An outpost of Russia’s State Hermitage Museum, designed by the architect Íñigo Amézola, will open in Barcelona in 2019 on the developing waterfront, where high-end hotels and a new marina are also being built, states Jose Angel Montanes of El País. Nearly $43 million in private donations will need to be raised for the building.

The new museum, which will be more than 37,000 square feet, will have seven main exhibition spaces and five floors. It’s estimated that it will receive about 500,000 visitors annually. The director of the outpost, Jorge Wagensburg, says the new space will not play a part of the Hermitage “franchise,” despite an agreement with the St. Petersburg museum that will cover fifty years of art loans from the Hermitage to its satellite. The museum’s mission will create, according to Wagensburg, “continuous dialogue between science and art, highlighting both what unites and what distinguishes them, using modern scientific museology, a unique combination of parts, and [phenomenological] and museological metaphors.”

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