2015 “Art Museum Architecture in the 21st Century: Inside and Out,” Invited lecture given at the Southern California Art History Association, Santa Monica, 2015. (The original lecture was accompanied by many images of buildings, but I have not included them here due to copyright issues.)
Art Museum Architecture in the 21st Century: Inside and Out
I. The Architecture vs. Art Controversy: Spectacular vs. Deferential Museums.
The controversy surrounding 21st century art museum architecture was set off, of course, by the opening of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997, whose inside was as spectacular as the outside. After Bilbao, many museums commissioned spectacular buildings, hoping to achieve their own “Bilbao effect,” such as Milwaukee’s 2001 entry building by Santiago Calatrava that boasts great wings that open and close over a dramatic atrium.
Peter Cook and Colin Fornier’s 2003 Graz Art Museum looks like some alien creature from deep that has been dropped in the midst of that baroque city, its interior walls curving to match the monster’s outer skin.
Daniel Liebeskind’s 2006 Hamilton Building for the Denver Art Museum, on the other hand, offers spikes and slopes on the outside, forms that are followed on the inside, resulting in sharply slanted walls and ceilings. Some slants are so acute that when the museum first opened, metal brackets had to be used to hold paintings vertical, and two-by-fours laid on the floors to keep people from hitting their heads.
That same year the façade of Jean Nouvel’s Quai Branly Museum sported colourful boxes, although it is hard to get a view of the exterior as a whole since it is fronted by an exotic garden of tall plants. The dark and sometimes cavernous interior galleries have drawn a mixed reception.
One also needs an aerial view to best appreciate the curves of Zaha Hadid’s 2010 MAXXI. Inside, the visitor is led through braided corridors and well lit galleries with dramatic views down into the big atrium. Of course, for sheer exterior drama, there are the sweeping curves of Hadid’s 2012 Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center in Baku, which features a large art museum inside along with an auditorium.
China’s race to achieve cultural as well as economic parity with the West has led officials to commission a spate of museums, many by by star Western architects even though some cities do not have enough art of significance to fill them. Younger Chinese architects like those of the MAD firm, have shown they can match the Westerner’s penchant for audacious curving forms.
Finally, bringing us full circle, we have Frank Gehry’s iconic 2014 Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris. I’ll take a closer look at it later. Of course, we could continue our survey by including spectacular museums currently still under construction, such as the much delayed Nouvel Louvre and Gehry Guggenheim and in Abu Dhabi or Hadid’s futuristic design for Changsha, China.
Although most of the spectacular art museums of the last fifteen years have been enthusiastically received by the public, a number of critics have agreed with Nicholai Ourousoff ‘s complaint that “too often flash and bravura win out over contemplation . . . and architecture triumphs over art.” Hal Foster has charged that iconic designs often inflate the museum into a “gigantic spectacle space that can swallow any art, let alone any viewer whole.” And in her recent book, Radical Museology, Claire Bishop has criticized what she calls “starchitecture,” in which “the wrapper more important than the contents.”
But there are plenty of architects and critics who disagree with these negative assessments, beginning with Frank Gehry, who has rejected what he calls the “mythology” that an art museum should be “deferential and not compete with the art.”
The art historian Andrew McClellan in his 2008 history, The Art Museum from Boulée to Bilbao argues that people have never gone to art museums just to contemplate art, but also “to be entertained and inspired . . . by the “architecture.”
Then there’s the quip by the architect, Philip Johnson: “When the architecture is as good as Bilbao, fuck the art.”
But the champions of spectacular architecture don’t just have a defensive game; some also make a case against “deferential” architecture. McClellan attacks the “entrenched . . . prejudices of curators, art critics, and the elite museum public” who “promote a handful of architects who resist the spectacular,” naming among others Renzo Piano and Tadao Ando.
Let’s look at a few examples of such “deferential” architecture.
Amid the hullabaloo over Bilbao,s Renzo Piano’s 1997 Beyeler museum was hardly noticed. As Piano remarked, it is “entirely geared to looking at art,” and features his signature louvered roof that creates delicate light effects.
McClellan dismisses the relevance of museums like the Beyeler for the architecture vs. art debate as too small and elitist. But there was another museum whose opening in 1997 was also overshadowed by Bilbao, and it was anything if not grand and popular, although its galleries certainly defer to the art.
Following the Beyeler and the Getty, scores of new museums and major additions have been built over the past fifteen years in the United States alone, most of them showing an elegant but restrained face to the world, while their galleries defer to the art inside, such as the De Young in 2005 to the or the Aspen in 2014. Rather than catalogue the many other significant museums that fall toward the middle of the spectacular/deferential continuum, I want to look more closely at a few museums that seem to “resist the spectacular” in McCllelan’s sense.
Behind the austere façade of Tadao Ando”s 2001 Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, a reflecting pool softens the light entering the main gallery on the right. The gallery itself ends with a two-story space expressly designed to contain Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Black. Ando even altered the proportions of the doorways on the right at Kelly’s request in order to reflect the proportions of Kelly’s work. The shaft of light that moves across the wall and floor during the day from a hidden window, offers an additional frame for Kelly’s work. Ando also tailored the side courtyard specifically for one of Serra’s Torqued Ellipses.
In 2003, one of the most deferential of all 21st century art museums opened in a repurposed industrial building. Designed collaboratively by the artist Robert Irwin and the firm OpenOffice, Dia/Beacon, like the Geffen Contemporary here in LA, has ample space and light and is especially appropriate for large-scale installations.
In Denver, just a year after Liebeskind’s building, David Adjaye’s Museum of Contemporary Art took to heart the museum’s mission statement, which called for “a place where architecture supports rather than defines the museum’s mission.” Adjaye’s design offers a remarkable variety of interior spaces that hold the visitor’s interest without interfering with the appreciation of the art works.
Not every 21st century art museum design in China has gone in for the spectacular. I. M. Pei’s 2006 museum for Suzhou, with its simple exterior forms and garden setting, complements rather than overwhelms the art in galleries filled with natural light.
Renzo Piano’s 2010 Modern Wing for Chicago’s Art Institute should qualify as large enough and popular enough for comparison with the major spectacle museums. The roof has louvers that offer soft light to the third floor, and the north facing elevation of the second floor has a glass curtain wall that bathes the galleries in natural light, while offering views of Millenium Park. The Art Institute’s older building had no real atrium and here Piano has given it a restrained one that bisects the new wing and gracefully connects its galleries to the older complex.
Some architecture critics are irritated that Piano has been so popular with museum boards who want a respectful addition to a existing building, such as LACMA’s Broad Contemporary (2008) and Resnick Pavilion (2010), the Gardner (2012) in Boston, the Kimbell (2013) in Ft. Worth, and the Fogg at Harvard (2014). Piano has been equally sought after for new buildings that emphatically defer to the art inside, such as the 2015 Whitney in New York. But with the Whitney we have come full circle in our sample of “deferential” museums, and I will discuss it later along with Gehry’s Louis Vuitton.
Now that we have before us some contrasting statements and examples of the architecture vs. art issue, I want briefly to set the debate in historical context before turning to some conceptual issues.
II. Architecture vs. Art in the History of Art Museum Design
One of the first purpose built art museums, Friedrick Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin of 1830, with its striking colonnade and great domed hall, drew the fire of the art critic Alois Hirt who complained at the time, that “The art objects are not there for the museum; . . . the museum is there for the art.” Shinkel replied: “the sight of a beautiful and sublime room” like his dome, will “create the proper mood” for viewing art.
Certainly, the 19th century neo-classical temple designs that followed almost everywhere with their grand stairways, colonnades, atriums or domes, were not remaining humbly in the background. Even the galleries of many of them were originally encrusted with elaborate moldings and pilasters.
In the US, the best known museum design to break decisively with traditional architecture, was the deferential Museum of Modern Art of 1939, which not only had a severe International Style façade, but moveable bare white walls inside. But, twenty years later, no one was quite ready for Frank Lloyd Wright’s spectacular Guggenheim, which provoked an even stormier controversy than the Bilbao.
The lesson of this history is not simply that the architecture vs. art issue has always been with us, but, as McCllelan justly points out, that today’s spectacular art museum designs, like those of Wright, Gehry or Hadid, are part of a long tradition of designing monumental civic spaces.
III. Changes in Museum Priorities, the Nature of Art, and the Emergence of the “Art-Architecture Complex”
Although these more recent historical changes are well known to this group, I want to briefly recall their impact on art museum design.
A. Changing Museum Priorities
The social and political turmoil of the 1960s and 70s combined with economic pressures of the 1980s, forced museums to be more diverse in collection, exhibition, and outreach and to find increased revenue through ticket sales, using film and concert series, member lounges, restaurants and shops. In Europe, the 1977 Pompidou Center, which was initially conceived as a response to the democratic upheaval of 1968, brilliantly exemplified this emerging mix of high culture and entertainment, and throughout the 80s and 90s many U.S. museums built additions or new buildings specifically designed to accommodate the new trends.
B. Art’s “Post-Medium Condition”
As artists from the 1960s on began to use any kind of material, technique, or activity in installations and performances, museum design has had to reflect not only these new art forms, but their increased scale. One can see this in Gehry’s Bilbao whose shaped galleries included catwalks for performance art and whose enormous “boat gallery” is two stories high and as long as a football field. SANNA’s 2007 New Museum in New York solves the scale problem on a narrow lot by off setting each floor in a way that not only offers an eye-catching profile, but allows very large, top lit galleries.
C. The Contemporary Art-Architecture Complex
An important aspect of the post-medium transformation of art since the 1960s, of course, has been the increasing permeability of the boundaries between art and entertainment, art and craft, art and design, art and architecture, the latter named the “art-architecture complex,” by Hal Foster in his eponymous 2011 book.
From the architectural side, some of the most interesting 21st century architecture/art explorations have come from firms like Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, which describes itself as “an interdisciplinary studio that fuses architecture with the visual and performing arts.” Perhaps best known is their Blur Building for the 2002 Swiss art EXPO at Lausanne, whose elaborate system of pipes and nozzles created a cloud of mist into which the visitor walked.
A different kind of architecture/art interchange occurs in DS+R’s iconic 2006 Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. Elizabeth Diller calls the strikingly cantilevered shape “a visual machine” to take advantage of its site on the harbor. To begin with, there are the highly popular bleachers under the overhang, then the computer room that drops down from the cantilever, its glass wall staring into the water, and finally, the corridor on the top floor that runs the full length of the front. DS+R’s conceptual art impulse led them to consider clouding the windows on the top floor in order to frustrate “the tourist gaze,” but they wisely restrained themselves.
IV. Between Spectacle and Deference
Keeping in mind these historical precedents and changes, we are in a better position to sort out some conceptual issues that have plagued debate over the architecture vs. art issue.
A. Rethinking both function and aesthetics
The contrast between spectacular and deferential architectural has often been treated as a conflict between aesthetics and function, with spectacular museums supposedly giving precedence to aesthetics at the expense of function and deferential museums favoring function at the expense of aesthetics. But if function is understood as mere utility and aesthetics as mere visual form, we end up with a irresolvable dualism between architecture as art and architecture for art.
1. Architecture is Multi-functional
To begin with, functions in architecture are not merely utilitarian, but multiple, embracing among other things, symbolic, social, economic, and environmental purposes. Thus, practical functions like preserving and exhibiting art are almost always found intertwined in art museum designs with symbolic and social purposes.
As we have already seen, museum functions from the beginning have included such symbolic purposes as manifesting the high value placed on art, or signaling a community’s wealth and cultured taste. But, as shown by the Pompidou and later Bilbao, Milwaukee, Graz, and even the new Whitney, architecture can also send a message that the museum is a place to hang out and have fun.
Social functions in architecture concern such issues as whether a design invites all classes of people and encourages social interaction or whether it primarily encourages either isolated contemplation by an informed elite as in traditional designs, or whether it induces what Hal Foster calls “stunned subjectivity” by its overwhelming visual spectacle. When art museums are designed to welcome all classes and encourage social interaction, its spaces for art become something far richer than either a neutral means to an end or a spectacle for gawking.
2. Architectural Aesthetics
a. Multi-sensory and mobile
The aesthetic aspect of architectural experience is first of all multi-sensory, proprioceptive, and mobile. This is reflected in the familiar notion of the architectural promenade. We only come to know a building fully by moving through it with all of our senses alert, joining hearing, touch, and smell to vision and to our awareness of bodily position.
b. Aesthetics includes function in both design and appreciation
Secondly, the aesthetic experience of architecture includes the way forms embody functions. Although some architects may begin by first imagining an audacious exterior profile, many other architects, including both Gehry and Piano, claim to design from the inside out, interweaving practical, social, and symbolic functions with aesthetic qualities. Of course, the balance among the symbolic, social and practical is likely to alter as we move from the exterior and atrium of a museum, where architectural splendor has greater rights, to the galleries, where less dramatic forms may be needed to create a supportive environment for encountering art.
B. The Principle of Balance Appropriate to Context
In summary, the best art museum architecture strives for a balance between multi-sensory aesthetic forms and the set of functions appropriate to a particular museum type, mission, and site. Architecture as Art is clearly compatible with Architecture for Art, but achieving the right balance between them isn’t easy. As Elizabeth Diller has said of the new Broad museum here in LA: an architect wants to be both “generous to artists and curators” and at the same time “to have his or her own voice heard, but you have to figure out how loud to assert that voice.” The difficulty of achieving that equilibrium between the rights of the architect and the rights of artists and curators, requires that we add two corollaries to the principle of balance.
The first corollary is that there may be cases, such as Gehry’s Bilbao, where the formal and symbolic properties of a museum’s exterior and its public spaces are so exceptional, that we may be prepared to forgive a degree of functional imperfection in the galleries. This is the grain of truth in Philip Johnson’s exclamation: “If the architecture is as good as Bilbao, fuck the art.” In this lopsided formulation, Johnson’s claim is clearly false and in the case of Bilbao is completely unnecessary since Gehry did not ignore the art in designing the galleries.
But there is a second corollary to the principle of balance, since we also regard commonplace aesthetic forms and lack of symbolic vitality as design faults in architecture. Even so, there may be cases, such as Ando’s Pulitzer, where an art museum’s practical and social functions, especially in the galleries, are so superbly handled, that we may be willing to forgive a lack of aesthetic and symbolic excitement to its exterior and public spaces.
C. Bridging Ideas for Judging the Balance of Aesthetics and Functions
Although each art museum design is unique in its attempt to balance aesthetics and functions, I want to suggest some general bridging devices for applying the principle of balance and its two corollaries. I have already alluded to the first bridge, the obvious fact that one always has to judge a museum design in the light of type and context. Three other bridging concepts may be less obvious, such as.
1. Distinguish Upstaging from Interfering
There is an important difference between architecture that seems to outshine the art, and architecture that actually interferes with our attempt to focus on the art. Even some of the best critics may misjudge a museum by failing to make this distinction. Thus, although Hal Foster admits that the galleries of the Institute for Contemporary Art adequately serve the viewing of art, he still complains that the rest of the museum “makes such an insistent claim on our visual interest” that it threatens to “challenge the art at its own game,” making it seem “secondary.” Here Foster is clearly talking about upstaging, not interfering, since the overall visual interest of the architecture could only be considered to interfere with our appreciation of the art if we assume that by the time we reach the art galleries, our appreciative capacities would be exhausted. From my experience at the ICA, I would say the DS+R team achieved its goal, which was that, as Richard Scofidio put it, “the architecture would neither compete with the art nor be a neutral backdrop. It had to be a creative partner.”
My experience of Daniel Libeskind’s Hamilton Building in Denver, on the other hand, was definitely one of architecture interfering with the art, and I am not alone in that feeling. Although I enjoyed the wild angles on the exterior and certain kaleidoscopic views inside, many gallery walls slant so sharply that I often felt their presence intruding as I tried to focus on the art.
But we should also recognize that museum architecture can go too far in the other direction. As Piano has remarked, “You can’t just build neutral white spaces . . . they kill works of art as much as hyperactive spaces that make the building into a piece of self-indulgence.”
2. Distinguish Motivated from Arbitrary Forms
In his book on the art/architecture complex, Foster, asks how architects who see themselves primarily as free artists, motivate their architectural forms. He is especially critical in this regard of what he claims are “the willful shape-changing of Gehry and his followers.” (79) Although I do not believe that Gehry’s spectacular forms are arbitrary, I do believe that architects in general are, or should be, constrained in ways that artist are not. A revealing instance of the difference between artistic forms that that seem arbitrary or self-indulgent and forms that seem motivated by deeper symbolic purposes can be seen by comparing Liebeskind’s Denver museum with his own widely admired 2001 Jewish Museum in Berlin. Both buildings employ similarly unconventional angles, and the Berlin museum’s spaces, like those in Denver, have been notoriously difficult for curators to match. The public was first allowed to visit the museum in 1999, when it was still empty, and many found its zigzaging angles, narrow corridors and dead ends deeply symbolic of the plight of German Jews under the Nazi’s. Whereas the Jewish Museum incorporates powerful symbolic and social resonances that give meaning to its daring aesthetic forms and compensate for its shortcomings as an exhibition venue, the Denver Museum’s symbolic motivation as a tourist attraction does not seem to me strong enough to balance its practical flaws.
3. Allow for adaptations
It often takes curators some time to figure out how to use unconventional spaces. This happened with the huge “boat gallery” at Bilbao, which only met its match a few years ago with the installation of a series of Serra’s giant torqued ellipses. Moreover, we cannot predict how changes in the art world itself might make certain spaces that now seem less friendly to art, appear more functional later on. Thus, the arrival of installation art has made Wright’s atrium at the New York Guggenheim a site for dramatic installations. And the Tate’s big atrium has had to wait a much shorter time to be used to advantage by Olafur Eliason and others. There is an exchange between Hal Foster and Richard Serra that reflects this aspect of adaptation. Foster: “What about the space war between art and architecture . . . what about museums that are . . . massive works of sculpture in their own right?” Serra: “Art has always found a way to intervene, to critique architecture, to transform and transgress space.” (243) Of course, even if Serra is right, the idea of allowing for adaptations can be misused as an alibi for simply ignoring functions.
V. Two New Museums Inside and Out
Let’s return now to examine Gehry’s Louis Vuitton and Renzo Piano’s Whitney in the light of the foregoing discussion.
Variously likened to a ship, a whale, or a chrysalis, Gehry’s Louis Vuitton is indeed a truly spectacular piece of architecture that gracefully addresses he three primary functions requested by Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH conglomerate: showing modern and contemporary art, hosting performances and concerts, and, at the same time, offering a dramatic architectural experience. It is basically two buildings, what Gehry calls the “Iceberg,” as Gehry calls it, a set of white concrete galleries and public spaces, and the “Verrière,” a complex of glass sails that fly above. This is not the first time, of course, that Gehry has separated a shell from the basic building underneath, but here the separation is even more pronounced, allowing him take care of the art inside and, in his own words, “. . . to do me at the same time.” Yet the glass sails are not purely a self-indulgent sculptural fantasy. They are motivated in part by the site, since the Bois de Boulogne once had a glass conservatory called the Palmarium near this spot.
Between the galleries and the sails are what, for some visitors and critics, is the most delightful aspect of the design, the multi-level terraces, each with a different view of the steel trusses and wood beams that hold up the sails as well as offering views over the Bois de Boulogne and toward the skyscrapers of La Defense. Since part of the museum had to be built below grade due to height limits, Gehry placed the two story theatre there and created a stepped water-fall feature, visible from the theatre, that feeds a shallow reflecting pool surrounding one side of the museum.
Although the architecture as a whole does dramatically upstage the art, I never found the highly varied gallery shapes to interfere with focusing on the art. Several of the larger galleries are actually standard rectangles, but many of the smaller ones on the upper floors are odd-shaped, some with curving walls or ceilings and skylights reaching up 30 to 50 feet. Far from distracting from the art, the variety of gallery shapes usually complemented the art experience.
Although many architecture critics have been enthusiastic about theLouis Vuitton, a few have been troubled by the idea of a billionaire commissioning a museum that serves the interests of a corporation. I will admit, that I was a little taken aback by the LV logo over the ticket window, but this is no worse than many other blatant assertions of corporate presence in today’s museum world. Two other criticisms that jibe with my own experience are, first, that the forest of steel trusses and wood beams can become a little overbearing; Martin Filler has likened them to “a chaotic pile up of Mark de Suvero sculptures.” A second problem is that the Louis Vuitton is a confusing building to navigate. Yet, if one is coming out to the Bois de Bologne to spend a leisurely afternoon enjoying a combined architecture and art experience, it's a great place to get lost on a nice day.
The new Whitney museum by Renzo Piano could not be more different than Gehry’s glass crysalis. At twice the size of the Louis Vuitton and located in the heart of the city, Pianos’ design seems eager to fit into the semi-industrial context of the Meatpacking District. From the West and the river, the Whitney rises above the highway, like a ship on blocks, from the North and the High Line, it could be a factory or a hospital with its clusters of pipes, exposed mechanicals, and stairs; from the East and South it is partly hidden by the beginning of the High Line, but its street level plaza, and its terraces and the stairways that allow one to go from floor to floor on the outside while viewing the city, are reminiscent of Piano & Roger’s Pompidou Center. These exterior features are obviously not mere self-indulgence, but motivated by Piano’s desire to let people in the museum see each other and to open the museum to its neighbor hood and the city.
Of the four floors of galleries, the 5th floor offers the largest column-free space for viewing art in the New York. Although the eighth floor gallery is the only one able to offer Piano’s subtle top lighting, nearly all the others have large windows at either end, letting in natural light and letting visitors look out to the city or the river. And, of course, the new building has all the current museum requisites: an up scale restaurant, a roof top cafe, a bookstore/shop, a classroom, a print room, a black box for film and video, and a separate theatre.
Whereas Gehry’s canopy of sails at the Louis Vuitton, has no need to follow the contours of the building underneath and can thus present a unified sculptural form, the external forms of the Whitney are determined by what is inside and by an industrial aesthetic in keeping with the surroundings. This accounts for Piano’s decision to give each side of his building a different look, with the result that even some critics who are favorable to the museum as a whole, speak of its exterior as “a jumble,” or an “ungainly . . . mishmash.”
Most of the positive reactions to the Whitney have come from art critics, for whom the lack of a coherent external profile is more than made up for by the suave galleries and the way the building connects to the city. As Michael Kimmelman puts it, the Pompidou showed that a museum could be a populist hangout rather than a temple to art, the Whitney shows the two can go together. But several architecture critics find Piano’s design deeply disappointing. Jeff Davidson, for example, writes that the Whitney is “so sensitive to its location and mission, so generous in its supply of views, light, and convenience, that it mistakes virtue for personality.” For him, the virtues of showing art to its best advantage and connecting people to the city are not strong enough to compensate for an exterior that Davidson calls “an awkward kit of protruding parts” that looks like “a mis-assembled IKEA flat pack.”
Despite the many striking differences between the Louis Vuitton and the Whitney, they share one important feature: exterior terraces and stairways. But the way the terraces and stairs work in each case underlines the deeper differences between the two. At the Louis Vuitton, the great glass canopy invites visitors to spend as much time looking at the sails and their intricate systems of braces as they do looking over the Bois de Boulogne. At the Whitney, on the other hand, the terraces are open to the sky so that visitors are more likely to look out over the city or the river. At the Louis Vuitton, the museum itself is the spectacle; at the Whitney the city and river is the spectacle. But on the issue that counts most, galleries that support an encounter with the art, I found each museum to succeed in its own but very different ways.
VI. Where Do We Go From Here?
No one can say what art museum architecture will look like fifty years from now, although one can discern certain trends, such as an increasing interest in a multi-sensory museum experience as reflected in the current Tate Sensorium exhibition. Perhaps future art museums will have touch galleries and dedicated spaces for sound art and olfactory art. As for the architecture vs. art issue, it may not disappear entirely. On the one hand, improvements in digital design and new materials will make almost any kind of spectacular fantasy build-able, given enough money. On the other hand, future generations may be less drawn to architects who create visual wonders, than to architects who put aesthetics in the service of sustainability and social justice.
But people in the future will not have to chose between spectacular and deferential architecture, any more than we do. As I have tried to show, the vast majority of art museums built so far in the 21st century fall toward the middle of the spectacular-deferential continuum, each seeking in its own way a balance between imaginative aesthetic forms and contextually specific functions. Among the most recent museums that achieve such a balance is the new Broad by DS+R, with its striking artistic veil on the outside, and on the inside, an attractive hall for lectures and films, an unusual opportunity to peer into the vault on the second floor, and, above all, the spacious, light filled galleries at the top, all of which make it a worthy place to end our consideration of 21st century art museum architecture.