Monumental museums: 7 recently opened and forthcoming institutions redefining cultural architecture

Zumthor, whose best-known works include the Therme Vals spa in Switzerland and the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, has received a divided early reception, with critics questioning whether his controlled, introverted approach translates to the scale and character of Los Angeles. The inaugural installation, developed by 45 curators, takes the world’s major bodies of water as its organising framework, grouping works by patterns of exchange and migration rather than chronology or geography.

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Designed by the Irish practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, the V&A East Museum will open on 18 April as part of the East Bank cultural quarter in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, an Olympic legacy project more than a decade in the making. The five-storey building, with its scored and profiled precast concrete facade, houses two permanent Why We Make galleries presenting over 500 objects drawn from the V&A’s collection across design, fashion, architecture, and performance. 

Programming is oriented towards East London’s young creative communities, with new commissions by Tania Bruguera, Carrie Mae Weems, and Es Devlin among the opening works. The adjacent V&A East Storehouse, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and housing over 250,000 artefacts, had opened separately in May 2025.

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On 21 March, the New Museum on Manhattan’s Bowery reopened with a seven-storey addition designed by OMA, the firm’s first completed public building in New York. Led by partners Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, the $82 million structure at 231 Bowery was conceived as a companion to the museum’s original 2007 SANAA building. Its facade of laminated glass with bevelled edges leans gently into the older building while maintaining a distinct character.

The addition doubles the museum’s footprint to 120,000 square feet and introduces three new terraces, an expanded Sky Room, and a ground-floor restaurant clad in expanded cork painted with silver leaf. A triangular entrance plaza, formed where the new building’s sloping facade pulls away from its neighbour, opens directly onto the Bowery and Prince Street intersection.

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Opened on 28 March within the Takanawa Gateway City development in Minato, MoN Takanawa presents cross-disciplinary programmes that draw on traditional Japanese arts, including rakugo, tea ceremony, and paper-cutting, alongside manga, digital installation, and live performance.

The building by Kengo Kuma & Associates is a nine-floor timber-clad spiral with terraced greenery running to a rooftop garden, its organic profile distinct from the glass towers of the surrounding development. The name carries a double meaning: mon (門) for gate, and mon (問) for question. Programmes rotate on a six-month cycle, with the inaugural season organised around the theme Life as Culture running through September 2026.

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Opened on 21 September 2025 on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Calder Gardens is devoted entirely to Alexander Calder, who was born in Philadelphia and whose father and grandfather left their own sculptures along the same boulevard. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron with landscape designer Piet Oudolf, the $90 million project places most of its 18,000-square-foot pavilion below ground, its single above-grade facade clad in a reflective metal sheet that mirrors the surrounding planting and largely dissolves into it.

The building was originally conceived as entirely subterranean but was raised during planning after Hurricane Ida flooded the adjacent expressway in 2021. Oudolf’s gardens, planted with over 250 varieties, frame the approach and extend into a series of sunken outdoor spaces that bring light into the galleries below. Works by Calder — mobiles, stabiles, paintings, and drawings — are presented without wall labels, in a rotating display drawn from the Calder Foundation in New York.

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Bjarke Ingels Group’s Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art completed a soft opening in late 2025, with a grand inauguration scheduled for summer 2026. The 60,000-square-metre complex on the Jinji Lake waterfront comprises twelve interconnected pavilions under a continuous ribbon-like roof whose undulating profile references the tiled eaves of classical Suzhou architecture.

BIG’s concept reinterprets the lang, the covered garden corridor central to Suzhou’s historic garden typology, as a fluid network of exhibition spaces, courtyards, and walkways. Warm-toned stainless steel and curved glass facades reflect the surrounding lake and sky. A sequence of public gardens extends the site to the waterfront and remains accessible outside museum hours.

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First announced in 2006 and originally scheduled to open in 2012, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is now nearing completion on Saadiyat Island, a cultural district already home to Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi. Frank Gehry, who died in 2025, designed what would become his largest museum project: 80,000 square metres of gross floor area, with 28 galleries and an additional 23,000 square metres of exterior exhibition space across atria, plazas, and terraces.

The building’s signature asymmetric cones reference the UAE’s traditional barjeel wind tower. The collection focuses on modern and contemporary art from West Asia, North Africa, and South Asia from the 1960s to the present. UAE officials have indicated an opening in 2026; no specific date has been confirmed.

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