The Museum of London has outgrown its current digs at the Barbican Estate and is set to relocate to the city's West Smithfield area by 2021. A shortlist of six potential designs for the new museum were recently unveiled, including submissions by BIG, Caruso St John Architects, and Studio Milou.
The new site will enable the Museum of London to double its visitor capacity (currently at 1 million per year) and display never-before seen works that are currently languishing in storage due to space constraints.
As the project is in its early stages, no significant information has been shared regarding the six designs. However, we can still get a clue of the direction each design is headed thanks to the images made available. The team led by Denmark's BIG (or the Bjarke Ingels Group), for example, stands out from the crowd with a large arching facade that features a display.
Stanton Williams also catches the eye with a central staircase and large white domed roof (shown above) that brings to mind NYC's Guggenheim Museum.
Each of the designs will be available for the public to view at the current Museum of London until August 5, following which a panel of judges will pick a winner later this year. Planning permission will then be sought next year. You can check out each one in the gallery.
Source: Museum of London
