A provocative new book by architectural historian Béatrice Grenier is challenging conventional wisdom about what constitutes a museum in the twenty-first century. "Architecture for Culture: Rethinking Museums" arrives at a pivotal moment, following the October opening of the redesigned Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris, and argues that architecture itself functions as a form of cultural policy. Rather than proposing a universal model for museum design, Grenier advocates for a contextual approach that recognizes how these institutions are shaped by their environments, communities, and the specific cultural questions they seek to address. ArchDaily spoke with Grenier about her research and the evolving relationship between built space and cultural preservation.
Grenier's motivation for writing the book emerged from five years of work on the Fondation Cartier project, where she witnessed firsthand how architectural decisions create the intellectual framework for a museum's existence within urban space. "In art history and architectural history, the museum is often treated as an outlier," she explained. Art historians examine the contents—artworks and narratives—while architects study theory and technology, but the crucial connection between these disciplines remains largely unexplored. Her work aims to bridge this gap by examining how architecture brings together the sociological, artistic, and spatial dimensions of museums, effectively defining their cultural policy through design choices about accessibility, transparency, and interaction with the public realm.
The crystallizing moment for Grenier's thesis occurred during a visit to the China National Archives of Publication and Culture in Hangzhou, designed by Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio. This institution defies categorization as either library or museum, instead fusing both functions into a single entity that could only exist within China's cultural context. What struck Grenier was how Wang Shu based the building's blueprint on a masterpiece by Li Cheng, a Song dynasty landscape painter, essentially treating architecture as a form of painting within a historical continuum. Visitors physically walk through a spatial composition originally imagined as a two-dimensional artwork, demonstrating how architecture can transform traditional media into experiential reality. This revelation prompted Grenier to investigate similar paradigm-shifting examples worldwide.
The concept of museums as landscape represents one of the book's most compelling arguments, tracing a progression from enclosed institutions to nature-integrated experiences. Grenier begins with Central Park, noting that Frederick Law Olmsted's entirely man-made design makes it as deliberately constructed as any skyscraper, just horizontally arranged. The Fondation Cartier on Boulevard Raspail functions as a threshold between city and garden, with Jean Nouvel's architecture making the surrounding landscape visible rather than walled off. The most extreme example is Junya Ishigami's kilometer-long museum in China, where the act of walking through the landscape becomes the primary artifact, dissolving traditional boundaries between culture and nature and recognizing the natural world as part of human heritage.
Grenier introduces the concept of the "in-between" as an urban condition rather than an architectural space, using Creek Road in Stone Town, Zanzibar, as her primary case study. This former waterway separates the UNESCO-protected colonial quarter from post-independence modern housing, creating a physical and metaphorical gap between preserved and neglected histories. When co-teaching a studio with the University of Toronto, Grenier and her students reconceived this artery as the true museum site—a democratic space where visitors stand between competing narratives, questioning which histories merit preservation and which remain marginalized. This approach positions streets as essential curatorial spaces where large-scale decisions about heritage affect entire populations.
The most speculative chapter, titled "The Planet," examines how land artists of the 1960s and 70s abandoned traditional museums entirely, treating the earth itself as both canvas and archive. Grenier focuses on Michael Heizer's recently completed "City" in the Nevada Desert, a massive earthwork five decades in the making that uses the planet's material to construct an abstract urban vision comprehensible only from aerial perspective. This work suggests that as urbanization encompasses the entire globe, the distinction between museum and world dissolves. Architects become central figures in determining how humanity will inhabit this fully urbanized planet, making decisions that extend far beyond building walls into questions of ecological stewardship and future living patterns.
Ultimately, Grenier's work argues against a one-size-fits-all approach to museum design, instead championing contextual pluralism. "Not all museums can do everything," she asserted, emphasizing that different institutions must serve different functions within their specific communities. While acknowledging that museums face existential questions in the digital age, she insists their continued construction reflects a persistent need for physical spaces of encounter and learning. However, she cautions against museums becoming tools for political image-making, arguing they must remain accessible spaces for open inquiry rather than ideological platforms. The future of museums, according to Grenier, lies not in standardization but in their ability to adapt uniquely to the cultural, environmental, and social contexts they serve.
