Shedding New Light on Art Museum Additions ─ Front Stage and Back Stage Experiences

Vast sums of money spent to design, construct, and maintain museum additions demand great accountability of museum leaders and design professionals towards visitors and employees. Museum visitors today come not only to view works of art, but also to experience museum architecture itself, resulting in most major cities competing to build new museum additions or new museum buildings to become world class tourist destinations.

Shedding New Light on Art Museum Additions presents post-occupancy evaluations of four high-profile museums and their additions in the United States and helps museum stakeholders understand their successes, shortcomings, and how their designs affect both visitors and employees who use them every day. The book helps decision-makers assess the short-term and long-term impacts of future proposals for new museum additions and illuminates the critical importance of investing in employee work environments, and giving serious consideration to lighting, wayfinding, accessibility, and the effects of museum fatigue that arise from the lack of public amenities.

Museum leaders, curators, architects, designers, consultants, patrons of the arts and museum visitors will find this book to be a useful resource when planning and evaluating new building additions.

Altaf Engineer is an Assistant Professor of Architecture, Health and Built Environment at the School of Architecture at the University of Arizona, USA. He is a licensed, NCARB-certified architect and LEED Accredited Professional in the United States. A recipient of the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship and the Architectural Research Colleges Consortium (ARCC) King’s Merit Medal for Excellence in Architectural & Environmental Behavior Research, he also is a founding member of a global non-profit design organization whose mission is to enhance the built environment of disadvantaged communities through innovative design.

Kathryn H. Anthony is an ACSA Distinguished Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, where she also serves on the faculty of the Dept. of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Dept. of Landscape Architecture. The author of Defined by Design; Designing for Diversity; Design Juries on Trial, and over 100 publications, she is the recipient of numerous awards from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, the Environmental Design Research Association, and the American Institute of Architects.