Abstract
Architecture is a relevant component of the marketing strategies applied to evaluate the brand appeal of a museum’s collections and exhibitions (Caldwell 2000). One case in point here is Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, where architectural design has been pushed to the limit in order to create a major artistic attraction. At the same, time, multimodal tools like ‘museum web texts’ are key to composing, developing and communicating a museum’s public image (Pierroux, Skjulstad 2011). In the light of this, it is the purpose of this paper to investigate the communication and representation strategies that professionals adopt in order to establish the architectural identity of a museum. More specifically, we put the main focus on selected pages of two multi-site museum networks (Pencarelli, Splendiani 2015) ‒ the Tate family of museums and the Guggenheim constellation ‒ so as to identify the distinctive textual features and discursive practices through which museums establish their architectural identity. Data analysis shows that architectural discourse can significantly contribute to branding the public image of the museums under investigation, asserting values of innovation, transformation, or continuity with the past.