Museum

Origin – For some reason, the Art Zone on the West Bund of Shanghai was to be demolished, and MOA Studio of Atelier GOM was among them. Almost at the same time, the curator of the Migratory Bird 300 section of the Aranya Theater Festival in Qinhuangdao City, Hebei Province, invited GOM to design a temporary building for artists’ activities and exhibitions. Since the area was comparable, Atelier GOM was prepared to dismantle the key components of the MOA Studio on the West bund of Shanghai and transport them to Aranya for assembly, completing a performance art of migratory birds in flight, as well as a grand funeral for the entire West bund Art Zone. Since the previous space was called the Museum of Distraction, the name of this time will be MOA Museum of Distraction（MMD for short).

The D-Day Museum in Arromanches was the first museum created on this theme in the aftermath of the Second World War. A new page in the museum’s history was written in 2024 with the opening of the new building designed by Projectiles. This phrase expresses well the main challenges of this project, which are memory, the knowledge and transmission of a shared history, as well as our duty of remembrance, beyond the disappearance of certain vestiges of the artificial port in the near future.

Six years ago, we were invited to participate in the design of a Thangka Art Museum, aiming to house traditional Buddhist Thangka art collections. The site is located at the foot of Penbu Mountain in the southern part of Lhasa, facing the Potala Palace across the Lhasa River. Being away from the core area of Lhasa, the site grants us more design freedom, yet it also presents the challenge of how to innovate while staying true to tradition. We aim for its volume and spiritual essence to be harmoniously unified.

Stillness and Motion. Through the perpetual interaction between glaciers and seawater, the glacial ice, which boasts an average age exceeding 5,000 years, will ultimately drift toward the ocean and transform into icebergs that undergo continuous displacement by the flux of ocean currents. In our opinion, the fascination of icebergs lies not only in the thousands of years of unchanging ice, and the unpredictable location due to drifting. It also stems from the mysterious seven-eighths concealed beneath the sea’s surface, as the writer Ernest Hemingway mentioned.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) in La Jolla traces its origins to philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps. Her last home, a modern oceanfront dwelling completed in 1916 by Irving Gill, served as the Museum’s first location. Since opening in 1941, the Museum has undergone several architecturally distinct expansions; Mosher & Drew completed a series of expansions in 1950, 1960, and again in the late 1970s; and Venturi Scott Brown & Associates completed a renovation of MCASD’s La Jolla location in 1996. However, as the Museum’s art collection continued to expand, the building’s galleries became inadequate to display its holdings. In 2014 Selldorf Architects was tasked with developing new architecture that would expand and enhance spaces for art and the public. The new design includes the renovation of 28,000 square feet of existing spaces, as well as the addition of 46,400 square feet of new spaces to MCASD, effectively doubling the Museum’s existing square footage. Selldorf Architects’ new plan provides significantly more gallery space for the collection, creates a more welcoming and clear entry, and gives greater coherence to the site enhancing the Museum’s connection to its spectacular coastal setting.

The museum is located to the west of a clearing in the garden and connected to it by an elevated gallery, allowing it not to obstruct the path that separates the two buildings.

As a singular and emotionally charged location, the National Holocaust Museum presents the history of the persecution of Dutch Jews during World War II. Opened in 2024, the museum is housed in the former teaching school Hervormde Kweekschool. It forms a larger whole with the former theatre Hollandsche Schouwburg across the street.