TheNY Times’s Nicholas Ouroussoff unpacks the Miami Museum of Art and asks the eternal question: why can’t anyone design a great museum?

The team’s recently unveiled design for the Miami Art Museum is likely to ignite the debate all over again. Some architects no doubt will snipe that it looks too safe, an insult in design circles, as if Mr. Herzog and Mr. de Meuron were inspired by a fear of inciting yet more art world ire. On a breathtaking site overlooking Biscayne Bay, its boxy exterior, surrounded by slim 50-foot columns and capped by a vast flat roof, it could even be momentarily confused with 1960s-era performing arts developments like the Kennedy Center.

But the design for the Miami Art Museum is not a regurgitation of outmoded historical forms. Instead it breaks those forms apart and then pieces them back together to create something wholly new. It’s as if the architects had stepped back to contemplate the long arc of museum designs — including their own — before moving forward again along the evolutionary chain.

Matching Architecture to the Art in the New Miami Museum (New York Times)