Michael Moran/OTTO

Aspen, Colo. — The trend in boutique museum building reached a chilly, sun-gilded peak a few years ago and has leveled out, at least in the United States. These days we mostly get unsexy makeovers and add-ons, and the critical conversation has moved on. Still, celebrity commissions appear. A Renzo Piano-designed satellite for the Whitney Museum of American Art is underway in Lower Manhattan. And last month, a new home for the Aspen Art Museum designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban,winner of the 2014 Pritzker Prize, made its debut here.

The building, which opened to a mixed local reception, has its virtues and they are not small; it also embodies some of the absurdities and contradictions that have given “starchitecture” a bad name. Yet the Aspen museum itself as an institution — which is modest in size, collects no art and has free admission — offers, at least potentially, a working model for what a new kind of 21st-century museum, regional or otherwise, could be....Continue Reading

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