Offering new insights into the role of museums, Wouter Davidts (author of The Fall of the Studio) investigates the connection between architecture, the museum as an institution, the museum program and art. A museum’s architecture may be deployed in a variety of ways: as an autonomous icon, as a flexible space, as a PR instrument, as a memory machine, as a stimulus to urban renewal, as a landscape theme, as a political trump card, as a storage depot for artifacts, and so on. Davidts explores these perspectives through several case studies–the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern and US institutions such as The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Los Angeles and MoMA P.S.1 in New York.