the pompidou, guggenheim and more come alive in federico babina’s musealis illustrations

Federico Babina maps seventeen museums using geometric forms

Federico Babina’s Musealis illustration series reimagines seventeen of the world’s most iconic museums as an imaginary black-and-white atlas, a visual journey. Each architectural illustration arises from the encounter between content and container. The architecture, with its geometries, both embraces and allows itself to be traversed by words, the titles of the most emblematic works housed within. No longer captions, but building blocks: the artworks transform into a plastic language, into lines, squares, curves, solids, and voids that construct the very image of the museum.

In Musealis, the words of the artworks are freed from their descriptive function and become raw material. They intertwine, overlap, and fold into the graphic rhythms that define the building’s shape. Thus, what normally lives on walls, in rooms, and in display cases finds a new existence within the structure that contains it.

Tate Modern | all images by Federico Babina

Weaving Architecture and Art Into One Continuous Visual Story

Each museum becomes a narrative machine, gathering dispersed fragments, titles, stories, memories, and transforming them into a single visual story. The central metaphor is a two-way movement: sometimes the artwork adapts to the space that hosts it, as if the museum were an organism capable of shaping its own skin to embrace what it contains; other times, it is the space that sculpts itself around the artwork, becoming a sculpture itself. In this dialectic, museum and art merge into a single entity, a complex body in which one cannot exist without the other.

The seventeen illustrations of Musealis celebrate precisely this fusion. Each building, recognizable in its architectural iconicity, is at the same time a mosaic of words, a narrative fabric woven from the works it houses. The museum thus becomes a great tapestry, in which the sequence of exhibition spaces stitches together a heterogeneous heritage, transforming it into a single coherent and vibrant surface. Musealis is a tribute to museums as living places, capable of telling stories not only through what they display but through what they are. An invitation to see art and architecture as two voices of the same discourse, two hands shaping the same form. Illustrator Federico Babina quotes Pablo Picasso: ‘Give me a museum, and I’ll fill it.’ 

Centre Pompidou

Guggenheim New York

Kimbell Art Museum

Neue Nationalgalerie

Bauhaus Archiv

MACBA Barcelona

MAXXI

Louvre

Guggenheim Bilbao

Pavillon Le Corbusier

21st Century Museum Kanazawa

project info:

name: Musealis

artist: Federico Babina | @fbabina

designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.

edited by: christina vergopoulou | designboom