Museum

The Douro territory from northern Portugal has the most antique demarcated wine regions in the world. The town of São João da Pesqueira historically is the center of this region, and as a way to preserve the traditions of ancient knowledge that goes from wine production to the technics and traditions of hard-working people, decided to build a Wine Museum. 

 Located in the city centre, the project proposed a master plan for the city´s three main museums: the Museum of Fine Arts MCB-A, the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts MUDAC andthe Photography Museum Musée de l’Elysée. The new Museum of Fine Arts takes place on the site’s southern edge as a longitudinal monolithic volume, parallel to the rails. Like the train station, it defines an urban space while protecting it from the trains’ nuisances. Embracing this condition, the Museum of Fine Arts, the biggest of the three museums, carries and expresses the memory of the site, echoing to the former industrial condition of the site with pragmatic forms, rigorous geometry and hard, sharp lines.

Museum of the Bible is the premier museum dedicated to one of the world’s oldest texts. The new eight-level, 430,000 sqft museums is housed in an adapted historic 1922 refrigerated warehouse in Southwest Washington, DC. It is resolutely modern, incorporating striking architectural forms and cutting-edge technologies. The finished project is the built equivalent of a manuscript that bears traces of several versions of text added and erased over time. The building avoids the easy, literal symbolism that is often associated with biblical representation, in favor of rich but subtle allusions.

Winning the competition to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture has consolidated the practice’s US portfolio with arguably the nation’s most prestigious new building. Located on Constitution Avenue, adjacent to the National Museum of American History and the Washington Monument, the museum will house exhibit galleries, administrative spaces, theatre space and collections storage space for the NMAAHC. As lead designer for the Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup (FAB) team, David Adjaye’s approach has been to establish both a meaningful relationship to this unique site as well as a strong conceptual resonance with America’s deep and longstanding African heritage. The design rests on three cornerstones: the “corona” shape and form of the building; the extension of the building out into the landscape – the porch; and the bronze filigree envelope.

Xing white porcelain is an important part in the history of Chinese porcelain development. Its invention and production broke the situation that celadon dominated the world since the Shang Dynasty, andopened up the famous “Celadon South & White North” phenomenon in the history of Chinese ceramics.

The building reaches the city’s height limit of 130 ft from grade in just seven stories. Its most prominent features are the angled facades of the exhibit floors on the south and west sides of the site, encased in a black box. Propped up on columns over an aligned, existing structure, the black box comprises the bulk of building including its exhibition spaces. This is a floating structure which creates public and private spaces for a combination of different uses.

The open-air museum celebrates the friendship between Japan and the state of Minas Gerais and what this relationship was able to construct concrete and immaterial. The design is a bridge over a lake. The bridge metaphorically connects territories, times, ideas and ideals. The lake is like the sea between the nations, and also the one of the challenges, of the conquests, of the lived times. Actions and works become visible through striking dates that emerge in the water, and the submerged spaces represent the regions of the unconscious of feeling and memory.