Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Therefore it also does not matter that their Akron Art Museum, which was presented to the press on 10.07.2007 in the city with a population of 200,000 in the US state of Ohio, goes back to a competition win in 2001. "Six years is the normal completion time for us. We are always so far ahead of our time that it doesn't matter. Only builders who have no confidence in themselves are afraid of the future and are scared of becoming un-modern."

"I find it a very important building, not only because it's our first public building in the USA," said Prix in an interview with the Austria Presse Agentur, "it even caused a sensation in the USA." The 23 million dollar project is the first public building Coop Himmelb(l)au have built in the USA. With their futuristic extension building Coop Himmelb(l)au also enter a dialogue with the old museum, a former post-office building from the end of the 19th century to which it is docked on three levels and which it virtually takes under its extended roof wing. Prix says that "as trained Viennese" they are used to dealing with old building substance. He hopes that the contracting authority of the new EZB headquarters in Frankfurt, where dealing with a listed former large market hall is causing hefty discussion, will also agree.

The extension – divided into three parts, "Crystal", "Gallery Box" and "Roof Cloud" – should not only multiply at one fell swoop the spatial capacity of the art museum founded in 1922, which has a collection of 3,700 objects, of which previously only one percent could be shown. "With our clients we have been able to develop a completely new concept for a museum," said Prix, "a museum of the future." Conventional museum functions and urban space should come together into a new type of cultural centre in which digital and analogue information and experience is provided.

Therefore the presentation of collections should no longer be the centre point but rather transparency and the possibility to allow the widest range of events to take place in a visible area which functions as an intermediary between the museum and the city. The three-storey glass "Crystal" – "a further development of our Dresden UFA Palace," as Prix said – should fulfil this task, while the "Gallery Box" provides space for permanent and temporary exhibitions and the sculpture garden.