Why is religious architecture so often good and museum architecture so often terrible? - Page 2

People tend to prefer older designed things to newer designs of things. Most churches worth mentioning were built 150+ years ago. Most museums were built less than 150 years ago.

This 150+ year ago rule that you have created, is this based on your broad religious architectural knowledge?

I don't like the cut of your jib, keep your puny lapels and skin tight trousers away from my peoples. 

This is Denver, right? I'm not deeply familiar with his work, but I've not yet seen anything from him that wasn't ARCHITECTURE™.

vienna natural history museum... check it out

Cleveland Museum of Art's new atrium. Breathtaking in person. The image doesn't do it justice. (For scale, the "wall" on the left is the back outside wall of the original museum building.)



Original building.



North wing (1971).


Edited by Van Veen - 11/11/12 at 12:20am

The Cleveland Museum is a really great institution, particularly its Chinese collection, but that building doesn't do much for me.

I'm certainly not an expert in either relgious architecture or the museum sort, but aside from the statements that have been made about functionality and how impractical some of these religious structures are. Some of the world's most recognized churches/cathedrals have taken hundreds of years to construct. The Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona "Sagrada Family" began constructing in 1882, and is not scheduled to be finished until at least 2050, for anyone who has visited Barcelona would have noticed this. Another example would be the Cologne Cathedral in Germany, which took approximately 800 years to complete. It's hard to compare any structure to some of these historical churches and cathedrals given the time that has been put in to make them look that way. That being said, like any art, it's somewhat subjective and what one may find beautiful, the other may consider dated, or messy.

The building's not great, but definitely not "terrible". The grounds including Wade Oval elevate it a lot. But the reason I posted it was because of the new atrium, which is really spectacular in working with what was already there.