Museums are not dead, they multiply. After their central role in the economic euphoria of the 1990s, the Great Recession of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020, along with different military and environmental crises, should have transformed the cultural and political climate, cooling down the enthusiasm for iconic architectures that had its heyday in Bilbao’s Guggenheim. But as Julian Rose demonstrates in Building Culture, the construction of museums has kept increasing in pace all over the world, as much in fast-growing regions – Gehry’s new Guggenheim, for example, will open in Abu Dhabi – as in areas where monumental works are no longer appreciated like before. In the opinion of the American architect and art critic, there are two reasons for this: on the one hand, extending or renovating museums is the most efficient way to obtain funds from their patrons, often also collectors for whom the institutions act as central banks of the art market, protecting their own investments in art; on the other hand, both the desire of museums to reach wider audiences and the political pressures to enlarge and reorganize their collections with new narratives force them to create physical spaces that can accommodate this expansion of their social clout.
Rose’s book presents sixteen in-depth interviews with authors of museums (some as prolific as Renzo Piano, who has built twenty-nine and has four more under construction), preceded by an intelligent, analytical introduction that gains from his experience as an architect, as an editor in Artforum, and as a teacher at Columbia and Princeton. Arranged alphabetically from Adjaye to Zumthor, the interviewees include leading figures like Chipperfield, Gehry, Herzog, or Sejima and museum specialists like Gluckman or Selldorf, and all of them speak of their personal and professional ties to the world of art. For the critic, who happens to be writing his dissertation on contemporary art museums, architects have had a strong bearing on the current role of museums, which are not only the last experimental spaces at the disposal of artists, but also among the few remaining places of an ever smaller and more fragmented public realm, besides perhaps the only buildings still able to skirt the economic-optimization criteria imposed on architecture everywhere.
In his historical account, Rose identifies four museums that architecturally brought a paradigm shift: Piano’s Pompidou (1977), a radical reinvention of the social function of the museum after ’68, whose author still does not understand how they were allowed to do it, because “it’s completely mad – it is a sacrilegious object in the middle of the city”; Gehry’s Guggenheim (1997), with its dramatic regeneration of the urban context that led to the term ‘Bilbao effect’ to refer to the transformative potential of iconic architecture for new cultural institutions; Sejima’s Kanazawa (2004), where glass was used to explore the immersive effects that redefined the influence of architecture in our experience of art, and whose designer explains how she won the competition joining in a single building the museum and the community center that had been included as a way to silence complaints about the elitism associated with contemporary art; and the museum David Adjaye is now raising in Benin City to house the mythical bronze pieces returned to Nigeria by the British Museum, which aside from tackling the theme of cultural restitution proposes the artistic institution as a vital piece in post-colonial society. Surprisingly, Rose excludes Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern (2000), which since its opening has turned its Turbine Hall into a space for artistic consecration, but whose popularity has the ‘dark side’ of serving real estate interests, and it is hard to defend an omission driven more by political positions than by love of art.
