Today’s public art museums demand a new concept of social role for museums.
An art museum is a public place for promoting refinement required for contemporaries, social education, and social contribution. And the functions and programs of art museums have been changing these days. Art museums have been growing into mixed-used community cultural centers with diverse programs having public concerns in culture and society.
Hence changes in the architecture of art museums mean not only the shift in the style of architecture but also evolution of the inherent functions in accordance with the social role of the time. It indicates that the public have growing interests in enjoying cultural life because of the better quality of living, and consequently the role for public art museums has expanded. Public art museums have assumed new functions and trends in each period and have a special role all the time. Culturally speaking, the architecture of art museums represents social and cultural characteristics of a period. The functional changes are closely related to formative characteristics of the exterior of art museum buildings. As the functionalist Louis Sullivan said, ‘Form follows function,’ this study intends to investigate how the changes in functions and roles of programs influence those in forms.
The purpose of this study is to examine the diversified function of public art museums and the resulting formative characteristics, and discern any trends and the characteristics of changes. The changing function of art museum programs and resulting spatial and formative characteristics give an understanding of basic elements, principles and compositions of architectural types; help visualize forms for design works; and help plan external forms and diversification of mixed-used art museums in the future.