The dialogue of ‘identity and difference’ finds many and varied architectural expressions in the contemporary museum buildings highlighted, which are drawn from across the globe. The projects vary dramatically in scale, context, thematics and intent, but all raise questions of architectural representation.

Many museum architects have turned to the natural landscape for inspiration, often for aesthetic or pragmatic reasons, but at times to invest their buildings with a specific identity. Similarly, rich archaeological and architectural caches have been plundered by designers in a quest to give identity to their built form. Several featured museum projects address the meeting of cultures, which were defining moments in history, and these encounters have left a tenacious legacy on the architecture and exhibitions of those museums. Most resonant here is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: a deeply poignant physical monument to one of the most horrifying and inhumane encounters in human history, and a most extreme example of the museum’s lasting role in the construction and depiction of identities.