Museum buildings, ideally, should reflect what they muse about. They should relate to the content and blend with it. Some do, most dont. One of the most incongruous museum buildings i have seen is the Luxor Museum. Its a swank building with a very modern display; many love it, i hate it. The Egyptian Museum of Antiquity looks more like a godown- much like what Prince of Wales in Mumbai has become. The Metropolitan in NYC is very grand, so much that it dominates over everything else inside.The Field Museum in Chicago is a good example of a museum that blends with its house as well as with the surroundings. So are some others in Chicago; but then, Chicago is an exceptional town. 

Perhaps the best housed museums are those in Italy.Nowhere else have the museums become a intrinsic work of art with the display. The Sistine Chapel other Vatican Museums, the underbelly of St. Peters bascillica, the Uffizi Gallery and Akademia and Medici Palace in Florence are cases in point. The Museum of Athens is also blended well, but then, most of the artefacts that should have been there are rather in the British Museum and Louvre. The latter is of course the high point of what a museum should be, closely paralleled by Horsey O Dorsey in Paris- an erstwhile railway station.  

London presents an array of museums. Some of them are in similar looking buildings, one can get confused precisely where he is- the Natural History, Science, and Geology look remarkably the same. Not very unlike the museum street in DC, where everything is packed inside similar looking modern structures. Jakarta has an exceptional collection, but all cramped into a colonial building which just doesnt gel with what lies inside.

Two museum buildings that reflect their personality are the Tate Modern (see photo) and Victoria and Albert. The Tate is located in an abandoned power house, a very imaginitative adaption that faithfully reflects the personality of all that is modern and surreal. The V&A is an old building, with its art and personality itself a visual treat and an objet de art. They have even preserved the pock marked exterior of the blitz, and the contents blend with the overall personality.  

In India priceless artefacts are stored away in an easy to plunder and easy to ransack structure. Examples galore, like the museums at Mathura, Sarnath, Udaipur, etc etc etc 

I hope comments on this mini blog will paraphrase the situstion in museums wherever you happen to be. Lets try to zero in on an ideal museum building in India- if indeed there is one :)