast sums of money spent to design, construct, and maintain museum additions demand great accountability of museum leaders and design professionals towards visitors and employees. Museum visitors today come not only to view works of art, but also to experience museum architecture itself, resulting in most major cities competing to build new museum additions or new museum buildings to become world class tourist destinations.

Shedding New Light on Art Museum Additions presents post-occupancy evaluations of four high-profile museums and their additions in the United States and helps museum stakeholders understand their successes, shortcomings, and how their designs affect both visitors and employees who use them every day. The book helps decision-makers assess the short-term and long-term impacts of future proposals for new museum additions and illuminates the critical importance of investing in employee work environments, and giving serious consideration to lighting, wayfinding, accessibility, and the effects of museum fatigue that arise from the lack of public amenities.

Museum leaders, curators, architects, designers, consultants, patrons of the arts and museum visitors will find this book to be a useful resource when planning and evaluating new building additions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Four art museums and their additions: museums grow more wings
• 3 Museum critics and museum visitors: reactions to the building boom and the Bilbao effect
• 4 Front stage versus back stage spaces: artwork before employees
• 5 Accessibility, wayfinding, and museum fatigue: the “Frankenstein Effect” of museum additions
• 6 Building aesthetics and architectural features: what works, what doesn’t, and why
• 7 Conclusions
• Appendix: museum employee survey results
• Index