A slew of new museums is set to open in 2023, built by some of the world’s best architecture practices. Among them is Cairo’s long-awaited Great Egyptian Museum, which has been two decades in production and will house a treasure trove of the country’s ancient antiquities, and Studio Gang’s cavernous Natural History Museum in New York.
Here’s a selection of new museums to visit this year.
Grand Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt
This one’s been in the works for 20 years, and after a few missed opening dates, the world’s largest archaeological museum complex plans to finally launch to the public in 2023. High-profile showpieces include King Tut’s treasures, pharaonic artwork and 100,000 artefacts dating back to prehistory. Heneghan Peng Architects designed The Great Egyptian Museum’s monolithic building using a pyramid motif from the nearby Giza complex.
Opening: early 2023
Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation, New York, USA
This expansion of New York’s American Museum of Natural History by Studio Gang has an amorphous, calcified form and 230,000 square feet of exhibition space focusing on insects and microscopic creatures, prehistoric and ubiquitous. The Vivarium will keep 80 species of butterfly. And organic cave-like openings will offer sightlines across the full-height atrium.
Opening: 17 February 2023
Manchester Museum, Manchester, UK
London practice Purcell has designed a two-storey extension to the 130-year-old museum’s Neo-Gothic building. The spare volume, coated in green-glazed terracotta tile, will house a new exhibition hall for rotating exhibitions and a gallery dedicated to South Asia.
Opening: 19 February 2023
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA
Michael Maltzan Architecture is leading the expansion and renovation of the Museum at Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards. After 20 years of negotiations, they’ve added a new anchor building called the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center, with a dramatic white entrance and 40,000 square feet of gallery space. Tying it all together will be an outdoor sculpture terrace and a new restaurant led by Alice Waters and David Tanis.
Opening: 26 March 2023
Arte Museum, Busan, Korea
The design company D’strict is renovating a Busan factory into an immersive exhibition of nature-inspired video art, incorporating projections, 3D images, light, sound and ASMR. Visitors will be able to purchase the artworks as NFTs. The firm is also working on its first international outpost in Hong Kong, to open in early 2024.
Opening: spring 2023
Toronto Holocaust Museum, Toronto, Canada
Longtime museum designers Reich + Petch are overhauling the existing museum, founded 35 years ago by holocaust survivors, in a vast new home north of the centre. The exhibitions will be current and immersive to address a new generation with little access to the dwindling number of survivors.
Opening: spring 2023
Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland
Ten years ago, the Polish capital enlisted New York studio Thomas Phifer and Partners to lead its four-storey expansion and rebuild next to the Soviet-era Palace of Science and Culture. The modernist concrete structure, located half underground, will double as a cultural centre, with workshops, lectures, a cinema and an auditorium.
Opening: May 2023
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, USA
Dutch practice OMA is rebuilding the renowned Albright Knox Gallery in an adjacent parking lot as the Buffalo gallery rebrands itself for a new era. The new building will be an open, transparent, multifaceted space – designed to be more welcoming and inclusive for residents of the community, with a sinuous promenade and public foyer.
Opening: May 2023
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland
A new space beneath an existing listed gallery by William Henry Playfair will feature work by William McTaggart, Anne Redpath, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Phoebe Anna Traquair and others. Hoskins Architects has undertaken the project, which will create new circulation routes from the historic building and out into Edinburgh’s historic Princes Street Gardens.
Opening: summer 2023
White Cube, New York, USA
To coincide with the gallery’s 30th anniversary, White Cube will open its first proper New York outpost in a 1930 building on the Upper East Side next autumn. Neighbours include the Met, Frick and Guggenheim museums.
Opening: autumn 2023
