Art for Architecture’s Sake

It is a stock art-world tale. In 1949, Guggenheim Museum director James Johnson Sweeney squared off against architecture’s reigning genius, Frank Lloyd Wright, who was designing the museum’s landmark Fifth Avenue building. Wright fought for the interests of his architecture; Sweeney defended the interests of art. Wright won. The result was a remarkable work of architecture and a difficult place to show art.

The story captures the often open disdain art-world insiders feel for the architects who design museums. The implication is that the greater the architect’s reputation, the more art suffers.

In the last few years, the completion of a number of high-profile museum designs has only reinforced that cynicism. The opening in 1997 of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and Richard Meier’s Getty Center in Los Angeles created a new audience for architecture. Since then, museums everywhere have launched ambitious building programs to raise their profiles. Among the most recent are two new Guggenheim museums in Las Vegas, both by the radical Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, Tadao Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis and a major addition to the Milwaukee Museum of Art by Santiago Calatrava.

That trend shows no sign of slowing. Zaha Hadid’s Museum of Contemporary Art in Cincinnati and Diller & Scofidio’s Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston are scheduled to open in 2004. An $800-million expansion of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, designed by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, will be unveiled in 2005. UN Studio’s addition to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn., is scheduled for completion in 2006, as is Gehry’s addition to the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, D.C. And Koolhaas is working on the design for a new Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Architects have welcomed this attention as proof of the profession’s growing cultural relevance. But many art world insiders are skeptical. Increasingly, architecture has become the central focus, and, in the process, it has pushed art into the background.

“I think museums have emerged as the primary civic buildings of their time,” says Glenn D. Lowry, director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, “and that has led to competition among institutions to create the most spectacular buildings imaginable. The assumption is that the building will galvanize a community and ignite the kind of financial support that would later lead to a better collection, a bigger endowment. But that’s a tenuous proposition. In many cases, the buildings have far outstripped the importance of the collections.”

Indeed, the diminishing importance of displaying art in the art museum is nothing new. For at least two decades, museums have been courting bigger audiences to pump up attendance. As a result, the identity of the art museum has radically changed. Art is now one component in a constellation of activities that the contemporary museum provides, including bookstores, restaurants, theaters and gift shops. And the definition of the art museum’s function has become more elusive than ever.

Architecture has contributed to that instability. The desire of many museum boards to make a strong statement with their buildings has encouraged architects to break old conventions. And that new sense of freedom has sometimes led to muddled results. But just as often, architects have imbued these works with a high level of creative energy, showing a deep respect for the art their buildings house.

These architects are proving that art and architecture can not only coexist, they can engage in a lively creative dialogue, one that ups the cultural ante for both.

More often than not, when a museum design fails, the fault can be traced to the motives of the institution’s board. Many museums see a high-profile building project as a convenient marketing tool. A second-rate institution may use architecture to hide the mediocrity of its collection. The assumption is that the average museum visitor is only mildly knowledgeable about art, and that the museum has to provide a host of distractions to hold the visitor’s attention.

An example is the $1.2-billion Getty Center. Meier’s design conceived the Getty as a temple for high art, set high above the city on a secluded hillside in Brentwood. The Getty’s collections are housed in a series of interconnected pavilions, organized around a tranquil, central court. The galleries, an elegant enfilade of well-lighted rooms, are perfectly fine places to view art.

But the galleries have to compete with a number of other activities.

Visitors ride the Disney-like tram up the hillside, slip past the gleaming white forms of the Getty Trust offices and Conservation Institute, and step out onto a travertine plaza. From there, they can stroll through the splendid Robert Irwin-designed garden, eat lunch at the cafe or restaurant, or wander into the Research Institute. It is possible to spend an entire day there and completely ignore the museum. The real attraction is the Getty experience.

The primary culprit is Harold M. Williams, the Getty’s president and chief executive from 1981 to 1998. It was Williams and his board who decided to isolate the museum from the lifeblood of the city, setting it in a residential neighborhood.

That initial decision provoked the ire of the Brentwood community, which subsequently forced the museum to locate parking at the bottom of the hill, three-quarters of a mile from the museum buildings. Williams also led the fight to transform the Getty into a complex of art-related activities, relegating its collections to secondary status.

Meier’s design reflects that vision. The architect could have designed the museum as a more inward-looking, self-contained experience. Instead, upon entering the museum courtyard, the eye is drawn out toward the landscape and away from the museum’s pavilions.

A more extreme example of art as sideshow can be found in the Milwaukee Museum of Art, which opened in December. The museum’s director, Russell Bowman, asked his architect for a compelling public gathering place--”the thing,” he says, “that will make the museum a community.” And that’s exactly what he got.

Designed by the talented Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, the museum’s dominant feature, the reception hall, is a glass-and-steel bird-like form that rests at the edge of Lake Michigan. Two enormous brise-soleils, or sunscreens, envelop the structure’s sides. Their forms open and close like gigantic wings to shade the hall’s interior.

Calatrava took great care to link the building to the city’s historic core. A narrow bridge leads from Milwaukee’s main formal axis, Wisconsin Avenue, down into the hall. As visitors enter, a stunning view opens up to the lake, and the cathedral-like roof of the hall soars overhead. To one side, two long corridors--which border the new temporary exhibition galleries--lead to the existing museum buildings.

The hall reflects the city’s grand civic ambitions. The only artwork in the space is an Alexander Calder mobile hanging near the entry. Except for an occasional fund-raising event, the hall will function as Milwaukee’s biggest, most spellbinding lobby. A boardroom overlooks the space through a large, curved window. A restaurant is tucked underneath, on a lower level, with a view out to the water.

Throughout, art is an afterthought. The long corridors, lined with muscular white arches, have a dreamy quality that holds visitors’ attention. The galleries, meanwhile, are so discreet they seem almost invisible. The museum’s main collection of contemporary art and American decorative arts seems like part of another world entirely: the tough, Brutalist forms of the 1950s and 1970s-era structures.

“The good news is that art museums aren’t being treated as mundane, cost-efficient containers,” says James Cuno, president of the American Assn. of Museum Directors, in New York, and the director of the Harvard University Art Museums.

“But you only have a certain amount of money to invest, and when the museum strives to become a logo for the city, it can be at the expense of the art.” A museum’s priority, Cuno adds, should be building its collections.

There are more subtle ways to mishandle a museum’s design. New York’s new Museum of American Folk Art, for example, is one of the most thoughtful buildings to rise in Manhattan in a long time. Designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the structure’s narrow, five-story facade is divided into three triangular steel plates that cave in slightly at the center, as if straining to protect the art from the pressures of the city.

Inside, light spills down from a skylight at the top of a soaring, slot-like atrium. A complex sequence of staircases circulates up through the space, bringing visitors back to the main atrium at each turn. The stairs, some made of rough concrete, others of wood, give each floor its distinct identity.

But the relentless focus on circulation pushes the art into the background. The grand, ceremonial stair that leads to the third floor is needlessly big. A luminous resin screen that lines the main staircase looks fussy. By comparison, the galleries, which are set parallel to the atrium, are tight and narrow. Both the architecture and the art suffer from the subsequent lack of clarity.

One response to the mess that many art museums have become is to create smaller, more intimate venues that serve a more discerning public rather than mass audience. The recently opened Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis is such a museum. Founded by Emily Rauh Pulitzer to house her collection, the building is modestly scaled. It has no bookstore or cafe, and it is open to the public only twice a week.

Pulitzer hired Tadao Ando to design the museum in 1993, and the deft manipulation of space that has made the architect famous is immediately apparent. Seen from the street, the building’s blank concrete facade evokes Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1906 Unity Temple in Oak Park, Ill. An intimate entry court is set at the corner of the building. From there, visitors pass through a small reception area before turning back into the central hall. In a series of quick, compact moves, the outside world is left far behind.

From this central space, the design splits into two parallel wings. Most of the art is contained in the wing farthest from the entry; the other wing houses a library and offices. A long reflecting pool is set between them, giving the space a remarkable serenity.

Ando worked closely with two artists, Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra, as he fine-tuned the design, and the artists’ works dominate the building. Kelly’s 28-foot-high painting “Blue Black,” for example, hangs at the far end of the main gallery. Seen from that distance, the work has a soothing quality, evoking a distant horizon. A broad stair leads down to the base of the painting, which looms like a primitive icon.

Serra’s work, one of his “Torqued Spiral” series, stands in an open-air court beyond the library and offices. A long slot window is set in the library at the exact height of the top of the massive steel spiral, a sort of architectural teaser. Outside, a series of shallow steps creates a long, drawn out procession to the sculpture.

The effect is almost too reverential. But the project’s power stems from the fact that architecture is allowed to assert itself. Three of the foundation’s best works, for example--two Rothkos and a black Serra painting--hang in a small gallery set behind Kelly’s “Blue Black.” The room is a cube, and the paintings look exquisite. Turn back, and the doorway frames a view through a slot window overlooking the reflecting pool. The bands of contrasting surfaces--water, concrete, glass--are an abstract image of almost equally haunting beauty.

At other moments, visitors are allowed to escape the art entirely. In the main hall, a narrow staircase leads up to a mezzanine. The roof seems to float above this room, supported on a single, heavy concrete column. Large windows open onto two rooftop terraces and a garden planted with pygmy bamboo.

A similarly elegant response can be found in Porto, Portugal, in Alvaro Siza’s Serralves Museum, which opened in 1999. The buildings’ low, abstract white forms are set at the edge of a hill in a park that was built for the Count of Vizela in the 1930s as part of a private compound.

With typical delicacy, Siza sited his building so as not to disturb existing pathways and trees. A low white wall and a narrow bridge guide visitors into the museum buildings. A series of outdoor courtyards breaks up the buildings into distinct components--the theater, offices and galleries. The courtyards become increasingly small in scale, so as visitors approach the galleries, the landscape recedes in importance.

With its park-like setting, the Serralves suggests what the Getty could have become in other hands. The exquisite balance of art, architecture and nature creates an experience of unsurpassed harmony. The long, pure lines of the building’s forms sharpen the eye rather than distract it. The procession through the courtyards calms the mind, preparing it for the engagement with art.

In their aura of cozy domesticity, both the Pulitzer and the Serralves owe an obvious debt to an earlier museum project, the 1987 Menil Foundation in Houston. Designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, the Menil was founded by a single patron, the late art collector and philanthropist Dominique de Menil. Its gentle, horizontal form is clad in clapboard siding supported on a steel frame, echoing the scale and domesticity of the neighborhood’s 1920s-era bungalows.

Inside, small, glass-enclosed garden courts evoke the courtyard of De Menil’s house, a few miles away, designed by Philip Johnson in 1949. The museum’s galleries, which house a rich collection of mostly African and 20th century art, are generously scaled. The light, which filters down through a louvered roof system, is exquisite.

Not surprisingly, many curators have held up the Menil as a perfect balance of art and architecture, a sanctuary where the beauty of the forms does nothing to detract from contemplation of the paintings.

“I think big museums provide a very broad range of experiences,” Pulitzer says, “but one of the problems they have is this deadening of the senses. Room after room of paintings--sooner or later you get bleary-eyed. I wanted to give people the kind of experience that I had looking at a work of art.”

The desire to escape to a more tranquil world points to a philosophical split in the museum world. It assumes that the function of a museum is to serve a relatively small cultured community. These buildings demand a measure of time and patience to absorb both the architectural and artistic experience. Their low profile and relative seclusion create a natural screening process. Only those who are truly drawn by the work will make the pilgrimage to see it.

But it does not follow that art cannot constructively engage a larger public. Nor does it follow that appealing to a broader audience will inevitably lead to a decline in standards. On the contrary, the mission of the traditional museum has always been to bring great works to a mass audience. The wonder of older museums, like Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, is that they have become a part of everyday life, no more or less important than a cineplex. And many architects still believe that their talents can be used to anchor art in a broader, contemporary public discourse.

In that regard, Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim remains one of the least understood buildings in recent memory. Gehry’s mission, as he saw it, was to root art in the postindustrial landscape. As such, Gehry and Guggenheim director Thomas Krens chose a site at the intersection of the city’s Nervion River and a rusted industrial bridge. The building’s exuberant, titanium-clad forms wrap under the bridge, as if to embrace the surrounding context. A reverse grand stair leads down to the building’s entry, allowing the city’s energy to spill into the museum.

Once inside, the museum could not be further in spirit from Calatrava’s Milwaukee Museum of Art. The lobby atrium spirals up to the sky in an explosion of undulating, sexually charged forms. The galleries branch off from this central space in various directions.

Inside, Gehry created a range of gallery types. Conventional galleries are set inside a series of boxy, rectangular rooms. An enormous, warehouse-like gallery--which recalls the belly of a whale--spreads out along the river. Three smaller, odd-shaped galleries are set between these forms.

The idea was to liberate the artist from the White Box. “We didn’t want fussy galleries, but we wanted a range,” Gehry says. “So the stodgy galleries were for the artists that were dead and couldn’t defend themselves. The more contentious spaces were for the artists who are living.”

Creating such spaces was risky. It meant letting go of accepted conventions. Even Gehry admits some of the galleries need fine-tuning. The big gallery, he now says, would work better if it were broken up by a series of partitions.

But the power of Bilbao stems from its desire to aggressively engage contemporary realities, rather than retreat to a sentimental version of the past. It is a museum of the people, and as such, it makes art seem accessible and relevant, a fundamental part of our everyday lives.

In Berlin, Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum employs a similar strategy. The building’s zigzagging shell carves aggressively across its urban site. Its shimmering zinc-clad skin--cut open with hundreds of slash-like windows--reflects the colors of the surrounding cityscape. It is a startling apparition. Sometimes it has an almost brutal edge; at other times it seems surprisingly calming--depending on the light and time of day.

To get inside, visitors must first enter the neoclassical Berlin Museum next door, in effect taking a detour through the city’s historic past. From there they climb down a dark, broad staircase before rising back up to the main galleries, which house an exhibition of Jewish culture in Berlin.

The galleries are simple spaces; there are no fussy details. Five large “voids” carve up through the space. The voids represent the absence caused by the Holocaust. But they do nothing to disturb the tranquillity of the galleries. Instead, they act as a device to trigger the memory. As visitors moves through the exhibits, they carry the recollection of that absence with them, so that it provides a constant context for the art. It is a stunning experience.

Yet another promising direction can be gleaned from two recent projects by Koolhaas, one of the profession’s most daring thinkers. The first is the Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas, completed in October. The museum is small--7,660 square feet. Set inside the Venetian Resort on the Vegas strip, it is enveloped in gaudy distractions.

Koolhaas’ design seems simple at first. The museum is conceived as a long rectangle, its four walls fabricated of heavy Cor-Ten steel panels. Inside, three pivoting panels allow curators to reconfigure the space as one large exhibition space or three smaller galleries. The effect is like a vault for art, braced against the surrounding visual noise.

The panels are slightly raised to allow a thin sliver of light to filter in through glass along the structure’s base. The muffled clatter of the slot machines occasionally seeps in. Such gestures set up a subtle tension between the contemplative act of viewing art and the mayhem outside. But this only makes the experience more serene.

What is lasting is the art itself, which in this case is so breathtaking that it makes the Venetian’s pasted-on, neoclassical decor look vapid. The steel walls, which were treated with an acid process, have a soft, rust-like finish. The effect is luxurious, and the current exhibition of paintings--late 19th century and early 20th century works that include Pablo Picasso’s “Three Women, 1908”--stands out against the walls’ rich red surfaces.

Koolhaas’ competition-winning design for a new Los Angeles County Museum of Art ratchets these ideas up to another level. The design, which was selected by LACMA’s board in December, is still in the preliminary stages. At this point, the galleries are nothing more than a concept.

But even as the sketch of an idea, the project offers a view into a possible future for the art museum.

The structure is conceived as three discrete layers, stacked one on top of the other. The first layer houses the museum’s storage and offices. On top of this base, an enormous, open-air plaza will contain the bookstore, restaurant, theater and temporary exhibition space. The main exhibition spaces rest on a concrete slab above the plaza, propped up on concrete columns and covered by a massive tent-like roof.

The brilliance of the scheme is that it allows the museum to absorb a range of public activities without disturbing the sacred relationship between art and viewer. The plaza is conceived as an immense, buzzing public forum, rooted in the life of the city. Art, placed back up on its pedestal, regains its central importance. The roof’s lightweight, playful form, meanwhile, gives the museum an informal, unpretentious quality that is a key feature of the design’s success.

In short, Koolhaas has proposed a museum that belongs to everyone. And that has always been the ultimate aim of the art institution. Museums as old as New York’s Metropolitan, with their grand ceremonial stairs, were conceived as palaces for the people. Years later, the Museum of Modern Art’s revolving doors were intended to further narrow the gap between art and the common man.

In the struggle to redefine themselves, museums have sometimes forgotten that agenda. But the ensuing chaos has its benefits. It has led to a greater degree of introspection among architects, and launched a sometimes adversarial but nonetheless productive dialogue about the museum’s function.

Chaos, after all, is the root of creative thought. And if that chaos leads to a renewed sense of public spiritedness, and more beautiful buildings, it is more than worth the occasional slip-up.

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Nicolai Ouroussoff is The Times’ architecture critic.