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State Of The Art by Peter Plagens and Cathleen McGuiganMarch 26, 2001 As a glacial wind whipped off Lake Michigan, architect Santiago Calatrava side-stepped the ice-skimmed mud puddles to inspect his breathtaking new addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum. Even unfinished, with building cranes still hovering, the structure was startling: a white steel-and-glass pavilion jutted out over the edge of the lake like a ship's prow, while on the other side, a sleek white footbridge cantilevered toward the downtown skyline. The local response to the design surprised the museum's director, Russell Bowman. "I expected it to be controversial, but I was wrong," he says. "Within months people were saying, 'Oh, it's going to be our Sydney Opera House'." Something, however, was missing. The Spanish-born architect pointed toward the spine of the glassroofed pavilion, which was awaiting the attachment of an incredible apparatus--a 200-foot-wide birdlike sunscreen, made of space-age carbon fiber, with "wings" that will move to shade the building below. The "brise soleil," as Calatrava refers to it, turned out to have some engineering glitches, and may not make the official opening of the museum's new space in September. Not that Calatrava doubts the thing will fly. "It's not that unique a piece," he says, shrugging. But eventually the bird must alight--it's already the logo on the museum's stationery, and local boosters are counting on it to become the new icon for a city that's always been most famous for brewing beer. Milwaukee isn't alone in pinning its ambitions on a radical new museum. Across the country, more than 25 major art institutions--and many more smaller ones--are planning or already constructing new buildings. There have been museum-building booms before (as recently as the 1980s), but never on this scale. When most of the current projects are finished, more than $3 billion in capital funds will have been raised, mostly from private donors. Naturally, the boom economy of the past decade has propelled these projects, but even in the current shakier climate, most museums say their plans are going forward, and new ones keep being announced. Last month alone, the Whitney Museum in New York hired the hot Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas; the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., chose two other Netherlanders, Ben Van Berkel and Caroline Bos, to plan an expansion, and Tadao Ando of Japan was selected to design the new museum for Alexander Calder's sculpture in Philadelphia. That avant-garde architecture is playing such a leading role in marketing these projects--both to potential benefactors and to the public at large--is a sea change in the culture. Architects have joined the celebrity milieu, led by Frank Gehry, who became the most famous one in the world with his spectacular Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. "When you're a museum creating a building, you may be creating the most important work of art in your collection," says David Levy, director of the Corcoran Museum, which has hired Gehry to add an off-the-wall wing to its neoclassical building in downtown Washington. And the embrace of high-style design isn't just a coastal phenomenon--some of the wildest designs are headed for the heartland. Take Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-born Londoner who's designed a radical glass museum with tilting floors for the busiest corner in downtown Cincinnati. Or look at Berlin-based Daniel Libeskind, architect of the stark, zigzagging Jewish Museum in that city, who's designing museums in both Denver and San Francisco. One striking aspect of the boom is the global talent: apart from Gehry and one or two others, most of the big projects are being designed by some of the coolest architects from Europe and Japan. This new museum architecture is not only shaping the identity of institutions, it's symbolizing the
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State Of The Art - Print - Newsweek
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aspirations of communities. Many American cities have been making a comeback, as the 2000 Census figures confirm, and museums are now seen as urban jump-starters, capable of attracting hordes of visitors, good press and even new business. In Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts hopes to be an agent provocateur in revitalizing the gritty Fenway neighborhood. "We need an anchor, where people can meet and come together," says the museum's director, Malcolm Rogers. "Maybe not since the 1890s have museums been so central as the cultural engines of cities," says James Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, which has hired the acclaimed Italian architect Renzo Piano to design an expansion. The latest architectural plans reflect how radically museums have changed since the 1890s, when the core experience was a contemplative one, between a viewer and a work of art. Museums now are striving for big box office and they're succeeding: last year museum visits in the United States topped 1 billion for the first time, more than double the attendance at sports events. In New York City, with 30 million tourists a year, the Metropolitan Museum is the single biggest attraction, with 5.5 million visitors. What these popularity figures point to is the drastic need for museums to improve their public amenities: many of them are expanding in part to get more gallery space, but they also need bigger lobbies with escalators, auditoriums, restaurants and cafes and, of course, larger shops. Washington's Corcoran, for instance, had nearly 1 million visitors last year, but its 1897 building still has only one public bathroom. There's a real danger that all the dining and shopping and Saturday-night dances are turning museums into indoor fairgrounds. But it's also clear that in many places, such as the Brooklyn Museum, such institutions can become vital social centers. "There was no institution in town that brought people together," says New York architect Steven Holl of the success of his new Bellevue, Wash., art museum. "This is really a social condenser. People want to get married there!" But the relationship that needs to click in any of these projects is the one between the museum and the architect. To find the right mate, most museums go through a competitive process, inviting perhaps dozens of architects to participate in the first round. Sometimes the competition is strictly offstage; in other instances, it's fairly public. In Denver, where the new wing of the Art Museum is partly financed by city bonds, the finalists in the competition made their design presentations on local cable TV (no word on the ratings), and the Corcoran opened its doors to the public to watch Gehry, with his proposal, duke it out with also-rans Calatrava and Libeskind. Museums used to quietly raise most of the money for their building and then hire an architect. But nowadays, the star power of architects helps bring in the bucks--the two-part Museum of Modern Art competition, with a roster of famous designers from Koolhaas to Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, created buzz, as did the choice of Hadid in Cincinnati. In Milwaukee, the board had a competition for the architect with just a $1 million gift in hand from homeboy Walter Annenberg. When Calatrava unveiled his wingedbird design, local money poured in. One evening at the Red Rock Cafe, Bowman ran into John Burke and his wife, Murph, having dinner. The Burkes told him they'd really like to participate in the museum project-and the size of the check they eventually wrote means the bird will now be known as the Burke brise soleil. Art museums began to change in the '60s. The power of the curators waned as museum education departments grew--and government money began to flow in. Today public money is drying up and marketing is more important than ever. Museums are pushing to appeal to broader audiences, not just with blockbuster shows of impressionist paintings but with a whole new category of populist fare: "The Art of the Motorcycle" (the Guggenheim, New York), "Wallace & Gromit" (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and "The Art of Star Wars" (now playing at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston). And new architecture helps deodorize the whiff of elitism that emanates from all those grandiose beaux-arts museums built at the turn of the century. The new designs are meant to be open and inviting. At the forefront of forward-thinking museums is the Guggenheim: it's expanding with a global franchise to reach far more people and generate money from new sources. And it's been a pioneer in using cuttingedge architecture since Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral building opened on Fifth Avenue in 1959. What Wright designed for the atomic age, Rem Koolhaas is creating for the digital--in Las Vegas, the fastest-growing city in the country. Sound tacky? Even the museum's unorthodox director, Thomas Krens, was skeptical at
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first. But he learned that 1 million people a year paid $12.50 each to see Steve Wynn's modest collection of old-master paintings in a Vegas hotel. "His gallery was sandwiched between a wedding chapel and a yogurt stand," says Krens. "People were standing in front of the paintings with real reverence, having a cultural experience." With Vegas's 38 million annual tourists in mind, Krens signed a deal to create two Guggenheim spaces in the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino for $30 million--at the Venetian's expense--to open next September. He hired Koolhaas to design an enormous art-exhibition hall that visitors can enter only via the hotel. Perfect for large-scale contemporary art, the pared-down space, framed in Cor-Ten steel, has one huge end wall that can become a multimedia screen. In a smaller space, the Hermitage Las Vegas will show art from the famous Russian museum that's now a partner of the Guggenheim. Krens's next gamble is closer to home: he wants to put a $678 million shimmering Gehry-designed Guggenheim on the waterfront of lower Manhattan. Though there's a preliminary design--and a $250 million pledge from the museum foundation's chairman, Peter Lewis--the process of approvals and fund-raising could take years. Cutting-edge architecture is now so de rigueur that when the Museum of Modern Art chose a quiet, classically modern design for its rehab and expansion in Manhattan, it sparked a major controversy. After its competition, the museum's board picked Yoshio Taniguchi--who'd never built outside Japan--over many more famous names. His sleek design isn't remotely flashy but, MoMA officials say, it solves the tricky problems of expanding on a tight urban site in an ingenious, supremely graceful way. He's tripling the gallery space, enlarging many amenities and enhancing the museum's most precious asset, its sculpture garden. Taniguchi puts it this way: "Architecture is essentially a vessel to be filled in by people and things." But for the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, a quiet design just wasn't the way to go. The CAC doesn't just want to create a new image, it's trying to live down--no, make that obliterate--the memory of its former director Dennis Barrie, who was arraigned (and then acquitted) for showing Robert Mapplethorpe's notorious photographs in 1990. "We want a more accurate reflection of Cincinnati than the Barrie incident," says CAC director Charles Desmarais. "The city has a history of progressive social ideas." Since the CAC is a noncollecting institution, which doesn't require much storage space, the gutsy solution is perhaps obvious: an almost totally transparent edifice of dizzying diagonals. It will be the first American public building designed by the radical architect Hadid. "Your first impression should be of antigravity," says Hadid, "like the rock suspended in midair in Magritte's painting." Desmarais hopes the "surprising" building right downtown will tempt thousands of passersby to "come in and test the art." Rarely is a museum with a big collection given a chance to rebuild completely from the ground up. But it's happening in San Francisco, where the 1989 earthquake badly damaged the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Three years ago, in search of an architect, the director Harry Parker, and the chairman of the capital campaign, Dee Dee Wilsey, flew to Basel, Switzerland, to check out Renzo Piano's Beyeler Museum. But the pair also visited the train station one evening--"Me tripping over the tracks in my Chanel slingbacks," says Wilsey, laughing--to see the engine depot and signal box designed by the Basel firm of Herzog & deMeuron, then on the brink of fame for the not-yet-completed Tate Modern gallery in London. Parker and Wilsey were captivated by the structures, aglow in the night. "We really needed a compelling vision to raise money," recalls Parker. "Herzog & deMeuron had a light touch, an ethereal magical quality that seemed to work with the park." The $135 million project, to open in 2005, will have 300,000 square feet of multileveled space, with a twisting tower and a shimmering exterior. At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the force behind rebuilding the museum isn't one of nature--it's one of pragmatism. When the British Malcolm Rogers arrived, it was, as The Boston Globe described it, a place of "locked doors, dimly lit galleries, indifferent visitor services, and a barely explained collection." Rogers was determined to rehab the museum from the inside out: in a series of highly controversial moves, he began by tossing out traditional curatorial fiefdoms, and created superdepartments ("Art of the Americas" is one), where paintings and furniture are lumped together. He's tried to lure the public with more populist shows--to the horror of some critics--such as an exhibition of guitars through history called "Dangerous Curves." The results: annual attendance doubled, to 1.4 million visitors, and endowment
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increased by $50 million, to $300 million total. Now for the outside. Rogers has engaged the illustrious English architect Lord Norman Foster--but not just to slap on another new wing. Foster is devising a master plan that will not only add new structures but reorder the museum's labyrinthlike circulation. It will take 10 to 15 years to realize--and cost what? "Haven't a clue," says Foster. The Boston museum gets a running start with one of the country's great collections, but in other places, a stellar new building can help put a museum with more modest holdings on the map. In Ft. Worth, Texas, Tadao Ando is building the new Modern Art Museum--four elegantly austere pavilions, with bluish glass wrapping smooth-as-velvet poured-concrete walls. The project has a fairy godmother in trustee Ann Marion, scion of Texas's Four Sixes ranch, who almost single-handedly got the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum built in Santa Fe, N.M. It was Marion who called up the museum one day in 1996 and said her foundation had just bought the 11-acre parcel next to the Kimbell Art Museum, the masterpiece of the late Louis Kahn. And it was Marion who kicked in the gift the museum decorously describes as "substantial" to start the ball rolling. "It's easy to be generous when you love a place as much as I love Ft. Worth," she says. The project now has $100 million in the bank. One test of how flush the museum feels: when one of Ando's poured-concrete walls turned out to be too mottled, it was torn down on the spot and done anew. Extra cost: $90,000. Amid the euphoria of these glamorous new museums, here are some caveats. First, remember this: that sparkling new edifice could look dated or shabby in just a few years. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened a very '80s-looking new addition only 15 years ago. Today trustee Eli Broad, the leading force behind the nascent plans to expand once more, says, "If you stand and look across Wilshire Boulevard, there's nothing to be proud of, from an architectural point of view." Second, beware of overhyping. Houston Museum of Fine Arts director Peter Marzio puts it this way: "You tend to promise your donors more than a building can deliver, something like, 'You're sacrificing now, but just wait. This will make the Taj Mahal look like an outhouse.' Then, when it's not the Taj Mahal, attendance and revenues can dip." That said, Marzio is presiding over a new addition by Spanish architect Rafael Moneo that's generated so much good will, the museum's now raised almost as much as what the building cost--$80 million--to acquire art for the collection. And looking at art, don't forget, is what museums are all about. "Appreciating art is a serious activity, requiring concentration, knowledge and a certain acceptance of authority," says Phillippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "It's not the fare of millions who want quick thrills." But millions of people who do want to appreciate great art are flocking to museums. And just because they can also lunch in a nice restaurant, take in a film or shop for Aunt Thelma's birthday present while they're there doesn't mean they're not looking at the paintings. Nor is it a bad thing to feel a little civic pride at strolling through a city's snazziest piece of architecture. One of these days, it may well be the art-museum experience that really makes Milwaukee famous.
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