Introduction

Museums have the power to communicate the identities and values of individuals, institutions, and cultures, and to create a sense of community among disparate members of a city. Museum architecture is often iconic, breaking away from design conventions to create unusual, creative, and startling spaces—spaces to “delight, inspire, and transcend”. Museums represent the worldly concerns of the people who lead the institutions and the cities that so often support the museums in a symbiotic relationship. Museums are, thus, stewards of the ideals of a city, whether those ideals are about economics or about communities. Museums also increasingly think of themselves as stewards of the environment, as more and more museums embrace green building practices and even pursue LEED certification. As buildings, museums represent three different paradigms of what buildings are: containers for collections, places for people, and symbols for ideas and values.