Cost overruns are not uncommon in architecture, particularly for designs that depart from structural or technological norms, or demand a finer quality of execution than commercial schemes - conditions typical of buildings for cultural institutions. Budgets are exceeded for many reasons, not all of them within an architect's control.

The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations.

The danger for any artist whose work is both recognizable and critically acclaimed is complacent repetition - the temptation to churn out easily identifiable, eagerly welcomed, and readily salable designs.

Despite the persistent image of the architect as a heroic loner erecting monumental edifices through sheer force of will, the building art has always been a highly cooperative enterprise.

What a museum chooses to exhibit is sometimes less important than how such decisions are made and what values inform them. To have the crucial role of museum professionals usurped by self-serving tycoons in the name of economic imperative threatens not only the integrity of individual institutions but the very principle of art held in public trust.

Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919.

Any set of decisions about design is inevitably influenced by cultural prejudice, no matter how intent an architect might be to avoid it.