Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space, by Julian Rose. Princeton Architectural Press, 2024. 368 pages.
IF YOU HAVE EVER HEARD any of them speak, it is nearly impossible to read Building Culture, scholar and writer Julian Rose’s remarkable new book on museum design, without imagining the voices of the sixteen outstanding global architects whose interviews constitute the bulk of the text: David Chipperfield’s mild West Country purr; Frank Gehry’s laid-back rumble; the crisp cadences of Jacques Herzog, like the sonic equivalent of Helvetica. Even if these often verbose subjects were heavily edited, their responses still convey the funny, frequently maddening personae that lie behind the ideas and the buildings that have shaped the current cultural landscape.
If you haven’t heard most of them speak, the book is that much more important, especially given the ideas and the buildings these individuals are talking about. As Rose puts it in his introduction, “The museum cannot be optimized.” Practically alone among the products of contemporary architecture, great storehouses of art are “not subject to the same ruthless value engineering” that reduces the office tower, the apartment block, and the airport to mere emanations of a bean counter’s algorithm. Freed (at least relatively) from onerous financial and functional constraints, the designers of museums are able to make the kind of emphatic, deeply personal architectural statements that ambitious, intelligent architects dream of creating when they enter the field. At the same time, innovations in building technologies have afforded today’s architects the means to create ever more extravagant declarations of stylistic individuality, while twenty-first-century media culture rewards them in the form of lavish attention, likes, and clicks.
The same simple question—what is the best way to encounter a work of art?—lies at the heart of each of Rose’s interviews; in each instance, he receives a different answer, the typology taking on the distinct accent of whoever happens to be discussing it. Surprising, then, that both the author and his interlocutors are so eager to explain just how idiosyncratic and whimsical museum architecture is not. “I referred to myself as an ‘expeditor’ or a ‘facilitator’ of an artist’s work,” architect Richard Gluckman claims; given his extensive work in the field of adaptive reuse, notably for the original Chelsea home of the Dia Center for the Arts in New York (now the Dia Art Foundation), Gluckman may well view his primary role as that of a mere technician, but it’s a title even his colleagues who are less bound to the white box also seem eager to claim. Again and again, the interviewees point not to formal considerations, but to quotidian problems of program, procession, and plain ol’ mechanical systems as the true keys to the museum-making biz, from Annabelle Selldorf (“The work should not be about style or form”) to Elizabeth Diller (who describes the Shed, her firm’s creative-hub-on-wheels on Manhattan’s West Side, as an exercise in “shifting the emphasis from the aesthetics . . . to an infrastructure for production”) to, notably, Gehry, who mounts a novel defense for his expressive exteriors based on the ease of slipping the building’s heating, plumbing, and electrical elements into the void between skin and structure. “We can argue forever,” he tells Rose, “but at the end of the day the space in between isn’t wasted.”
Of course, none of the interviewees can quite escape the long, bulbous shadow that Gehry’s best-known museum has cast over the profession. For architecture, the primary symptom of the “Bilbao Effect”—so named for the Spanish satellite of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that opened in 1997—has been to elevate museum architecture to the sine qua non of the art of building, the prime repository for all new design ideas and the objective of every design career. Within architectural history, we are now, in effect, in the Age of the Museum, and the conflicting sequelae of this fact are dramatically demonstrated by Building Culture itself:“This is a noble job,” says Renzo Piano, yet it is hard to square the nobility of architecture, and of the artistic encounters that museum architecture can help facilitate, with the sometimes dubious motives for art collecting and art exhibiting that have produced such a boom in new museum commissions around the world. “By hanging an artwork on its walls, a museum offers tangible proof of its worth,” Rose writes. “Museums stabilize the value of the very goods their patrons collect, serving as something like the central banks of the art world.” The architects he interviews, however, largely underplay the material underpinnings of their museum work. Shohei Shigematsu says in passing that “art is becoming part of the global economy” and that architects must “accept that reality,” but there is no mention of tax avoidance, and very little about how collecting and donating can help the rich get richer.
Speaking of conflicts: Rose conducted several of these interviews during his former tenure as a senior editor of Artforum. But given its vital topic, as well as its astounding scope—including such relative sprites as Liu Yichun (who is fifty-five) alongside legendary figures like Denise Scott Brown (who is ninety-three), and with landscape specialist Walter Hood appearing side by side with mystical artiste manqué Steven Holl—there can be little bias in calling Building Culture an essential document of the most essential building type of our time. (Albeit not the only such document: András Szántó’s Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects, 2023, for instance, includes interviews with several of the same designers.) In the spirit of objectivity, it would be worth pointing to one question, posed in the book’s opening pages, that the rest of the text leaves rather tantalizingly unanswered. In his preface, Yve-Alain Bois asks, “Could one envision a living architecture for the museum, which would ensure a full appreciation of the art it contains?” Speaking mostly in the past tense, Rose’s architects proffer many suggestions for how to make a good museum, but few ideas as to the future of the field in a fast-changing urban and artistic context. How to find a way forward for the architectural field, and for the art world it serves, might make a suitable subject for the author’s next outing.
Ian Volner has contributed articles on architecture, design, and urbanism to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New Yorker, among other publications. His most recent book is Jorge Pardo: Public Projects and Commissions (Petzel, 2021).
