Turkish museum among best museum buildings in last 100 years

A museum in Turkey's Central Anatolian province of Eskişehir has been included in the list of the 25 best museum buildings of the last century by ARTnews, a New York-based leading art journal.

The Odunpazarı Modern Museum (OMM), designed by famous Japanese architectural firm Kengo Kuma, was selected in a prominent list which features some of the most significant museum buildings of the past 100 years.

"What makes a great museum? It's about more than just the art inside its walls—it's also those walls themselves, which are meant to work in service of what's on view," the magazine said in its Jan. 24 article.

"As many architects have realized over the years, museum buildings can, if anything, function like artworks themselves, as objects for appreciation. In some cases, these buildings have become just as identifiable as the masterpieces in museums' collections," it said.

"Borrowing from local traditional wooden Ottoman houses—Odunpazari means 'wood market,' and is also the name of the region where the institution is sited—the design by Kengo Kuma & Associates looks akin to an elegant log cabin, with interlocking boxy structures composed of stacked laminated blonde timber beams that feature Lincoln Log-like slits," it added.

The list also includes influential modernist experiments and polarizing postmodern expansions, architectural oddities and beloved additions, circular museums and glassed-in pyramids.

Centre Pompidou in the French capital, Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Brazil's Rio de Janeiro and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington D.C. stand out as the three museums at the top of the list.

Spain's Guggenheim Bilbao and Italy's MAXXI also were named in the article.

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