Museums: new icons of the Digital Age

Museum is much more than a place for preserving artifacts and objects. Indeed, throughout history, the museums, flexible and adaptive places, have been designed as social aggregators, to house objects and collections in which community could identify. They have always represented powerful means of communication through their ability to convey knowledge and to involve its audience (tourists and local residents). For over half a century, museums have become an important design topic, accompanied by a sharp increase in the creation of new architectural formal configurations. Also the role of museum has been changing: museum is not only a place for exhibiting, also the container itself has become an artwork. Nowadays, with the triumphal entry of computer into architectural design, the digital expressiveness gains the upper hand and architects have the freedom to fully play with morphology in relation to museums, often characterized by impressive dimensions.This paper aims to explore how in the Digital Age the museums are changing in their role and in their architectural shapes, both interior and exterior, and are becoming an instrument of urban and cultural renewal. We will analyse and report as examples several recent case-studies designed by worldwide architectural firms, that had much claim and publicity in international architecture magazines in the last years.