Turkish museum among best museum buildings in last 100 years

ISTANBUL

The Odunpazari Modern Museum (OMM) in Turkiye said Thursday that it was selected as one of the most important museum buildings in the past 100 years by a leading art magazine.

OMM, founded in 2019 in the Turkish province of Eskisehir received the nod, according to New York-based visual-arts magazine ARTnews.

“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, The 25 Best Museum Buildings of the Past 100 Years.

“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.

ARTnews noted that the museum hosts Erol Tabanca’s collection of Turkish modern art as well as temporary exhibitions.

“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 said. “For this project, the firm wanted to recreate the urban experience unique to those Ottoman houses, whose cantilevered windows on upper stories—at times positioned at unlikely angles—playfully hover overhead.”

The Centre Pompidou and Louvre museums in France, Spain’s Guggenheim Bilbao and Italy’s MAXXI also were named in the article.