Seduced by Form: Aesthetics of Spectacle in Contemporary Art Museum Architecture
Seduced by Form: Aesthetics of Spectacle
in Contemporary Art Museum Architecture
by
Yvonne Nowicka-Wright
A Master Research Paper presented to OCAD University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts (MA)
in
CONTEMPORARY ART, DESIGN AND NEW MEDIA
ART HISTORIES
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 2013
©Yvonne Nowicka-Wright, 2013
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Abstract
Seduced by Form: Aesthetics of Spectacle in Contemporary Art Museum
Architecture examines strategies behind the radical structural reshaping of contemporary art museum architecture in the last three decades. Focusing on exemplary art institutions such as the Pompidou Centre, the New Stuttgart National Gallery, the Bilbao Guggenheim, the Graz Art Museum and the New Hamilton Wing at the Denver Art Museum, a new paradigm shift in architectural aesthetics is being interrogated that positions contemporary art museum buildings (such as these) in an idealized state as objects of art; atmospherically enhanced and theatrically staged masterpieces.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all those, whose contributions directly or indirectly affected the successful completion of this paper. Firstly, my principle advisor, Professor Marie-Josée Therrien, whose helpful expertise and guidance helped me to navigate the maze of modern and postmodern architectural discourses, and was invaluable in helping me to understand the ideological complexity of art museum architecture. Secondly, I would like to thank Professor Keith Bresnahan, my secondary reader for offering his expertise in the area of spectacle and atmospheric effects in contemporary architecture. Thirdly, I would like to thank Professor Michael Prokopow, Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories (CADN) program Director for his professionalism and moral support that helped to bring my stylistic, cognitive and argumentative skills to the required level. Finally, I would like to thank the Graduate Studies faculty at OCAD University for granting me the President’s Scholarship, the award that set me on the path and mobilized my academic efforts.
This MRP was reviewed and approved by the following:
Principle Advisor
Marie-Josée Therrien, PhD
Modern Design, Art and Architecture, Canadian Cultural History,
Museum Administration
Second Reader
Keith Bresnahan, PhD
Histories of Architecture and Graphic Design, Design and Politics,
History of Ideas
Program Director
Michael Prokopow, PhD
Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories
Dedication
To my husband Michael, for believing in me.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 1
PART 1 THE STAGING OF MODERN MUSEUMS
1.1 The Origins of Art Museums 7
1.2 Museum as a Container 15
1.3 Iconic Monument versus Tactical Instrument 21
1.4 Modern versus Postmodern 25
PART 2 ARCHITECTURAL PRECEDENTS
2.1 The Centre Georges Pompidou 30
2.2 The Stuttgart New National Gallery 37
PART 3 THE AESTHETICS OF SPECTACLE
3.1 The WOW! Factor 43
3.2 The Bilbao Guggenheim Museum 52
3.4 Atmospheric Effects in Museum Architecture 60
3.5 The Bilbao Effect 71
3.6 The Graz Art Museum 81
3.7 The New Wing at the Denver Art Museum 90
Conclusion 96
Bibliography 101
List of Figures:
Fig. 1 Art as Spectacle. Musée du Louvre 1
2. One of the First State-Owned Museums. Musée du Louvre 8
3. The Legacy of Aristocratic Residences. Metropolitan Museum 11
4. Structural Purity. Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin 17
5. Art History - Engaging Local Communities. Musée d'Orsay 19
6. Building as Tactical Instrument. Centre Georges Pompidou 23
7. Museum Exterior. New York Guggenheim 28
8. Techno-Architecture. Centre Georges Pompidou 31
9. The East Façade (Detail). Centre Georges Pompidou 33
10. The Railway Crossing. Fernand Léger 35
11. Front Entrance. Neue Staatsgalerie 38
12. The Ramps. Neue Staatsgalerie 39
13. Meeting at the Rotunda. Neue Staatsgalerie 40
14. View from the River Bank. Bilbao Guggenheim 52
15. The Spectacle of Titanium Sheets. Bilbao Guggenheim 56
16. The Spectacle of Nightly Illuminations. Bilbao Guggenheim 60
17. “The Neo-Baroque” Aesthetics. Bilbao Guggenheim 61
18. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. Umberto Boccioni 67
19. Areal View of Museum Complex. Bilbao Guggenheim 71
20. Museum Exterior (Detail). New York Guggenheim 75
21. View from the Mur River. Kunsthaus Graz 81
22. Spectacle-Space. Kunsthaus Graz 84
23. Computerized Projections. Kunsthaus Graz 86
24. The New Frederic C. Hamilton Wing. Denver Art Museum 90
25. The Aesthetics of Dysfunctional Form. Denver Art Museum 91
26. The Matter of Time. Richard Serra 92
27. The Ethos of Spectacle. Musée du Louvre 96
Introduction
Fig. 1. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Art as Spectacle. Photo: Yvonne Nowicka-Wright, 2009.
Museums have been identified in recent decades as the most popular and frequently visited tourist destinations around the world. In 1999, the American Association of Museums (AAM) reported that in the United States alone, an estimated eight hundred and sixty five million visitors walked through museums’ doors during the so-called ‘golden years’ of American museums (1997-98); undeniably evidencing a growing interest among the general public in museums as cultural and social institutions. The increasing popularity of these
historically designated guardians of cultural heritage may not be based in its
entirety on their apparent and recently ‘re-discovered’ educational and social
significance; rather, it is for the most part an outcome of various conceptual
strategies that aim at securing the industry’s illustrious past with future stability.
In steadily changing post-industrial cities art museums are moving away from
the traditionally perceived image of a ‘stable container’ to that of an increasingly
flexible, public space.
One of the most effective tools used for ensuring audiences’ ongoing
interest and participation is the structural expansion and tactical transformation
of museum buildings, as evidenced in recent years in various international art
museum projects (particularly since the opening of the Bilbao Guggenheim
Museum in Spain). The new museum spaces have been repurposed, enhanced
and aestheticized with an increasingly diversified vocabulary of sensorial stimuli
that explore the spectacular and the atmospheric within architectural designs.
Art historian Chris van Uffelen pointed out that the most elaborate "exhibit"
into which [art] museums today invest for their future is their own museum
buildings;
architects.
Consistently, the world’s most innovative architectural concepts in
Kozak, Lisa Rogers, Sarah Schkolziger. Translation Talhouni. Salenstein: Braun Publishing.
2011: 8.
building design are represented by art institutions, some of which have undergone radical structural reshaping to communicate a shift in modern aesthetics from austere functionality (as privileged in the 1960s) to spectacular, multi-sensory “flash and bravura” works of art (by the late 1990s), provoking fierce critical debates within the museological discourse. This change in building visualizations necessitates new research into the critical paradigm shift that signifies the ideology of spectacle, with the cult of image as its guiding principle.
The rejection of minimalist dogma in the years that followed the opening of the Centre Georges Pompidou a.k.a. Beaubourg in Paris in 1977 has resulted in a steady architectural and operational transformation of art museums around the world into successful, often multi-national corporations whose institutional practices have begun to overlap and blur ever expanding borders between culture, communication technology and savoir-faire business practices.
Focusing on the theory of spectacle as proposed by Guy Debord, I will argue the notion of spectacularized aesthetics and their seductive powers to attract audiences as a dominant force behind several contemporary art museum projects - one that becomes an explicit goal in itself, and a critically important element in the overall art museum’s architectural assembly. This theoretical argument will
4 Shiner, Larry. “On Aesthetics and Function in Architecture: The Case of the ‘Spectacle’ Art Museum.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69.1 (2011): 31. Wiley-Blackwell. Nicolai Ouroussoff A Razor-Sharp Profile Cuts Into a Mile-High Cityscape New York Times, Oct. 2006, qtd. in Shiner.
5 Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chasel, 1967. Reprint, Paris: Champ Libre, 1971, trans. Black and Red, 1977. Reprint, Detroit: Black and Red, 2010.
be based on writings by art historians, theorists and architectural critics whose contributions to the scholarship on contemporary museum architecture was particularly informative (e. g., Hal Foster, Charles Jencks, Larry Shiner and Anthony Vidler, among many others).
Privileging museum buildings whose spectacularized structures exemplify the notion of an iconic landmark, the focus of this paper will be given to star designers whose key point of creative departure is modernist art (i. e., to an architectural practice that adopts an abstract language of Modernist paintings and sculptures). With the convictions of avant-garde visionaries seduced by the dynamics and possibilities of multi-sensory structural forms, leading architects have been successfully reconfiguring museum buildings since the 1980s.
Rationalized on the persistent idea of spectacle, an unprecedented global proliferation of impressively unique art museum buildings has occurred; aided to various degrees by computerization of the designing process (e. g., CAD and CATIA three-dimensional interactive softwares), and most recent material technologies. It is here, in the area of architectural digitization, that the stunning and structurally most complex iconic buildings are realized. American art critic and historian Hal Foster, somewhat dismisses contemporary museum designs, relegating them all to a “digital period,” and seeing them as a distraction-of-sorts in the overall intellectual process. Yet, I will argue that the emergence of new
6 Foster, Hal. The Art-Architecture Complex. London: Verso, 2011: 85. Foster argues that Zaha Hadid might be considered along with Frank O. Gehry a prime architect of the digital period.
media, particularly in the area of three-dimensional drafting applications, has
created an infinite number of possibilities for avant-garde architects who dare to
test uncharted territories.
Exemplary art institutions like the 1977 Georges Pompidou Center (Renzo
Piano and Richard Rogers), the 1984 New Stuttgart Art Gallery (James Stirling),
the 1997 Bilbao Guggenheim Museum (Frank O. Gehry), the 2003 Graz Art
Museum (Peter Cook and Colin Fournier) and the 2006 Frederic C. Hamilton
New Wing at the Denver Art Museum (Daniel Libeskind) - all attest to art
museums’ dependence upon impressive structures. The prevalent discourse in
the “experience economy” relies on a strong and spectacularized corporate
identity, which is paramount to the survival and growth of art museums in the
twenty-first century. I will argue that art museum buildings have became more
than just physical structures. They reflect the consumerist society accustomed to
spectacle of which they are a part. Yet, they exist in an idealized architectural state
as objects d’art, masterpieces, the creative signatures of architects of whose
privileged activities they are testimonies.
It may be argued that such a sensorial play subverts the art museum’s
historically reflective and intellectual character by shifting audience’s attentions
from educational significance to the performative and entertaining. In the twenty-
7 Pitman, Bonnie. “Muses, Museums, and Memories”. Daedalus 128.3 (07/1999): 27. The MIT Press,
accessed: July 18, 2012. The Experience economy, is a recent theory developed by B. Joseph Pine,
James H. Gilmore, and B. Joseph Pine II, as well as current marketing and management theories,
and has had a dramatic impact on the ways museums develop relationships with their visitors.
first century art museum architecture has positioned itself at an intersection of creative ingenuity and an ideological pragmatism
Part 1
THE STAGING OF MODERN MUSEUMS
Museums disarm us. [They] help us to forget, that we have forgotten who we are.
(Preziozi 2011)
1.1 The Origins of Art Museums
The history of art museums as public spaces is a tumultuous one.
Their modern function as cultural institutions with collecting and educational components is generally dated back to the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology in Oxford, founded in 1683 and later bequeathed to the Oxford University; a decision which created the first public museum in Europe.
It was also the first cultural institution characterized by scheduled accessibility, arriving from what American art historian Jeffrey Abt describes as the “efflorescence of social idealism” that began in mid-seventeenth century England;
In 1793, the first major art collection in Europe was made available to the public, when the Bourbon Residence at the Palais du Louvre became nationalized
Fig. 2. Musée du Louvre, Paris. The Cour Napoleon.
One of the First State-Owned Art Museums (Since 1793).
Photo: Yvonne Nowicka-Wright 2009
during the French Revolution.
and political sovereignty; fueling the growth and spread of art institutions in France as promoters of social stability and growth. It was then, at this pivotal moment in museums’ history that the Louvre was also recognized as an important social space, capable of accommodating large numbers of visitors of varying backgrounds.
The original beginnings of collecting and scholarly devotion to art is unclear; however, in time the pursuit of acquiring valuable manuscripts and objects of art became a popular activity among wealthy ancient Greeks and Romans, who contained their collections in specifically designated buildings. Romans called them Musaeums,
Jeffrey Abs argues that the majority of Europe’s most prestigious art institutions took their roots in the legacy of the Napoleonic wars. The widespread looting and confiscation of art by the French Great Army across Europe,
ironically resulted in a future rise of national art galleries, born of plundered and repossessed works of art
Historically significant is the fact that with the return of looted works from France, an unprecedented museum-building-boom took place in western Europe,
perspective of the twentieth century. It transformed not only European urban
centers, but also influenced future North American building projects that endorsed
Fig. 3. Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, New York City. Built 1872-1902.
The legacy of Aristocratic Residences. Photo: Jean-Chrisrophe Benoist 2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NYC_-_Metropolitan_Museum_Carroll_and_Milton_Petrie_
European_Sculpture_Court.jpg This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
the Enlightenment idea of the public’s right to ownership and accessibility to
cultural heritage
age’ of North America’s prosperous economy, most major American art
institutions were founded. The Museum of Fine Art in Boston (1870), the
Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art in New York City (1870), the Philadelphia
Museum of Fine Art (1876), the Art Institute of Chicago (1879) and the Detroit
11
Institute of Arts (1885) opened their doors to the public for the first time. The cultural and economic importance of art institutions began to “define and reflect the [American] nation as a whole.” In 1835, on the bequest of French-born Englishman and scientist James Smithson, the Smithsonian Institution was founded in Washington “to increase and diffuse knowledge,” communicating the apparent concern of the elite’s at the time, about the inferiority of American culture as opposed to European.
Europe marked its own golden age of economic prosperity in the last two decades of the nineteenth-century, affectionately categorized today as la belle epoque, which also witnessed museum constructions on a grand scale. This unique merging of art and commerce during the 1870s quickly established the ‘Continent,’ particularly Paris, as a cultural leader, a kind of arbiter elegantiarum for the Western world. The newly built national art galleries in Austria, Britain, France, Germany and Italy displayed cultural artifacts from Europe’s past and geographically distant places, becoming repositories of objects that Walter Benjamin would later describe as having an auratic value. The nineteenth century art museums were shrines to unique and ‘irreplaceable’ objects,
22 Abt, Jeffrey. “The Origins of the Public Museum.” A Companion to Museum Studies. Ed. Sharon Macdonald. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011: 130.
23 Ibid., p 130. Oeher 1983:15, qtd. in Abt.
24 Laquer, Walter. “Fin-de-siècle: Once More with Feeling.” Journal of Contemporary History 31.1 (January 1996): 5.
functioning more like collections of curiosities than chronologically organized art institutions in the modern sense.25
Architecturally, in spite of their aristocratic roots and the Enlightenment’s obsession with Greek and Roman temples, art museum buildings continued to evolve. Challenged at first by the fin-de-siècle’s Historicism (fig. 3. p. 11) and Eclecticism, and later, by the early-twentieth century Modern, the processes of conceptualizing unique museum buildings continued - crowned first by the iconic Guggenheim Museum in New York and later the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
A new type of monumental ethos was being forged, the ethos of spectacle, denoting a paradigm shift towards seductive architectural forms that has come to symbolize contemporary art museums.
In the last two decades, surprisingly diversified architectural visualizations have developed outside of the predictable paradigm, materializing themselves in innovative, art museum buildings. The forward-thinking designs for such cultural institutions as the Guggenheim Foundation or the Denver Art Museum for example, have launched an increasingly debated phenomenon of the museum building as a sculptural work of art. Echoing the legacy of the ‘princely palace’ (or an ancient Musaeum), symbolically situated within contemporary design, the flamboyantly spectacular buildings seem to induce in their audiences a
25 Zeiger, Mimi. New Museums: Contemporary Museum Architecture around the Word. New York: Rizzoli International Publications Inc., Universe, 2005: 10.
sense of “privilege rather than a civic right”
Mimi Zeiger argues that the rejuvenating power of the “new,” found its advocates in a succession of avant-garde movements that opposed traditional cultural institutions, inadvertently setting the stage for art museums’ future architectural development.
1.2 Museum as a Container
Art museums in the twenty-first century have been sites for specifically defined aesthetic values, with institutional agendas oscillating between education and entertainment fields. As cultural venues, they seek to serve communities that support them, often promoting urban re-development and economic revitalization. Not all contemporary art museums are sovereign new structures; many morphed from existing, older museum buildings that were perceived as outmoded and ‘stagnating’ the corporate vision of growth, and were therefore remodeled. With a widely held belief that the external update of the museum’s shell provides an essential cultural and economic service, many art museum buildings have been effectively reconfigured and repurposed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, into iconic emblems of forward-thinking structures that fulfill institutional demands for unique brand identity not inhibited by the museum’s historic past.
The design configurations of art museums have been guided by three key elements: lighting, security and flawless procession through space - all controlled and determined by the structural requirements of a communal building. Yet, the relationship between the content and the container that defined and ruled museum architecture for the past two centuries, has become precariously unbalanced, particularly in the early twenty-first century. Canadian-born historian and
29 Ibid., p. 10.
economist, Anthony King, believed that “buildings are informed by society’s ideas, its forms of social organization, the beliefs and values that dominate at the particular [historical] moment.” Therefore, as social and cultural products they are continually “reproduced through use.” It has also been put forward by another architectural historian, Jonathan Hill, that the designer and the audience appear to produce architectural experiences simultaneously, which vary in intensity. The architect’s contribution is direct and personal, through the structural design, while the audience’s influence on a museum’s building is indirect, accidental and on some level subconscious.
It is important to note that when in the mid-nineteenth century, revered early architects, Karl Friedrich Schinkel
the twentieth century in museological discourse, contributing significantly to the development of a new type of building - the museum building as a masterpiece.35
Fig. 4. The New National Gallery, Berlin. 1968.
Structural Purity. Photo: Manfred Brückels 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neue_Nationalgalerie_Berlin.jpg, accessed 03/22/13.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
The idea of a “pure object” was reintroduced into architectural discourse in 1968 by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose New National Gallery (Neue Nationalgalerie) in Berlin (fig. 4) became a symbol of the modernists approach to cultural institutions. Conceptualized as a kind of universal space, a
35 Ibid., p. 12.
17
“temple” to contemporary art, the gallery launched an uneasy relationship between the museum building as an open-concept-exhibition-space and the art collection housed inside it. The increasingly debatable tension between materiality and ‘dematerialization’ of museum walls, exemplified by Mies van der Rohe’s 1968 design, implied some form of negotiation between the physicality of museum structures and the phenomenal, often spectacular atmospheric readings created by them.
The American art historian Donald Preziosi, has proposed that art museums are not utopian constructs at all, but “heterotopic sites within social space,” art objects or instruments to provide audiences with the apparent methods and means to master their lives and compensate for the “confusions” of their daily existence.
What [a] museum subject ‘sees’ in this remarkable institutional space is a series of ‘mirrors’ - possible ways in which it can construct or compose its life as one or another kind of centered unity or consistency which draws together in a decorous and telling order its sundry devices and desires. (Preziosi 2011)
Preziosi refers to museums as staged hybrids whose duality oscillates between “determinacy and causality;” to him, these buildings are both there and not
36 Zeiger, Mimi. New Museums: Contemporary Museum Architecture around the Word. New York: Rizzoli International Publications Inc., Universe, 2005: 7.
37 Preziozi, Donald. “Art History and Museology: Rendering the Visible Legible.” A Companion to Museum Studies. Ed. Sharon Macdonald. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011: 52.
38 Ibid., p. 53.
39 Ibid., p. 53.
there, present and absent at the same time, directly and indirectly meaningful.
George Brown Goode, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in the 1880s and 1890s, might have originated Preziosi’s notion of the museum space as ‘constructing’ its audiences, when he developed in 1889 a working theory for the museums of the future, later known as the theory of the exhibitionary
Fig. 5. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Art History - Engaging Local Communities.
Photo: Yvonne Nowicka-Wright 2009.
complex. “The museum is more closely in touch with the masses than the University or the Learned Society” declared Goode in 1894, and later adding that “exhibitions [...] minister to the mental and moral welfare of the masses and turn them into good citizens” (fig. 5). The basic premise of Goode’s “new museum”
40 Rydell, Robert W. “World Fairs and the Museums.” A Companion to Museum Studies. Ed. Sharon Macdonald. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell 2011: 139. Goode 1889, qtd. in Rydell.
41 Ibid., p. 137. Goode 1901:4 66, qtd. in Rydell.
idea was however, to run it more as if it were a world fair than a traditionally perceived cultural institution; a type of commercialized cultural engagement that was popularized in 1851 by the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, and proven most profitable.
Goode proclaimed in 1901 that “to see is to know,” a sentiment that expressed the apparent “tendency of the human mind”
1.3 Iconic Monument versus Tactical Instrument
Two distinct operational strategies inform museum architecture today: first, the museum building as an iconic monument
protected the cultural “past;” acting therefore as if a monument à mémoire, no longer capable of representing progressive, social ideals.
The demands placed on designers to create buildings of unique forms encouraged the proliferation of more spectacularized structures whose iconic shapes have become architectural landmarks. The early examples of innovative museum buildings correspond to the beginning of postmodern which rejected the Miesian motto “less is more” and Fuller’s dictum “do more with less” in favour of Robert Venturi’s liberating counter-endorsement “enhance what’s there” and “less is a bore,” consequently initiating a new type of museum building.
The museum building as a tactical instrument (fig. 6 p. 23) possesses two significant features that are primarily characteristic of art museum buildings in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They pertain to the way in which art collections are handled and displayed by museums, allowing various degrees of a) ‘impermanence’ of collecting components, b) ‘flexibility’ of spacial arrangements and c) ‘adaptability’ in institutional prioritizing. In 1939, French architect Le Corbusier proposed a notion of the museum as “time’s arrow,” or an instrument, designed to display the “cumulative progress of humanity’s achievements.” Art historian and theorist Anthony Vidler, suggests that the
48 Ibid., p. 177. Monument to memories.
49 Wigley, Mark. “Towards a History of Quantity.” Architecture Between Spectacle and Use. Ed. Anthony Vidler. Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008: 161. Robert Venturi 1966, qtd. in Wigley.
50 Giebelhausen, op. cit., p. 232. International exhibitions created the demand for temporary display spaces.
51 Ibid., p. 232. (Le Corbusier’s design for a Museum of Unlimited Growth, 1939).
notion of a building being an ‘instrument’ derives from the museums’ use of modern technology. Agreeably, it seems as though contemporary museum buildings have became technological instruments, especially in the areas of information and display, that coincide with various other services they support.
Giebelhausen presents the history of museum architecture as a shift from monument to instrument, however the boundaries between these two distinct
Fig. 6. The Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris. 1977
Museum building as tactical instrument. Photo: Yair Haklai 2007.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_from_the_Centre_Georges-Pompidou.jpg, accessed 03/22/13.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
3.0 Unported.
52 Vidler, op. cit., p. 177
53 Giebelhausen, Michaela. “Museum Architecture: A brief History.” A Companion to Museum Studies.
Ed. Sharon Macdonald. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011: 241.
modalities are blurred and the apparent return to the monument
1.4 Modern versus Postmodern
The term Postmodernism is generally attributed to Joseph Hudnut, whose article “The Post-modern House” published in 1945, first used this classifying expression. Later, in his writings about architecture, American architectural theorist Charles Jencks, used the term ‘postmodernity’ as a kind of “temporizing label,” and referred to it only when observing architectural practice that departed from Modernist canon. For Jencks, Postmodern became indicative of the architectural practice that rejected Minimalist simplicity, rather than suggestive of a brand new paradigm.
Today, contemporary art museum architecture builds on the creative legacy of late-modern and post-modern designs that deliberately resisted somber Minimalism, and challenged the prevailing architectural paradigm by introducing new, more structurally expressive forms. Where would innovative buildings be today, such as the Bilbao Guggenheim, the Graz Art Gallery or the Hamilton Wing at the Denver Art Museum, if it were not for their defiant forerunners: the late modern, High-Tech Pompidou Center or the postmodern “hybrid,” New National Gallery in Stuttgart, to lay the groundwork for more sensorial concepts? Jencks credits British architect James Stirling with particularly
55 Jencks, Charles. “Postmodern and Late Modern: The Essential Definitions”. Chicago Review 35.4 (Jan. 1987): 33.
56 Ibid., p. 33. Jencks claims to be the first to use the term postmodern, circa 1975.
important contributions to the kind of spectacularized architectural language
Postmodernity also indicates a time of “de-industrialization” in western countries and their continuous attempts at recovery. This seemingly up-hill battle was recognized eloquently by contemporary museum institutions in the context of addressing rather than challenging business environments. In architecture, economic necessity brought dramatic changes in museum building visualizations that moved away from austere functionality, privileged by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, to more imaginative, multi-sensory forms said to have started with Sterling’s postmodernist evocation of Schinkel’s Altes Museum, and followed by Gehry’s and Libeskind’s array of atmospheric effects that were made possible through advanced technologies - a new trend in architectural visualizations initiated by Piano and Rogers high-tech Pompidou Centre in 1977 (fig. 8 p. 31).
Arguably, this “poetic”
seductive designs that have firmly situated museum buildings as leaders in a competitive world of architecture.
Foster regards contemporary art museum architecture as physical structures that exist in a “particular historical period” and communicate with their viewers as “symbols in space rather than forms in space,”
There was one museum building, erected in New York City that defiantly stood out from the collection of dominant Modernist Style - the Guggenheim Museum on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue (fig. 7, p. 28). It opened in October 1959, six months after the architect’s death and was quickly regarded as the crowning jewel of Frank Lloyd Wright’s achievements. Instructed by the first museum curator Hilla von Rebay, to create “a temple of spirit, a monument!” Wright translated it into a ziggurat-like, cylindrical structure that signified novelty and progress. His innovative use of spiral ramps inside the museum to connect five levels of barrel-shaped galleries with outwardly-tilted walls proved visionary - heralding a new and more innovative museum architecture. It took sixteen years
for the Guggenheim Museum to be completed and required seven hundred forty
nine drawings to visualize its final shape.61
Fig. 7. The Guggenheim Museum, New York City. 1959.
Museum Exterior. Photo: Finlay McWalter 2004.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guggenheim_museum_exterior_retouched.jpg, accessed 03/22/13.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Today, the official Website of the Guggenheim Museum in New York quotes the
words of Paul Goldberger who claims that “Wright's building made it socially and
culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely
personal museum. In this sense almost every museum of our time is a child of the
61 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Website © 2013, accessed March 24, 2013,
http://www.guggenheim.org/guggenheim-foundation/architecture/new-york.
28
Guggenheim."\textsuperscript{62} To concur with this statement, it needs to be added that the museum’s exterior was conceptualized as a work of art, a dynamic sculpture and a spectacle capable of attracting, drawing audiences for the first time, before they even entered the building to see its collection.
Surprisingly, it took another twenty years for museum architecture to reveal itself in equally exciting and visually \textit{seductive} sculptural forms. Not until the Centre Georges Pompidou was erected, and the Bilbao Guggenheim two decades later, was there an end to the prevailing Modernist paradigm for museum architecture to function as merely an unobtrusive physical support to an art exhibit, having limited capacity for attracting attention unto itself.
\textsuperscript{62} Ibid., Website © 2013 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Part 2
ARCHITECTURAL PRECEDENTS
Life is chaotic, dangerous and surprising. Buildings should reflect that.
(F. Gehry)
2.1 The Georges Pompidou Centre (a.k.a Beaubourg)
When the Georges Pompidou National Art and Cultural Centre (Le Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou) opened in the Marais district of Paris, in 1977, it was quickly and broadly proclaimed to revolutionize the meaning and function of the contemporary art museum.
Fig. 8. The Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris. 1971-1977.
Techno-Architecture. Photo: Leland 2004.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki.File:Pompidou_center.jpg accessed 01/22/13. Permission is granted to copy,
distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License, the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
they have done as much modern building as anybody else; but they regard it, not
as part of la culture française but as an unavoidable evil, to be kept as far as
possible to the peripheries of their historic cities."67 Yet today, it can be credited to
the city’s foresight that the Centre Pompidou was commissioned (fig. 8), marking
it the apex of the late Modern Movement.68
67 Reyner Banham and John Partridge. “1977 May: The Pompidou Centre, the ‘Pompodolium’”
The Architectural Review, published online March 2, 2012, accessed March 23, 2013,
http://www.architectural-review.com/archive/1977-may-the-pompidou-centre-the-pompodolium/
8627187.article.
68 Ibid.,
From the beginning, the Piano and Richard’s megastructure with its engineering innovations resonated throughout Europe. The Musée National d'Art Moderne (MNAM) is located there, one of the most important museums of modern and contemporary art in the world, along with the Musical Institute (IRCAM), the Public Information Library, the Centre de Création Industrielle (CCI) and several cinemas - all conspicuously contained within eight floors that offer multifunctional spaces, divided by adjustable walls. Today, the Centre Pompidou is recognized for its uniquely exposed structural elements that wrap around the building to create its iconic exterior shell. The outside ramps and “caterpillar” escalators (fig. 8, p. 31) offer visitors panoramic views of the city.
The museum’s megastructure brings to mind Goode’s “new museum” idea based on the world fair. The Centre Pompidou is juxtaposed against the city’s historic landscape (fig. 6, p. 23) like a futuristic machine worthy of Marinetti, where the conveniences of cutting-edge technologies are re-purposed and ‘exposed’ as new architectural tools. Conceptualized to promote a democratization of culture, the complex plays a pivotal role in the Marais district of Paris’ urban regeneration efforts. Its uneasy fit among the city’s narrow streets was aided by creating a large public square in front of it (a project which required demolition of some heritage
69 "Centre Pompidou, Paris." Centre Pompidou Foundation. 2011, accessed February 6, 2013.
http://www.centrepompidoufoundation.org/Centre_Pompidou_Foundation/CENTRE.html.
70 "Centre Pompidou." France Monthly. October 28th, 2012 accessed May 6, 2013
http://www.francemonthly.com/centre-pompidou-modern-art-in-the-heart-of-paris/
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
buildings) - a difficult decision that over the years has proved invaluable, turning
the square into one of the most frequented public spaces in Paris and an open-air
stage for street artists.73
Fig. 9. The Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
The East Façade (Detail). Photo: Hydromel 2012.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DSF1634.JPG., accessed 01/22/13.
This work of art is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it according to terms
of the Free Art License 1.3 and the Copyleft Attitude.
Decades later, “the Beaubourg” appears to exist in a realm of a unique
technological and architectural “hybrid” that has morphed into a Pop symbol in
its own right. As a type of museum building it has distanced itself clearly from the
traditional notion of a building as a monument,74 and represents instead the notion
73 Agnoletti, Matteo. Renzo Piano, trans. Clarice Zdanski. Ed. Giovanni Leoni. Milan: Motta, 2009: 35.
74 Giebelhausen, Michaela. “Museum Architecture: A Brief History.” A Companion to Museum Studies. Ed.
Sharon Macdonald. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011: 232.
of a museum as an instrument. As such, the building simultaneously enables “the production, collection, dissemination and consumption of culture”
Architects Piano and Rogers, whose creative departure for this particular structure appears to have been inspired by modernist art, expanded the language of museum architecture into the realm of sculpture. A close parallel can be drawn between the Beaubourg’s architectural elements, such as industrial piping in bright colours (fig. 9, p. 33), and the 1919 Cubist work by French painter Fernand
Léger (fig. 10), which marks an enormous conceptual ‘leap’ in architectural visualizations away from objective neutrality towards subjective individuality; opening thereby architecture to unorthodox, avant-garde interpretations. The idea of sensorial seduction through museum structure as part of the overall cultural experience is strongly affirmed.
Fig. 10. Fernand Léger The Railway Crossing, 1919. Oil on canvas. The Art Institute of Chicago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wikiFile:Leger_railway_crossing.jpg, accessed 01/22/13. This image is in the public domain in the United States. In most cases, this means that it was first published prior to January 1, 1923. Other jurisdictions may have other rules, and this image might not be in the public domain outside the United States. This work of art is copyrighted in its source country until after August 17, 2025.
Piano and Rogers re-configured art museum architecture and managed to defy the supremacy of the ‘white cube’ as an elitist gallery environment. They introduced a new, more embodied museum experience that helped to empower visiting
audiences
Conversely, “driven by historical necessity as well as technological advance,”
2.2 The Stuttgart New National Gallery
Arguably, by the early 1980s, a new ideological momentum was gaining its potency with the return to historical references, while at the same time some art historians appeared unfazed. Among a new generation of architects, the search for subjective individualism was beginning to influence museum designs, privileging “deconstructive” thinking outside the dominant Minimalist dogma.
Charles Jencks argues that such tendencies permeating the creative considerations in the 1980s and 1990s turned museum architecture into more forward thinking, sometimes “poetic,” but never predictable institutional statements that oscillated between historical references and contemporary interpretations of the dominant International Style.
Under the leadership of James Stirling, one of the most iconic, early Postmodern art museum buildings was created in Stuttgart (fig. 11, p. 38). The new addition to the historic National Gallery was the winning design of a national architectural competition in the early 1980s. The museum’s website claims today that Stirling’s controversial architectural proposal produced a wave of “furor worldwide” once the museum opened in 1984. Yet, looking at the New National Gallery today, it is evident that the architect successfully responded to the
challenging urban and cultural environments. Topographically, Stirling positioned
his new art gallery on two different levels that architecturally follow the terrain.
Fig. 11. The New National Gallery, Stuttgart. 1984.
Front Entrance. Photo: Mussklprozz 2004.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Staatsgalerie1.jpg, accessed 01/22/13
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
A set of terraces, podiums and ramps were built to integrate the museum building
with its sloping landscape, while at the same time, a large courtyard platform was
designed for the main building to perch it on, a pedestal-like elevation to double-
function as an underground garage enclosure. The overall design of the New
83 Cannon-Brookes, Peter. "The post modern gallery comes of age: James Stirling and the Neue Staatsgalerie,
Stuttgart." The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship 3.2 (June 1984): 161, Butterworth & Co., Ltd.
38
National Gallery (Der Neue Staatsgalerie) in Stuttgart can be described as monumental, incorporating irregular geometrical forms that are juxtaposed against each other and oddly protruding. Large and partitioned windows bend in waves at various angles, while Stirling’s daring use of pink and blue on steel railings and bright green on window frames alludes to an industrial site rather than an art museum (fig. 12). The architect once stated, as quoted by art historian
Fig. 12. The New National Gallery, Stuttgart. 1984.
The Ramps. Photo: Veuveclicquot 2010.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki File:Neue_Staatsgalerie_Sstuttgart.jpg, accessed 01/22/13.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Peter Cannon-Brookes, that “monumentalism [has] nothing to do with size or style, but entirely to do with presence.”84 Stirling’s playful use of colour and
84 Stirling qtd. in Cannon-Brookes 179. Cannon-Brookes, Peter. “The post modern gallery comes of age: James Stirling and the Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.” The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship 3.2 (June 1984): 159-181. Butterworth & Co., Ltd.
architectural detail added welcomed contemporaneity to a rather weighty sandstone cladding covering the museum exterior. The truly “theatrical drama,” begins within the high, cylindrical walls of the central Rotunda, where the barrel-shaped courtyard walls are punctuated by arched and slightly in recess windows - agreeably, Sterling’s postmodernist evocation of Schinkel’s Altes Museum.
Stylistic references to Neoclassicism (fig. 13) announce with a fanfare an eclectic
Fig. 13. The New National Gallery, Stuttgart.
Meeting at the Rotunda. Photo: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart 1984
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christian_von_Holst und James-Stirling_Foto
_Staatsgalerie_Struttgart.jpg, accessed May 8/2013. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
architectural narrative of the Postmodern, which uses a “hybridized” design language to achieve the foremost of visual complexity. One could argue that although Stirling’s architectural signature references past historical styles, it
also decisively embodies contemporaneity with its purposely atmospheric and ‘loosely’ negotiated historic styles - indicative of the designer’s subjectivity, not necessarily accuracy. The New National Gallery in Stuttgart represents the first wave of art museum buildings purposely spectacularized for the sensorial pleasure of looking at them. Peter Cannon-Brookes theorized that such a design, as the first Postmodern art museum building, may have been “fully in tune with [its] visitors’ aesthetic frames of reference in the early 1980s and thus the excitement which it engendered was positive in effect,” however, Cannon-Brookes concluded that it was very unlikely for postmodernism to become a “definitive architectural style for the next century.” He supposed incorrectly, because upon completion of the Neue Staatsgalerie, Stirling created a reference point of fundamental importance for future generations of architects to follow worldwide.
We live in a complex world, where we cannot deny either the past and [its] conventional beauty, nor the present and current technical and social reality. (Stirling 1984)
The Pompidou Centre was designed as a contemporary and democratic public space to work for the public good; utilitarian, functional and fun. Stirling
85 Cannon-Brookes, Peter. “The post modern gallery comes of age: James Stirling and the Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.” The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship 3.2 (June 1984): 169
86 Ibid., p. 169
87 Jencks, Charles. “Postmodern and Late Modern: The Essential Definitions”. Chicago Review 35.4 (Jan. 1987). James Stirling 1984, qtd in Jencks 37.
88 Foster, Hall. The Art-Architecture Complex. London: Verso, 2011: 33.
attempted an Enlightenment notion of art museum as an intellectual gathering place, an art institution full of visual anecdote and mystery. Stirling’s vision solidified what was later described as a “fusion” of architecture and art into one, seductively choreographed assembly of forms.
89 Ibid., p. 95.
Part 3
THE AESTHETICS OF SPECTACLE
In a spectacle, one part of the world ‘presents itself’ to the world and is superior to it.90 (Debord, 1967)
3.1 The WOW! Factor
One could argue that in the last three decades, art museum buildings have successfully imprinted their audiences’ perception of museum architecture as signifiers of world trends in building visualizations. As art institutions in the twenty-first century, they have became increasingly self-reflective, well-manufactured, highly spectacularized, sometimes chaotic and certainly uniquely branded - well capable of applying seduction in the service of a culture industry.
The generalized perception of museum architecture as being most fashionable reached such an extent that it turned the majority of visitors into apparently indiscriminate participants in the picturesque “scenographic kitsch” of the Postmodern. Hal Foster sides with Aaron Betsky, an art critic and curator, who argues that the majority of today’s designers can be simply described as “display engineers, contaminating and complicating intrinsic and supposedly pure architectural forms and techniques”91 by allowing themselves to serve the
90 Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chasel, 1967. Reprint, Paris: Champ Libre, 1971.
Trans. Black and Red, 1977. Reprint, Detroit: Black and Red, 2010 (chapter 1, paragraph 28)
91 Foster, Hall. The Art-Architecture Complex. London: Verso, 2011, Aaron Betsky qtd. in Foster 95.
globalized culture of consumerism. Too much focus has been given to the “symbol and surface,” Foster bemoans, rather than “structure and space”
The growing need for more inclusive and publicly accessible spaces has opened museum architecture to interpretations in which new projects challenge traditional understanding of museum buildings and suggest unconventional possibilities for display and cultural experience - at the core of which, spectacle has found its prominence as a dominant, ideological force. Spectacularized aesthetics, or as philosophy professor and design engineer Baz Kershaw calls it “the WOW! factor”
sensitive areas in the changing nature of the human psyche."97 The postmodernist concept of the museum as a mass medium has let to the construction of vessels that allowed the "spectacular, mise-en-scène and operatic exuberance."98
For Debord and Baudrillard, writes Kershaw, the notion of spectacle is constitutive of the performative society, where persons or things can be exhibited as objects "either for curiosity or contempt."99 Debord and Baudrillard both suggest the binary aspects of spectacle which can attract and repel the perceiver simultaneously. Allegedly, the power invested in spectacles tends to diminish the human factor, objectifying it. "If spectacle is everywhere," argued Baudrillard, "then we, as the performative society, are constituted through it with a new kind of significance; the spectacle becomes a flexible force for change transforming humans into something more or less than themselves."100
When evaluating contemporary museum architecture, four types of spectacles need to be considered which indirectly influence the designing processes. These are: a) the spectacles of domination which are most commonly associated with the rituals of the 'powerful' (e. g., the church, the state, etc.); b) the spectacles of resistance also called 'carnivals of the weak' and are associated with the revolutionary avant-garde; c) the spectacles of contradiction
97 Ibid., p. 592.
98 Rees Leahy, Helen. "Producing a Public for Art. Gallery space in the 21st century." Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions. London: Routledge, 2005: 109.
99 Kershaw, op., cit. p. 593
100 Ibid., p. 593. Baudrillard qtd. in Kershaw.
or ‘festivals of division’ that negotiate power through festivities and saturnalias; and finally d) the spectacles of deconstruction which displace the nature of the "real" with whimsical masquerades, shamanic tricks and trompe l'oeil effects that veil the ambiguities of such entertainments
The historical definition of spectacle is generally attributed to Aristotle and his famous work “Poetics,” where Aristotle is credited as saying: "the spectacle [opsis]...of all the parts [of drama] is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry."
There has been a logical association between spectacle (performed or created) and its size. Almost habitually, most people think of a spectacle as an event persuasive in scale. In art museum architecture, the idea of spectacle has been transparently connoted in structural ‘greatness,’ the audience size and flow, and “the exponential increase in bandwith.”
projects turn into projectiles [...] judged by the number of images [they inspire]
that land around the world.”
Conversely, while playing a part in the spectacle of deconstruction, art
museum architecture disperses its allure through contemporary culture like
“performative [mass] mediatization,” using modern technology to effectively
‘seduce’ the human subject. Wigley points out that the resulting spectacle
“services the machinery of the global marketplace by distracting us from the
realities of contemporary socioeconomic life.”
warns that highly performative audiences are being constituted, “predominantly
through spectacles of deconstruction”
market at the core of contemporary culture. “In this age of uncertainty,” Kershaw
writes, “if subjects are constituted through spectacle then humans will need to
develop an especially reflexive take on how they appear between themselves,
in order to get anywhere near to a sense of the commonly human in the
contemporary world.”
Likewise, contemporary media increasingly entices cultural institutions
such as art museums, to extend their impact into an ever larger field of influence,
magnifying museums’ celebrity power to act accordingly. Museum architecture
(12/2003): 606. The John Hopkins University Press, accessed 18 July 2012.
therefore becomes increasingly dependent on enhanced physical properties, with each generation of architects cherishing and cultivating that image - progressively giving way to the seduction of representational systems.
Not all contemporary art museums have been spectacularized, but there is great proliferation of “dizzying variations of architecture offered,” since the opening of the New National Gallery in Stuttgart. Okwoi Enwezor, an Igbo Nigerian-born American curator and writer, questions the cultural implications of American art museums’ operational “independence,” their local context in relation to the globalized art market and the effect such independence has on a culture that is currently “free-floating and experienced, superficially.”
Contemporary art historian Terry Smith declared in 2009 that the western world is “living in the regime of the representation,” consumerist culture which evolved from the aesthetics of an image-based economy and whose key drivers are: reflexivity, experimentality and conspicuous consumption (all prone to excess). I will argue that these key economic drivers have been pressuring contemporary museum architecture to relentlessly undertake “remodernizing and contemporizing projects” that connote the dominance of superficial
108 Enwezor, Okwoi. “The Contemporary,” Questionnaire on ‘the Contemporary’. Ed. Hal Foster. October Magazine Ltd. Volume 130, (Fall 2009): 33. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
109 Ibid., p. 33
110 Smith, Terry. “The Contemporary,” Questionnaire on ‘the Contemporary’. Ed. Hal Foster. October Magazine Ltd. Volume 130, (Fall 2009): 49. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
111 Ibid., p. 50
spectacularism in contemporary culture. French Marxist theorist, Guy Debord wrote:
Spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as an instrument of unification,”[and] “in all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or entertainment, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life.”[13] (Debord 1967)
It appears today as though the goal of art museum architecture is to stand out and command attention as a socially unifying cultural spectacle of auratic value.
Leading international designers pursue building visualizations to reflect their own understanding of what the new cultural industry is, its shifting role and function. Presumably, as Associate Director at the Whitney Museum, Johanna Burton, argues, behaving more like any other forms of entertainment and retail industries in the hopes of retaining relevance and currency in the prevailing world economy.[14]
Persuaded by the dynamics and possibilities of multi-sensory forms, leading star architects such as Frank O. Gehry, have been reconfiguring museum architecture since the early 1980s, with the apparent success of establishing a new power relationship between the art collection and the formal qualities of the museum building itself. Contemporary architectural practice has became
[112] Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chasel, 1967, Reprint, Paris: Champ Libre, 1971, trans. Black and Red, 1977. Reprint, Detroit: Black and Red, 2010: paragraph 3
[113] Ibid., paragraph 6
[114] Burton, Joanna. “The Contemporary.” Questionnaire on ‘the Contemporary’. Ed. Hal Foster. October Magazine Volume 130, (2009): 22. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
emblematic of an unleashed individualism marked by new creative freedom
enjoyed by designers that support the unique, exuberant and increasingly
entertaining within the cultural experience.
In a 2005 interview with Charles Jencks, Canadian-born architect Frank Gehry stated that “the whimsical buildings, when successful, [put] architecture on a par with the best [of] contemporary art, to explore freely, the possibilities of open-ended creativity.”
Foster theorizes that the apparent morphing of art and architecture into so-called art-architecture has become an integral part of “image making and space shaping” in today’s culture. The computerization of the designing process, “the automatic option”
architectural designs, that stunning subjectivity, the earnestly sought-after agency of the structurally complex iconic museum building, is achieved.
Shiner warns us that this architectural practice interferes with the audiences attention to art,
3.2 The Bilbao Guggenheim Museum
Fig. 14. The Guggenheim Museum of Contemporary Art. Bilbao. 1997.
View from the River Bank. Photo: Ardfern 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Guggenheim_Museum_Bilbao_July_2010_(06).JPG, accessed 01/22/13.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
A small trickle of tourists visiting Bilbao became a flood, when the Guggenheim Museum of Contemporary Art (Bilbao Guggenheim Museoa) opened in Spain in 1997 (fig. 14). The museum’s triumphant inauguration signaled the inevitable end to what German historian Wolfgang Schievelbusch called “the supremacy of shoe-box architecture, impressive primarily for its astounding lack of fantasy and aesthetic worth.” Built at the cost of $100 million US, it was hailed as an absolute masterpiece, the first “global museum”
115 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. “Epilogue: On Falling,” The Culture of Defeat. London: Picador, 2004: 289
and an “instant landmark”
From the project’s onset, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao was expected to perform for the Spanish Basques the same way Utzon’s Sydney Opera House had done for the Australians twenty years earlier: that it would bring urban renewal through tourism to a stagnant city. Gehry’s building however, accomplished much more than that. Spanish art historian Anna Maria Guasch and Basque anthropologist Joseba Zulaika, have concluded that Frank Gehry’s masterpiece introduced a new form of globalization of art systems, the “globalized museification.”
Charles Jencks, for his part, concluded that in Bilbao, the relationship between “power [cultural institutions] and meaning [cultural product] was
altered,"
It all began in Spain, with a small architectural competition in which Frank Gehry participated with two other international star-designers, Arata Isozaki and Wolf D. Prix of Coop Himmelblau. Thomas Kerns, Director of the Salomon R. Guggenheim Foundation at the time, and the Basque authorities in Bilbao desired a "hit;" but what they got was a change in the course of postmodern architecture. Gehry candidly commented years later that he won the competition because his project was the least conservative in design and the most economically conservative to execute.
Initially, Frank Gehry was resistant to the idea of computerization, because CATIA (Computer Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application) the multi-platform computer program developed for the French aerospace industry, seemed
somewhat limiting for his designing purposes. “I just didn’t like the images of the computer,”127 Gehry admitted, frustrated by limitations imposed on him by the program. Local contractors and manufacturers assumed that Gehry’s sculptural idea simply could not be built.
I don’t know where you cross the line between architecture and sculpture, [ ] for me, it’s the same. Buildings and sculptures are three-dimensional.128 (Gehry 2004)
However, the Spanish Guggenheim would not have stayed within the constraints of time and budget if the French aerospace industry had not facilitated help with the execution process.129
The brand new construction material used in Bilbao was titanium (fig. 15). It offered the kind of atmospheric effect Gehry was looking for as a replacement material for lead copper, outlawed as toxic. Titanium turned out to be the kind of product that “could play with the light the way lead copper did.”130 In the 1990s, titanium metal had rarely been used in civic building projects; Gehry took the chance and the rest was a history-defining moment. It allowed the exterior walls of the building to be covered with one-third-of-a-millimeter thin metal sheets that
127 Van Bruggen, Coosje. Frank O. Gehry, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. 1997: 136. An Interview with Frank Gehry.
128 Welchman, John C. “Architecture :: Sculpture.” Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim. Ed. Anna Maria Guasch and Joseba Zulaika. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, 2005. Gehry 2004, qtd. in Welchman 238.
129 Van Bruggen, op. cit., p. 135.
130 Ibid., p. 141. Interview with Frank Gehry, 1997.
Fig. 15. The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.
The Spectacle of Titanium Sheets. Photo: Georges Jansoone 2006.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bilbao.Guggenheim15.jpg, accessed 01/22/13.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
“do not lie flat, but flutter,” and still achieve an effect of desirable permanency and spectacle. The sculptural effects that were achieved in the Guggenheim project developed from what American art historian John Welchman describes as “a different interpretation of what exactly sculpture is.” The museum’s innovative form is the product of flamboyant, art-like assembly in space “with materials delivering to a building an aesthetic condition beyond its function;”
131 Ibid., p. 141.
132 Welchman, John C. “Architecture :: Sculpture,” Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim.
Ed. Anna Maria Guasch and Joseba Zulaika. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, 2005: 242.
133 Ibid., p. 242.
a sculptural spectacle offering an enclosure within which other designs are displayed.
At the opening ceremony in October 1997, the powerfully performative spectacle of wiggling and protruding titanium walls shimmering in the Iberian sun greatly impressed the elite audience. The building’s sophisticated interplay of light against texture, colour, shiny materials and imposing structural volume stopped even the most skeptical critics from expressing their professional opinions; many of whom were content simply to praise.
King Carlos of Spain crowned the opening night.
However, Charles Jencks claims (without giving specifics) that some scholars bemoaned the opening of the Spanish Guggenheim as representing a
Pandora’s Box of aesthetic values that should not have been unleashed. Others, believed that Frank Gehry finally “destroyed the box of taboos, the constraints of decorum, square architecture and the right-angled world”
A historically significant moment had occurred in Bilbao in 1997, heralded decades earlier by the first Guggenheim Museum in New York (1959) and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1977), both of which have long established permanent collections - with the Spanish Guggenheim, the architecture of an art museum took indisputable central stage, presenting itself to the world as a unique cultural experience in its own right and a formidable subject matter for academic debates.
Gehry’s design in Bilbao epitomizes the reality of art museums in a world of new, globalized cultural industry, where the need for identifiable, unique buildings precedes over the need for outstanding (and frequently temporary) collections inside. The dominant message here is the container, the content is just an added bonus. Bilbao demonstrates that spectacularized architectural forms have the power to promote art museum’s holdings beyond art collections, epitomizing postmodernity’s struggle and the symbolic relationship between form and context. In contemporary museum designs such as in Bilbao “architecture and sculpture meet in anxious and uneasy confrontation;”
Van Uffelen points out that the most elaborate "exhibit" into which museums today invest for their future is their own buildings. Whether a new building or an extension, contemporary museum architecture “has become one of the most popular genres among architects.” Leading designers frequently employ spectacle and ephemeral effects to ‘fortify’ their assemblies, manipulating the overall phenomenological experiences of the museum buildings with an extra-visual, almost spiritual dimension.
140 Van Uffelen, Chris. Ed. Contemporary Museums: Architecture, History, Collections. Secondary ed. Jennifer Kozak, Lisa Rogers, Sarah Schkolziger. Translation Talhouni. Salenstein: Braun Publishing. 2011: 8.
141 Ibid., p. 8.
3.4 Atmospheric Effects in Museum Architecture
Fig. 16. The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.
The Spectacle of Nightly Illuminations. Photo: Mikel Uzkudun 2010.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gugeenheim_by_MikelUzkudun.jpg, accessed 04/28/13.
File licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Building designs based on the principle of interplay between varying mood inducing elements can seduce audiences into intense psychological states ranging from euphoric and uplifting to sublime, depending on the preferred institutional agenda. When visitors to the museum get stimulated by the allure of the building, it metaphorically elevates such a structure to a performative work of art (fig. 16) - signifying a construct that is ruled by an independent set of aesthetic values, parallel to the institution traditionally designated functions. One of the most eloquently negotiated ephemeral effects can be experienced in contemporary art
museum buildings, often achieved by the controlled amount of light inside their
spaces and skillful use of texture, colour, air circulation and building materials to
enhance the overall ‘presence.’ Broadly employed ‘moodiness’ in art museum
projects reflects society’s apparent need for more spectacularized cultural
experiences that privilege sensorial readings over intellectual. In various buildings
(especially the Bilbao Guggenheim), the inherent ‘atmosphere’ of the place is
skillfully produced by architects to accentuate, diminish or purposely distort
structural detail (fig 17).
Fig. 17. he Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.
“The Neo-Baroque” Aesthetics. Photo: Andrew Brown 2003.
http://wikitravel.org/shared/File:Guggenheim_Bilbao.jpg accessed 01/22/13.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document according to the terms
under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Mark Wigley, defines the atmosphere of a building as something which surrounds
its physical form, being produced by it and unique to it, seemingly emanating its
“sensuous emissions from the very point where the building’s physical
dimensions end"142 and audiences perception begins. In his essay on “Architecture of Atmosphere” Wigley argues that the “climate of the intangible effects” created by the specific circumstances around and within architectural spaces envelops the perceivers (audiences) with its projected effects. The audiences have their emotional responses triggered by the otherwise ‘neutral’ materials, which supports the idea of atmosphere as an explicit object in itself, and a critically important element in the overall architectural assembly.
The general term “atmosphere” comes from the Latin word atmosphaera, said to have been coined in the 1600s, from two Greek words: ���τμός [atmos] meaning "vapor" and σφαίρα [sphaira]143 and used in describing a round object, a "sphere," surrounded by a layer of air. The word atmosphere has also historically alluded to a dominant tone or mood in a work of art, a ‘vapor’ of creative genius as it were that was often associated with a particular person, object or geographical place and representative of a distinctive aesthetic quality pleasing to a viewer.144
German Philosopher Gernot Böhme, theorizes that atmosphere is an informal term indicating a spatial ambiance, created by ambiguous and often
142 Mark Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmosphere”. Daidalos. 68, June 1998: 18.
143 Oxfort Dictionaries. Atmosphere, accessed Nov. 23, 2012. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/atmosphere
144 Answers. Section: American Heritage Dictionary. At-mos-phere, accessed Nov. 23, 2012, www.answers.com/topic/atmosphere.
intangible properties as they appear in a particular three-dimensional space.
As an aesthetic concept, the atmosphere mediates between a product and its reception, allowing an individual as a recipient to intuitively recognize an atmospheric place and be “assailed” by its content. When a museum audience is seduced by the charismatic properties of a contemporary art museum building, the registered impressions of it can allegedly affect the recipients’ state of mind.
Therefore, Böhme argues, the atmosphere of a museum exterior or the ambiance of its interior can be described as an inherently subjective experience, one which cannot be communicated easily to others.
American architect and painter Steven Holl, who considers himself a phenomenologist, advocates for clean and simple shapes in architecture over complex and flamboyant. In dealing with museum spatial perception, Holl understands space in phenomenological terms as “reality [that] consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness.”
In 1993 he challenged museum audiences to experience architecture through physical contact only, by walking through it, touching it and seeing it
the aesthetics of contemporary museum architecture often require (or provoke) physical as well as emotional engagement to fully comprehend and enjoy their concepts. Yet, one could argue that a less spectacular approach to art museum designs, stripped of all atmospheric layering, could keep a visitor’s mind liberated from such highly entertaining ‘manipulations’ and therefore more focused on the art collection itself.
Postmodernists obsession with art museum architecture has turned once traditional looking public buildings into ‘flashy’ exhibitionary complexes of geometric, biomorphic or otherwise complex structural forms, imbued with a powerful allure. However, the practice of creating highly impressive public buildings is not new, as British architectural critic Peter Buchanan points out, and was always intended to promote particular social and economic agendas.
Evidenced in architectural productions of previous historical periods, particularly the 1600s,
Buchanan theorizes that the reductively rational Modernism of the twentieth century rose in part in reaction to atmospheric manipulations of the past
centuries, intentionally applying neutralizing and defetishizing aesthetics against exuberant excesses. Yet, the apparent return to the Baroque-frame-of-mind in the late 1990s, perfectly embodied by Frank Gehry’s architectural style, has indicated once again the apparent need in contemporary culture for structural tensions, dynamic forms and atmospheric staging of public spaces - most transparently expressed by art museum architecture. There seems to prevail an inherent need for powerful public dramas and seductive cultural spectacles as exemplified by the “Neo-Baroque” Guggenheim in Spain (fig. 14, p. 52 and fig. 17, p. 51). Italian installation and video artist, Fabricio Plessi, one of the invited guests to the opening of the Bilbao Museum, summed up contemporary architectural style as:
We are living in a baroque period. Gehry's is the kind of work, where the eye never rests-on in one spot, but rather slides and moves.
(Plessi 1997).
The atmospheric effects of sunlight, as it glows, shines, shimmers and reflects in the window glass sheets, titanium plates and limestone surfaces of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum exterior shell can simply be described as a sensorial feast. Considered by many critics, architects and architectural theorists as the most admired work of contemporary architecture and “unsurpassed in its commanding
150 Ibid., p. 90
151 Foster, Hal. "Crystal Palaces," The Art-Architecture Complex. London: Verso, 2011: 36.
(Part One: Global Style).
152 The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. (2004). Frank Gehry: Architecture as Art [CD-ROM version].
Princeton, N.J.: Film for the Humanities & Sciences. Transcripted interview. Accessed Jan 2013.
theatrical presence to date,”
The abundance of sunlight that soaks the city of Bilbao for the most part of the year, consciously incorporated into the museum design, is made to function like another formal element of the building itself. Magnified by titanium used for the exterior, the Guggenheim building absorbs, reflects and disperses the immersing rays of the sun off its smooth surfaces. An array of atmospheric effects has been created by multilayered and constantly fluctuating structural forms, intentionally designed to bemuse the beholder. The museum building exudes a Baroque-like dynamism as the sun accentuates architectural overlaps, conceals pressure points and ‘distracts’ the gazing eye from the constraints put on various architectural points.
The seemingly random folding and unfolding of the Guggenheim’s form is intensified and effectively extended almost ‘beyond’ its physical limits by strong, ever present shadows. This rather convoluted mass of structural elements is only sparsely opened up, here and there, by a series of partitioned and randomly angled windows to invite penetrating sunlight inside. Silvery-blue tints, subtle pinks and
green hues bounce off the surrounding city intermittently, washing and reflecting
themselves in the exterior’s titanium paneling and limestone cladding.
The spectacular nightly illuminations turn the Bilbao Guggenheim’s
metallic shell into a ‘gold-plated,’ jewel-like, oversized sculpture (fig. 16, p. 60)
Fig. 18. Umberto Boccioni Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. 1913. Bronze sculpture.
Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Image: Wmpearl, 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:'Uunique_Forms_of_Continuity_in_Space
%27_1913_bronze_by_Umberto_Boccioni.jpg, accessed 01/22/13.
that brings to mind Umberto Boccioni’s work, the 1913 “Unique Forms of
Continuity in Space” (fig. 18) with its dynamically animated architectural forms.
As a massively imposing structure, contemporary art museum buildings, such as
Bilbao, can be viewed from a considerable distance, as if taking on the role of glowing beacons for the multitudes of tourists flocking in to town.
The atmospheric mood becomes an ‘object’ in itself, a goal of a deliberate creative visualization and as such, an agreeably fleeting and changeable phenomenological experience. The nineteen century German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, described a rather short-lived ethos of spectacularized experience in 1888 as most fittingly applicable to Baroque (and today Neo-Baroque) architecture when he wrote:
The momentary impact of baroque is powerful, but soon leaves us with a certain sense of desolation. It does not convey a state of present happiness, but a feeling of anticipation, of something yet to come, of dissatisfaction and restlessness rather than fulfillment. We have no sense of release, but rather of having been drawn into the tension of an emotional condition.
New building technologies can effectively enhance the already existing atmospheric potential within an architectural complex, or, it can be artificially created with a variety of ephemeral props for the most effective staging and uniquely personal experience. Such a mood-staging ‘razzle-dazzle,’ whether employed as an uplifting, sobering or simply whimsical narrative, “gives museum buildings their unique radiance”
Holl argues that today’s architects are very well versed in creating the truly ‘experienceable’ aura, the kind of “building’s soul”
In his 1886 essay “Prolegomena toward a Psychology of Architecture” Wölfflin debated weather it was possible for an architectural form to be capable of expressing an emotional mood, and if buildings possessed such abilities, on what principle could an art historian make an aesthetic judgement.
[I]ntensified as the brilliant or, as the obscure effect to dazzle or to confuse, as if the paragon of architecture might be an illuminated jewel the production of which is mystified, a commodity-fetish at a grand scale.
Wigley, on the other hand, supposes that many contemporary architects, routinely deny their conscious involvement in producing intangible effects,
determined to perpetuate the idea of architecture as discipline based on (neutral) logic. They allegedly reject the presence and importance of atmosphere in their projects, rendering it a “sentimental deception” and therefore rejected as a rule.
Yet, it appears that Piano, Stirling, Cook, Gehry and Libeskind most convincingly gave in to the production of intangible effects - clearly mastering in their works the aesthetic of seduction by form.
3.5 The Bilbao Effect
In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development is everything.\textsuperscript{161} (Debord 1967)
Fig. 19. The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.
Areal View of Nervion River and the Museum Complex from the Iberdrola Tower.
Photo: Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz. 2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bilbao_05_2012_Guggenheim_Aerial_Panorama_2007.jpg, accessed 01/22/13. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Leading the parade of uniquely avant-garde contemporary art museum buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao has came to signify a multiple-phenomenon of experiences as only an iconic, one-of-a-kind, “flash and bravura” museum building is capable of offering. Jon Azúa, a former Basque deputy Prime Minister and currently a member of the board of trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, writes that ever since the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum’s physical incarnation the building has not only become an avant-garde embellishment of its surroundings, but a messenger of change, locally and
\textsuperscript{161} Debord, Guy. \textit{Society of the Spectacle}. Paris: Buchet-Chasel, 1967. Reprint, Paris: Champ Libre, 1971.
Trans. Black and Red, 1977. Reprint, Detroit: Black and Red, 2010 (Chapter 1 paragraph I4)
internationally - almost instantly influencing cultural trends, encouraging regional development (fig. 19 p. 71), attracting intellectual properties, fostering art communities and recovering the self-respect of the population that brought the museum about; becoming their prime capital.
The “Bilbao effect” epitomizes the desire for transformation and re-birth of urban centers in decline, through a heightened role and visibility of a local art museum, to create a broad public interest and revenue. Giebelhausen, argues that in the late 1990s:
The global shift of the dominant urban paradigm occurred, [...] which reconfigured the city as a marketplace and spectacle [...] and provided a larger context in which the reshaping of many European cities took place.
I would argue that the significance of contemporary art museums in post-industrial, urban revitalization schemes cannot be overstated, and the effectiveness of ‘fashionable’ buildings in providing a welcomed solution to economically challenged regions is still crucial. Evidenced in Beaubourg, Bilbao and Graz, a single cultural institution by the means of its very existence has the power to transform stagnating city quarters into vital tourist destinations. Since the opening of Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim in 1997, a new era in museum
architecture was launched that boldly supports innovative and one-of-a-kind building structures, hence the name “the Bilbao Effect.” It also fostered a new kind of art museum institution that is more performative and flamboyant than reflective and intellectual, offering a cultural product validated by its architectural aesthetics. Azúa theorizes that as a result of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and its impressive, performative record, many art museum buildings around the world have become sculptural exhibits in their own right, works of art created for the sake of their own unique, iconic worth
The museum industry was inspired when just under one year after its opening in the heart of the Basque Country, the Guggenheim Museum broke all projected estimates, attracting the largest number of daily visitors in all of Spain (Museo del Prado included).
In the year 2000, the old port-city was marking its seven hundredth birthday, and it had a lot to celebrate. Up until the mid-1990s, Bilbao has endured and survived a succession of wars, a lack of territorial unity, various identity crises and profound de-industrialization that brought severe economic instability.
At the same time, Bilbao’s cultural institutions “were being progressively abandoned.” In 2000, only three years after the inauguration of Gehry’s signature building, the city’s ‘Guggenheim franchise’ was hailed as a tremendous, if overtly expensive gift to the Basque nation. So huge was the gift, in fact that “it can never be repaid” as some Basques despair. Those sentiments echo however, Walter Benjamin’s observations that he expressed in 1936:
One of the most promising cultural developments of modernity lay in the way in which [it] allowed for the development of art forms that serve to distract working people from the trials and tribulations of their work-a-day world.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York was experiencing its own crisis, during the 1990s. As a major cultural institution, it “had sunk into a profound operating deficit.” Internationally perceived as a leader in the cultural avant-garde, a sentiment symbolically connoted by Frank Wright’s iconic building on Fifth Avenue (fig. 20 p. 75), the Guggenheim Foundation’s leadership needed a financial and directional boost. Its director at the time Thomas Kerns, saw Bilbao as a promising solution. In the meantime, “the art of the 1990s had ceased to be a
166 Ibid., p. 75.
167 Guilbaut, Serge. “Sleeping in Bilbao: The Guggenheim as a New Cultural Edsel?” Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim. Ed. Anna Maria Guasch and Joseba Zulaika. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, 2005: 143. The Bilbao Guggenheim is a museum that functions like a momentous gift.
168 Moxey, Keith. “Gehry’s Bilbao: Vistus and Visions.” Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim. Ed. Anna Maria Guasch and Joseba Zulaika. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, 2005: 176. Benjamin 1936, 1968: 215, qtd. in Moxey 176
169 Azúa, Jon. “Guggenheim Bilbao: “Coopetitive” Strategies for the New Culture - Economy Spaces.” Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, 2005: 77.
bohemian activity™170 writes art historian Robert C. Lamm, and New York City was no longer the primary center of artistic production. Such cultural changes brought about international negotiations in which museum buildings began to play an increased role in shaping transcultural spheres. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao was an outcome of such negotiations, and its subsequent cause and effect: the “Bilbao Effect,” resulting from a unique convergence of several strategies that contributed to its success. One of them was the Solomon R. Guggenheim
170 Ibid., p. 82. Robert C. Lamm 1996, qtd. in Azúa.
75
Foundation’s decision to lead the international art world
Azúa believes that the Bilbao project has created an environment of mutual benefits, a model for the “museums of the future” and a template for a building as a “trademark.” Its timely construction has also revealed the power and capacity of local firms and workers’ skills, long deemed irrelevant as serious business partners. Considered an international marvel and a museum model for the future, the Guggenheim in Bilbao represents the globalization of partnerships and internationalization of art collections that fostered a more “optimized management” of art resources and welcomed reductions in operating costs.
Bilbao introduced a more spectacularized art programming, keeping it in line with a “culture-leisure-entertainment” ideology that supplies the audiences with a museum format the world is allegedly seeking in cultural and economic options. However, one might recall Guy Debord’s cautioning words that “[u]nder
the shimmering diversions of the spectacle, banalization dominates modern society the world over [...].”174
The ripple effect has generated a renewed interest in art museum construction projects. In the decades that followed the opening of Bilbao, an estimated one hundred fifty cities worldwide175 have engaged in an urban revitalizing frenzy. The so-called “cultural gambling” has indeed delivered on its promise, even though the Basque arts community launched numerous campaigns against the Guggenheim, protesting the apparent “surrender to an international culture with an American veneer.”176 In spite of the activists’ efforts, the museum of contemporary art in Bilbao did not become the Basque Museum of Contemporary Art, nor did Basque artists influence the Guggenheim’s international exhibition plans,177 further contributing to “a greater and greater deviation between the museum [as iconic and universal entity] and its location.”178
Labeled by Guasch an all-purpose “deconstructionist” building site, Gehry’s Guggenheim does not cease to provoke both critical debates and
174 Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chasel, 1967. Reprint, Paris: Champ Libre, 1971. Trans. Black and Red, 1977. Reprint, Detroit: Black and Red, 2010 (Chapter 3 paragraph 59).
175 Azüa, Jon. “Guggenheim Bilbao: “Coopetitive” Strategies for the New Culture - Economy Spaces.” Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, 2005: 75.
176 Ibid., p. 75.
177 Guasch, Anna Maria. “Global Museums versus Local Artists: Paradoxes of Identity between Local and Global Understanding.” Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, 2005: 192.
178 Ibid., p. 192
applause. While some critics, like architect Philip Johnson, consider it “the greatest building of our age,” and architectural historian Kurt W. Forster reads in its spectacularized shapes the Baroque tradition of Borromini; others, like Swiss architect Jacques Herzog considers Bilbao “a cynical example of a global company’s global behavior, where work such as Gehry’s [...] makes sense only from the logic of modernity.”
Joseba Zulaika goes even further by calling the Guggenheim Museum project “the decline and fall of the museum as we know it, and [...] an example of cultural imperialism.”
In the end, the intentionally revered museum building continues to attract multitudes of spectators, decades after Bilbao’s promotional campaigns subsided.
At the forefront of it all lies the universality and internationalization of culture or “Guggenheim experience,” which symbolizes a particular application of various arts and humanities in an economically impactful manner for the benefit of a society as a whole. The “Bilbao effect” epitomizes the forging of a new kind of co-operation between culture and commerce that, in the eyes of many, has beneficial effects clearly outweighing its argued disadvantages.
179 Ibid., p. 195.
180 Ibid., p. 195, Kurt W. Forster 1999, qtd. in Guasch 195. Bilbao museum in shape is resembling Gaudi’s modernism and the Baroque tradition of Borromini. (Kurt W. Forster’s biography, “9th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, Italy, 2004” designboom, 2010, accessed March 27/2013. http://www.designboom.com/snapshots/venice04/forster.html.)
181 Guasch, op. cit., p. 194.
182 Moxey, op. cit., Joseba Zulaika, qtd. in Moxley 175.
183 Guasch, op. cit., p. 190.
184 Azüa, op. cit., p. 86.
In spite of criticisms of contemporary art museums’ spectacularized cultural identity, the decades of accumulated evidence support the iconic buildings’ social and economic significance; not illusionary in attributes but grounded in an earlier tradition of a museum as an exhibitionary complex and a democratic public space created and used for the public good.
Some light needs to be briefly shed on the phenomenon of etherealization, a contemporary art museum discourse that is indirectly linked to the “Bilbao Effect,” in which some art institutions today privilege the idea of no permanent collections, or are extremely light in their collecting component (e.g., Bilbao, Graz, etc.) - a trend towards which contemporary museum industry gravitates and new ‘spectacularized’ architecture supports. There has been no comprehensive national study done on museum etherealization, but allegedly, there are some North American museums that boast to have no collections of any note and use temporary exhibits to generate revenues.
perpetuating the postmodern museological discourse of entertaining, but offering
rather fleeting cultural experience.
3.6 The Graz Art Museum
Fig. 21. The Art Museum (Kunsthaus), Graz. 2003.
View From the Mur River. Photo: Marion Schneider & Christoph Aistleitner 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graz_Kunsthaus_vom_Schlossberg_20061126.jpg,
accessed 01/22/13. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5
Generic license.
The “Bilbao effect” has become a trademark for art museums in the
twenty-first century and represents the kind of architectural visualizations that
morph museum buildings from ‘traditional’ structures to elevated works of art.
One such iconic visualization landed in Austria in 2003. Like an inflated,
oversized balloon, the Graz Art Museum (Kunsthaus Graz) projects an aura of
an otherworldly descent with its rather peculiar, biomorphic form (fig. 21).
Designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier of the London group Spacelab
and fondly nicknamed the "Friendly Alien," the building’s soft contours have
imposed themselves on the surroundings, oozing its translucent blue and highly
reflective Plexiglas body over the pastel coloured Baroque buildings nearby,
with claustrophobic proximity. Realized for the most impactful visual effect, as
museum architecture it subverts the city’s landscape, and is seemingly ‘wrestling’
with its intended purpose as an art gallery.
Hal Foster has declared that contemporary museum buildings such as
this one: “inflate contemporary art museum[s] into gigantic spectacle-space[s]
that can swallow any art, let alone any viewer, whole.”
appears particularly capable of that, with its hugely protruding bulge. It illustrates
what Wigley calls “a lack of definition” in contemporary architecture, created by
the difficulty to address and control the play between ephemeral and material
elements.
know-how met with Graz’s need for contemporary art, commerce and prosperity -
with particular attention given to notoriety.
identity of museum and recalls a legendary design movement.” Architectural Record (January
2004). ©The McGraw-Hill Companies. Inc., accessed October 17/2012.
Website: http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/bts/archives/museums/0401_kunsthaus/
photos.asp
Wigley sees it as a “fragile illusion”
It can be argued that a more intimate meeting between the audience and a work of art has been lost in certain contemporary art museum settings, or is considerably reduced by the openness of spaces, long ramps, bright lights and the increased flow of visitors. The tendency in twenty-first century museum architecture is to indulge in exuberant forms at the price of dwarfing the art and the subject. In turn, contemporary art productions, have become more reflective and accommodating, privileging works of increased size and added architectural volume to counterbalance this new, exhibitory reality.
The Graz Art Museum, like its predecessor in Spain, embodies the idea of an iconic building that has been created to rejuvenate an old, down-on-its-heels district into a popular tourist hub.
Fig. 22. The Art Museum, Graz.
Spectacle-space. Photo: Zeljko 2010.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GrazIMG_5018.jpg., accessed 05/08/13.
Licensed under the GFDL by the author; Released under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Zeiger described the structure poetically as “an expressionist gesture”
competition in 2000, it took another three years to complete. Art historian,
critic, curator and architectural theorist Liane LeFaivre, wrote in 2004 that the
Graz Art Museum’s form reflects “a ludic and optimistic mood” [that has
characterized Western culture for the past three decades. Today, the building is]
“an anachronistic creation of [...] a cultural optimism in a world now so terribly
different;”[196] “an arresting [creation] and strangely moving.”[197]
The main
aesthetic principle of Graz’s unique art museum building appears to be light
fracturing form. Effects achieved with daylight as well as artificial illumination
intermittently, it subordinates the first and focuses on the latter. As an art museum
whose external shell (in this case, referred to as the “skin”) absorbs little natural
light[198] the building uses, for the most part, a technologically advanced system of
artificial lighting. Sunlight penetrates some of the interior spaces, the closest to
the “skin,” and especially evident near ground level, where translucent museum
walls are a calculated spectacle to entice passersby.
Yet, the most spectacular effects produced by the building are observable
at night, when the computerized lighting scheme illuminates the museum’s
exterior from the inside out in geometrical configurations. The Kunsthaus’
plexiglas façade is a 148-foot wide and 66-foot-high[199] shiny aqua-marine,
[195] LeFaivre, op. cit.
[196] Ibid,
[197] Ibid,
[198] Zeiger, op. cit. p. 66.
[199] LeFaivre, op. cit.,
and oddly bulging wall. It turns at night into a pulsing screen (fig. 23). A glowing geometrical pattern fluctuates “at an infinite variability eighteen times per second.” Each of the fluorescent lamps acts like an oversized computer pixel
Fig. 23. The Art Museum, Graz.
Computerized Daily Projections. Photo: Mark St 2008.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Garzer_Kunsthaus_bei_Nacht.JPG, accessed 03/22/13.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
and can be separately dimmed at various levels to animate graphics and text.201
A spectacularly hallucinatory effect can be created with 930 fluorescent lamps glowing across an Acrylic museum façade during free, nightly performances, expanding the building’s parameters deeper into public space. These daily
200 Ibid.
201 Zeiger, op. cit., p. 66
amusements, intensified by the darkening sky, can effectively manipulate
audiences’ perception of the building’s already fluid physicality.
The largest exhibition space at the Kunsthaus (called Space 01) is located
immediately under the bulbous roof. Natural light enters the top gallery through
a network of sixteen nozzels (fig. 21, p. 81), science fiction-like
protrude from the top of the museum’s roof, playfully designed to resemble
biomorphic, tentacle-like forms - hence perpetuating the “Friendly Alien”
metaphor. The function of the nozzels is to funnel northern light inside. Equipped
with louvers to modulate the amount of brightness, the nozzels disperse sunlight
throughout the exhibition space, acting in a similar fashion as the glass ceilings at
the New National Gallery in Stuttgart - they minimize the presence of shadows
by ‘flattening’ them; an effect complementary to the exhibited works.
The spectacularized art museum buildings such as the Graz Art Museum
shift our attention away from what they represent to how they present it,
mediating our senses and engaging our intellectual responses through a set of
atmospheric effects. Architectural historian Krysta Sykes calls such manipulation
an “intelligent practice”
is put to action. For Anthony Vidler, the phenomenon of such “Baroque effects,”
in contemporary museum architecture is indicative of “a breakdown of form,”
Architectural Press, 2010: 17.
which is associated with the structural fits, breaks and openings that inadvertently denote “anxious relations between the material and metaphysical worlds.”
Others, like Polish-American architect and author Witold Rybczynski, disagrees with the favorable recognition of spectacular effects in art museum buildings.
Since the Bilbao’s success, Rybczynski bemoans, municipalities are increasingly seeking renown architects to deliver eye-catching signature buildings for media publicity.
Flamboyance rather than careful thought, [and] it favor the glib and obvious over the subtle and nuanced. ‘The wow factor’ may excite the visitor and the journalist, it does not necessary make for a good architecture, which should have more to say to us than ‘look at me.’
(Rybczynski 2010)
However, first in Bilbao and later in Graz, the increasingly popular and clearly infectious politics of seduction, or cultural gambling have proved time and again the seductive powers of a single, avant-garde building to ensure commercial benefits and prosperity for the host city. The old urban fabric is re-appropriated as spectacle space aligning itself with a new type of cultural institution.
204 Vidler, Anthony. “Dead End Street, Walter Benjamin and the Space of Distraction.” Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. Cambridge: First MIT Press (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 2001: 91
205 Sykes, op. cit., p 25. Witold Rybczynski qtd. in Sykes. Rybczynski is an architect and Emeritus Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania.
206 Zulaika, Joseba. “Desiring Bilbao: The Kernsification of the Museum and Its Discontents.” Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, 2005: 149
207 Zeiger, Mimi. ‘The ‘New’: Invention and Reinvention of Museum’. New Museums: Contemporary Museum Architecture around the Word. New York: Rizzoli International Publications Inc., 2005: 9.
Gernot Böhme theorizes that in the aesthetics of architecture, the enhanced atmosphere is “the only area in which a desired transformation of art into life takes place.” However, today’s aesthetics are no longer just for the beautification of life, cautions Böhme, but can be used also as a political tool and economic factor through which a broader “aestheticization of nation’s politics and the staging of everyday life takes place.”
208 Böhme, Gernot. “Atmosphere as an Aesthetic Concept.” Daidalos. 68, June 1998: 114.
OCADU, (VISD 2012): 23
209 Ibid., Benjamin, qtd. in Böhme 115. OCADU, (VISD 2012): 24.
89
3.7 The New Frederic C. Hamilton Wing
at the Denver Art Museum
Forms are not bound by their physical limits. Forms emanate and model space.
(Giedion 1941)
Fig. 24. The Denver Art Museum. 2006.
The New Frederic C. Hamilton Wing. Photo: Hustvedt, 2009.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wikiFile:Denver_Art_Museum_Frederic_C._Hamilton_building.jpg,
accessed 03/22/13. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
In 2006, the New Frederic C. Hamilton Wing at the Denver Art Museum
opened, offering a unique type of relationship between the museum building and
the procurers of art. Designed by Daniel Libeskind, a Polish-born American
architect, the new addition to the Denver Art Museum (fig. 24) is a building
indicative of an increasingly more complex interweaving of interests between
qtd. in Wigley 18.
museum architecture and its content. As a flexible and adaptable public space,
the new addition serves cultural product from a populist perspective, offering
art exhibition spaces wrapped in a structural marvel. With Libeskind’s addition,
Fig. 25. The Denver Art Museum.
The Aesthetics of Dysfunctional Form. Photo: J. Miers, 2010.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Denver_Art_Museum_2.jpg, accessed 03/22/13.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
the overall dimensions of the Art Museum have changed, clearly increasing in
volume; yet, at the same time, the building’s practical functionality was contested
by its form, as if determined to amuse audiences rather than to serve (fig. 25).
Privileging architectural experimentations that warp structural elements, the New
Frederic C. Hamilton Wing was designed as a kind of performative, massive
sculpture. Vidler recognizes this as a “language necessary to construct a space of post-psychoanalytical, post-digital world of simulacra” - perfectly embodied in Bilbao and now in Denver, where dramatically juxtaposed shapes and voids undermine visitors’ spatial awareness and manipulate their art experience. At the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, for example, the curvilinear interior space known as the Fish Gallery, destabilizes not only its visitors but also the works of art.
Approximately the size of a football field (fig. 26), the gallery space is capable of
Fig. 26. Richard Serra The Matter of Time. The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.
430 feet long Installation. Photo: Zarateman. 2010.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bilbao_-_Guggenheim_21.jpg, accessed 03/22/13. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
overpowering almost anything put on display there - unless intentionally procured
by the artists on a much more monumental scale, to offset the Fish Gallery’s
imposing dimensions.
The New Hamilton Wing at the Denver Art Museum is also perceived
as a challenging exhibition space. The dramatically angled walls and oddly
protruding structural supports, that are sagging or seemingly collapsing onto
themselves, “perform” museum spaces characteristic of Daniel Libeskind’s
architectural style. His New Hamilton Wing can be described as a building “on a
slant” and a rather Futuristic interpretation of an art museum, where institutional
functionality is secondary to the creative vision. The museum’s administrative
staff finds it unmanageable, with gallery spaces “poorly suited for displaying
works of art.”
as “working despite Libeskind’s best efforts,” praising museum curators for the
“heroic job of making several [...] odd shaped galleries function as well as they
could.”
Paintings were held vertical by obtrusive metal brackets protruding
from the walls and visitors had to be protected from hitting their heads
on the more seriously inward-sloping walls by pieces of lumber laid on
the floor. Two years later, these highly distracting solutions had been
replaced by raised panels built up on the sloping walls to create
vertical surfaces to accommodate paintings and horizontal panels on
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69.1 (2011): 31. Wiley-Blackwell.
Accessed July 18/2012.
the floor to keep visitors at a safe distance.
Yet, the iconic building continues to attract audiences with its visually seductive exterior wedged into Denver’s urban landscape. It can be argued that like most publicly-run art museums in the twenty-first century, the Denver Art Museum has been defined and driven by an aggressively consumerist cultural environment, using Libeskind’s iconic building as leverage against the industry’s fluctuating finances. Clearly, it has become a profit-oriented and consumer-driven cultural institution, with operational strategies tailored to suit its forecasted longevity; therefore subordinating the experience of pure art as secondary to consumerist spectacle. It is pertinent in the current economic context to wonder if these highly curved, trapezoidal and otherwise convoluted shapes that dominate contemporary art museum architecture should be in fact tolerated as aesthetically necessary.
Do such architectural designs affect the overall future respectability of the museum as a cultural institution?
The answer is not simple. When evaluating art museum architecture in the twenty-first century, one could advocate the importance of aesthetics that give the museum building its priority, reasoning that successfully spectacular architecture can “override its otherwise dysfunctional”
building may emphasize its “functional beauty,”
One could argue, however, that contrary to some art historians like Hal Foster, who critically evaluated the cross-over between architecture and sculpture in contemporary art museum buildings and wished for the return of Minimalist museum architecture with its anti-auratic, anti-symbolic forms of expression - the spectacularised, Pop architectural designs produce decisively more imaginative and aesthetically engaging museum environments.
I would contend that the characteristically multisensorial and multilayered qualities of postmodern and post-postmodern architecture offer contemporary art museum visitors exciting, challenging and even elevating experiences that are difficult to duplicate with less alluring narratives. Therefore, ‘atmospherized’ museum architecture has been more successful at generating large audiences, seducing them by form, as it were, that otherwise would not visit an art institution. In so many ways, the iconic Frederic C. Hamilton Wing at the Denver Art Museum, like the Bilbao Guggenheim or the Art Museum in Graz, draws on its strong iconic presence, inadvertently promoting art exhibitions housed inside rather than overshadowing them. It is truly a fusion of art and architecture into one, somewhat fragile union based on mutual rewards.
Conclusion
Fig. 27. Musée du Louvre. The Ethos of Spectacle. Yvonne Nowicka-Wright, 2009.
Paintings, sculptures, even film media have been traditionally linked with (and are often physically dependent on) supportive and stabilizing architectural frames. With Baroque’s theatrical flamboyance,
I theorize that while the highly variable journey in the service of cultural product symbolized by an art museum building began in the aristocratic setting of princely palaces, it has inevitably led to Bilbao in Spain, with its deeply rooted elitism masquerading as populist spectacle. Detouring via various architectural styles, ideologies, and operational strategies, art museum architecture as a cultural product has culminated in the iconic presence of the Spanish Guggenheim.
Created by Frank Gehry in 1997 and now perceived as Postmodernity’s embodiment, it has communicated a shift in late twentieth century aesthetics towards amusement that echoes the legacy of George Brown Goode’s exhibitionary complex. Bilbao’s flamboyantly spectacular exteriors and aesthetically refined interior spaces set precedent for future museum buildings to follow. Agreeably, since 1997, many art museum directors have privileged and revered spectacularized exteriors to connote the arrival of a new era in architectural visualizations - the museum building as a self-professed work of art.
As a result, contemporary art museums, have positioned themselves squarely within the binary aspects of spectacle. On the one hand, art museum institutions seem capable of inducing in their visiting audiences a feeling of betterment and elevation in their social relevance; on the other hand however, the spectacularized structure simultaneously projects an allure served with an uncanny sense of granted “privilege rather than a civic right,”
perception experienced by art museum visitors that connotes a psychological separation under cultural unification; general accessibility with underpinned exclusivity.
The contributions made by the Pompidou Centre, the New National Gallery in Stuttgart, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Art Museum in Graz and the Denver Art Museum to the discourse of spectacle, have created a venue for renewed interest in cultural institutions that goes beyond museum collections and enters social and political context. Through a seduction by form, contemporary art museums bridge and connect fractured public spheres, under the umbrella of mutual interest in art. As on the day the Musée du Louvre first opened in 1793, contemporary art museums offer their entranced visitors a new kind of visual and social experience, one that can only be accomplished through atmospheric properties of a perfectly staged architectural drama.
Audiences are seduced today, as much as they have been in the past, by a spectacle of artworks put on display by a highly reputable “place” (therefore presumed valued and desirable), particularly when framed by a monumental embodiment of customary formality. I would hypothesize that the relation between the value of a work of art and the physical dimensions of the gallery space within which it is presented increases exponentially, hence influencing the spatial volume of contemporary art museums.
98
Arguing against the notion, put forward by some critics, that contemporary art museum buildings are ‘disposable’ objects, not meant to survive for more than fifteen years, I suggest that contemporary art museums have already succeeded in creating satisfying and far-reaching cultural, social and economic impacts, in spite of being faulted for overlooking practical needs while privileging aesthetic values. Iconic museum buildings have launched an unprecedented era of one-of-a-kind structures contributing greatly to cultural progression and architectural development, turning leading designers into “professional séducteurs;”
On the flip side, contemporary museum architecture has positioned itself firmly in the new landscape of cultural wealth ruled by the impermanence of fashion. The accelerated consumption of their iconic images has created an overt emphasis on the buildings’ structural allure rather than their architectural functionality; characteristics which architectural historian William Saunders criticizes: “a design that seduces, discourages independent thought, and art depends on it.”
f#%$ the art!"220 Clearly, sensorial stimulation wins out over intellectual
contemplation, a trend fostered by the values and principles in contemporary
culture within which art museums strategize to establish a long duration, while
competing for the attention of the world, in a game of seduction.
220 Shiner, op cit., p. 31.
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