| The notion of designing a history museum for the 21st century is a bit of an ironic endeavor for an architect. It is impossible to design a history museum without developing a philosophical perspective about the meaning of new architecture in the context of the history of human culture. Most architects trained in the Modernist/Bauhaus tradition are taught to ignore history and to allow functional concerns and new technologies to drive each architectural effort to be a revolutionary statement capturing the spirit of the age. By contrast, most historians see history as a continuum: more evolution than revolution. In architectural terms ‘21st century history museum’ is an oxymoron.
In our practice, we observed early on that the museums that are most successful at reaching their audiences and fulfilling their missions are those that express the mission of the institution in its architecture. This is one of the basic tenets of our firm's design philosophy and why our designs are extremely varied. To us, it's more important that a museum's architecture express the personality of the institution rather than the personality of the architect.
In the case of all of our History Museum designs, the major challenge is to incorporate the history-based mission of the institution with the needs of a 21st century building serving 21st century audiences.
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