Late last year, a judge ruled that the Barnes Foundation could relocate its $25 billion art collection from suburban Merion, Pa., where it had been situated for the last 80 years, to downtown Philadelphia. The deficit-ridden institution wants to move in order to gain a higher profile and attract more visitors. To do so, it plans to construct a new building. The original Barnes Foundation (at right) resembles a large residence; there are two dozen rooms. It was designed in 1924 by Paul Philippe Cret in a highly simplified Italian Renaissance style that presaged the "stripped Classicism" for which he became famous. Stripped classicism, which combined Modernist abstraction with Classical proportions and composition, went out of fashion after the Second World War, so it's unlikely that a new museum will be an updated version of that spare, sophisticated style. What else might it be—and what might a new building mean for the famously idiosyncratic Barnes Foundation?