Mark Lamster of Design Observer recommends a visit to the newly opened Putman Pavilion at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania Modern 
Mark Lamster 
 
One tends to think of authors' museums as dowdy Victorian cottages with a lot of bric-a-brack laying about—the stuff of a writer's messy mind and varied inspiration. Not so for the museum of James Michener, author of historical epics—nearly fifty of them, with some 100 million copies sold. Michener's museum celebrates not his own work, but the arts of his native Pennsylvania, and it's set in a reconstituted prison in Bucks County, with dramatic walls of fieldstone.

While architectural talk in Pennsylvania has been justifiably centered on the new Barnes museum in Philly (about which more soon), the Michener Museum has also opened a new building in recent months, and it too is a wonder of boxy illumination. 
 
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