A beautiful year for art museums

The top trend in 2005 was, unquestionably, the explosion of art museums all over the world. You could say that about almost any recent year, but 2005 topped them all.

Opening were: the vast new de Young Museum in San Francisco, by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron; a major addition to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, by the same architects; the Chichu Art Museum in Japan, by Tadao Ando; the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum near Jerusalem, by Moshe Safdie, whose office is in Somerville; the Paul Klee Center in Bern, Switzerland, by Italian architect Renzo Piano; and an addition to the High Museum in Atlanta by Piano. Piano is also working on an addition to Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Other major museums staged exhibitions of their ambitious plans for the future. These included a $500 million expansion of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts by British architect Norman Foster, and plans for major additions to the Whitney in New York, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Due to open next year are a skylit underground addition to the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, Mo., by Steven Holl, and the renovated and expanded Getty Villa near Los Angeles, by Boston architects Machado and Silvetti -- a gutsy, inventive job that's likely to cause a stir.

Here in Boston we'll see the opening of the new Institute for Contemporary Art by New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a building that, even while still under construction, is a notable presence on the harborfront. All this comes on top of last year's raft of new museums, including the greatly enlarged MoMA in New York and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

It's clear that a major reorientation is underway. Many cities in many parts of the world are redefining themselves as centers of culture rather than centers of commerce. They seek architecture that will put them on the cultural map. A fine example is Chicago -- once ''the city of broad shoulders" -- where the brilliant Millennium Park, with its remarkable artworks, fountains, and performance spaces, opened in stages during the year.

Another trend is more specific to Boston. This is the appearance of spectacular new buildings for scientific research, mostly biological, in which the practical working labs are supplemented by humane spaces for social encounter. The hope is that scientists from different disciplines will meet one another and interact creatively.

New England Biolabs in Ipswich was the most generous of these, but there were numerous others, including the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex at MIT, the Novartis building (a renovation of a 1920s candy factory) in Cambridge, and the Simpson Gumpertz & Heger building in Waltham, another renovation. These came on top of last year's stunning Stata Center at MIT, by Frank Gehry, and the nearby Genzyme building, an example of ''green" ecologically sensitive architecture.

As so many classic Boston corporations are bought up by outsiders -- Jordan Marsh, Gillette, John Hancock, the Globe among them -- it's possible that the future of the city lies with the kind of institutions that aren't going to move. These fall into three main categories: the cultural institutions such as art museums; the colleges and universities; and the hospitals. Tied to the universities and hospitals are the research labs that gather around them. All three categories are building like mad.

A few quick notes on my list: The Wang is a lively center for student activities at Wellesley. Trinity Undercroft is a vast space carved out beneath Trinity Church in Copley Square as a social center for the congregation. Philip Johnson, uneven as an architect, was an enormously influential figure who kept a step or two ahead of changing tastes in architecture for 70 years. Twenty-three Sidney is an elegant exercise in canonical Modernism, much of it in handsome green copper. Forest Refuge is a Buddhist retreat, designed with the help of Asian theories of feng shui. Millennium Park is a brilliant example of a public-private collaboration in which each side raised a quarter of a billion dollars. The Nantucket Whaling Museum patches together new and old buildings into a modest but splendid new complex.

Not all of the list's entries are winners. The Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site in Manhattan, as currently proposed, is a wretched failure. It's more concerned with fending off terrorists than providing life to Manhattan. The first 200 feet of its 1,776-foot height is to be solid concrete, a sort of tower castle meant to fend off possible truck bombers, with a few slot-like windows that look as if they're intended to be used by defending archers. This is to be our new national symbol?

Robert Campbell, the Globe's architecture critic, can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.