Plums for Architects : Museums: Monuments to City Pride

A bumper crop of art museums is rising across the country.

Seeded by civic pride and cultivated by architects’ egos, they have become an emblematic focus for many cities, their proud badge of culture, and for designers a much coveted commission promising honors, if not notoriety.

Within the last few years, new art museums and museum additions have opened in Williamsburg, Va.; Des Moines, Iowa; Portland, Me., and Akron, Ohio, as well as in Miami, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Dallas, San Antonio, Boston and New York City.

Plans also have been disclosed for new art facilities in Austin, Tex.; Newark, N.J., and Seattle, and for major additions to New York’s Whitney and Guggenheim museums, while work continues on new and expanded galleries in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Richmond, Va.; Elmira, N.Y.; Hanover, N.H., and Washington, among other cities.

Los Angeles Examples

In Los Angeles, nearing completion downtown is the ambitious Museum of Contemporary Art, under construction are two substantial additions to the County Museum of Art, and in planning are the $100-million-plus Getty arts complex, and museums of cultural and Jewish history, both of which will include art collections.

“It is a major boom,” observed Lawrence Reger, director of the American Assn. of Museums, a clearinghouse and resource center for the approximately 1,200 major and 4,000 other museums across the country, including museums of history and science as well as art. The association defines as major those museums with annual budgets of more than $500,000, of which there are an estimated 250 featuring art collections.

Reger said he could not offer an exact figure for the number of art museums that were in planning or construction or had just completed a new facility, an addition or a major renovation but that a recent association survey clearly showed “a most definite increase over the last 10 years.”

‘A Growth Industry’

“Museums have become a growth industry,” declared Arthur Rosenblatt, vice president for architecture and design of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and an adviser to various other museums considering new or expanded facilities.

Reasons offered for the burst of museum construction and renovation varied.

Rosenblatt suggested that the boom was touched off in large part nearly 20 years ago by Thomas Hoving, then head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who sought through “blockbuster” exhibits and expansion plans to dust off the museum and make it more attractive and accessible to the general public.

“Thanks to exhibits like King Tut, within a few years more Americans were going to museums than football games,” Rosenblatt said. “Hoving brought art out of the musty closet and helped make it a popular attraction.”

Reger contended that the growth in museums is primarily a response to the increased need to upgrade and expand exhibit space, prompted by an increase in collections as well as in public interest. Others cited more philistine motives.

“Museums have become a mark of sorts of civic maturity, something unique a city can put on the cover of the local telephone book and point to with pride and perhaps give them that extra competitive edge to attract new investments,” said Robert McNulty, president of Partners for Livable Places, a Washington-based planning resource center for cities.

“That is also why museum boards are going after name-brand architects, at almost any cost, to design their facilities,” McNulty added. “They know it is the architecture that will probably attract attention, not their collections. The art actually is quite secondary to the civic desire for recognition.”

McNulty pointed to the new Charles Shipman Payson Building of the Portland (Me.) Museum of Art, designed by the prestigious firm of I. M. Pei & Partners. This is the same firm that designed, among others museums, the acclaimed East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington and the controversial addition to and renovation of the Louvre in Paris.

Publicity, Notoriety

“Here was a worn out, depressed fishing town of 61,000 that needed that something special to give it an economic and psychological boost,” McNulty said. “So it went out and got Pei, knowing whatever he would do would generate publicity, if not notoriety. And that, of course, is what happened.”

The bold design gained wide coverage in the architectural magazines and garnered numerous accolades, including an Honor Award a few weeks ago from the American Institute of Architects.

“It also generated quite a bit of pride, tourist trade and investments,” McNulty said. “The town is now considered quite desirable, definitely on the way up. There is no question that it was the museum that gave the town a focus and turned it around. They learned, as have other cities and a number of economic studies have proven, that culture pays.”

Ellen Hicks of the museum association, who helped prepare a report last year entitled “Museums for a New Century,” noted that most of the new museums and expansions have generally followed the shift of population and prosperity toward the Sun Belt.

“Cities there, once they gain a little wealth and culture, want to be known as innovative, exciting places, not dusty, musty backwaters,” she said. “Museums are very important for their image and therefore have become a very popular cause.”

Others contend that museums in many of the burgeoning cities also fill the role of sorts as a social center, offering the more culture-conscious in the community a very acceptable, nondenominational facility in which to gather, gossip and, added an museum official, “perhaps even to look at the art,”

“Museums have become this decade’s big civic projects, just as convention centers were in the ‘70s and stadiums in the ‘60s,” said Bill Lacy, president of Cooper Union, a venerable architecture and engineering school in New York.

Lacy also is a consultant to the Getty Trust on the planning of its arts complex in the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking Brentwood, the centerpiece of which, when completed within the next decade, will be a major museum.

Whatever the reason for the increase in museum construction, the projects have become among the most desirable commissions for an architects.

“Museums are the hot item; everyone wants to design one,” said Lance Brown, a professor of architecture at the City College of the City University of New York. Brown also is a consultant to the federal National Endowment of the Arts on design competitions, including those for museums.

Brown contended that the design of museums has a special attraction to architects.

“To design a museum is to design for eternity,” he explained. “No one is building pyramids anymore, but museums, as repositories of the artifacts of our civilization, are being built, so any architect with half an ego figures why not design them also as an artifact.

“That is why the (Frank Lloyd) Wright’s Guggenheim and Pei’s East Wing look the way they do instead of just looking like a bus terminal that happens to be filled with art. They wanted to make an artistic statement as well as design a repository.”

Experiencing the spiraling Guggenheim museum in New York City and the well-detailed angular East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, one gets the impression that the structures indeed are the largest object in the collections.

‘No Fixed Formulas’

“No doubt about it, museums are the most challenging, most exacting design for an architect,” said Richard Meier, who won out over 32 other architects in an 18-month selection process to be chosen as the designer of the Getty Center. Given that the Getty is one of wealthiest institutions in the world, controlling a $2-billion-plus endowment, the commission was one of the more coveted of the century.

Meier explained that what makes the design of museums so challenging is that each is so different.

“Because the collections, location and building requirements of each museum vary considerably, there are no fixed formulas or recipes,” he said. “You must also deal with the art, the views, the need for changing exhibits, the security and the use of the museum as a social center.”

And deal with them Meier does, to the professional envy of his peers, for he has become one of the more sought-after museum designers in the world. Only this spring, two museum additions he and his partners designed opened, one in Des Moines, Iowa, and the other in Frankfurt, West Germany.

In a bid for national attention, the Des Moines Art Center made much of the fact that what it called the “Meier wing” was an addition to an original building designed by the noted architect Eliel Saarinen in 1948 and an addition by Pei in 1968. The art center declared in a press release that at the opening “three masters of 20th-Century architecture will all come together to form an architectural dialogue of distinct statements.” Little was said about the art it contained.

When Meier’s design of the High Museum of Art opened in Atlanta in the fall of 1983, it was greeted and treated as if the Holy Grail of museum design had been found, containing the key to the perfect blending of architecture and art.

The opening generated quite a bit of publicity for Meier, the museum and Atlanta, even though on closer inspection Meier’s design was found not to serve the museum’s relatively modest collection particularly well. More impressive, if not overwhelming, was Meier’s use of gleaming white porcelain exterior panels, creating a stark modern look, which has become his trademark of sorts.

Called Ego Buildings

Meier also used the same materials and style for the Des Moines and Frankfurt designs, as well as for a visitors’ center in Indiana and a mental health hospital in New York City, among others. This has raised the issue in design circles whether the buildings are more an expression of Meier--what architects call an ego building--than a product of a particular place and a varying set of needs.

The issue prompted architect and historian Gerald Allen to recall the story of the opening of a new library at Yale University, where he has taught. “The librarian did not think the building expressed the library and suggested a sign be put over its front door stating, ‘This is not the library. The library is inside.’ ”

Nevertheless, the design of the High was mentioned prominently in the award last year to Meier of the Pritzker Prize, considered with its $100,000 grant architecture’s most prestigious honor. The award in turn was said to have helped Meier garner the Getty commission.

The Pritzker Prize this year went to Hans Hollein, principally for his design of a municipal art museum in Monchengladbach, near Dusseldorf, West Germany. Museum designs also were major items in the vitae of past winners, including Philip Johnson, James Stirling, Kevin Roche and Pei.

The winner of this year’s American Institute of Architects’ Firm Award was Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown of Philadelphia, which last year was selected to design both the new Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, Tex., and the new downtown Seattle Art Museum. Both designs promise to attract attention to the firm, the museums and the cities.

There definitely seems to be a symbiotic relationship between museum commissions, architectural awards and publicity, which, it has been observed, subsequently make most architects all the more anxious to get a commission and to try to do something special with it.

“Museums have become the glamour building for architects, their blockbuster building, something for the ages that will put them right up there with the artists whose works are to be contained in the buildings,” Allen said. “This can, and does, create some aberrations that do not serve the art, the public or architecture particularly well.”

Some of these issues have been raised in the fierce debate that has erupted within the profession following the disclosure last month by the Whitney Museum in New York of its expansion plans.

The original structure, designed 20 years ago by Marcel Breuer, is a well-scaled, singular brutish building, a very urban piece of sculpture, that has become in its relatively short life a landmark on New York City’s Upper East Side.

The proposed expansion calls for more than doubling the space of the museum in an arbitrary massive mix of ornamental shapes. styles and rich colors, topped by a colonnaded penthouse on top of which is yet another structure, this one in the form of a pergola. The fragmented mass, looking a bit like a stage set for a campy remake of the film “Cleopatra,” contrasts sharply with the original museum.

Provokes Profession

The expansion was designed by Michael Graves, who over the last few years has provoked the architectural profession and the public with a variety of idiosyncratic buildings blending history and fantasy. These have included the Portland (Ore.) Building and the Humana headquarters building in Louisville, Ky. He also has done a number of more modest buildings, including the San Juan Capistrano Library in California, that have won various awards.

The Whitney is Graves’ first design of a major museum, and it almost immediately drew the wrath of many of his peers in New York City. He was accused of, among other things, sacrificing the landmark Breuer building to satisfy his own ego. The debate is sure to continue as the museum seeks the needed approval of the various city agencies, including that of the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission.

In contrast, a few weeks ago the De Witt Wallace Decorative Arts Gallery was opened in Colonial Williamsburg, Va., to nothing but polite applause. The gallery, containing an extensive collection of early American art and antiques, was designed by Kevin Roche, the 1982 winner of the Pritzker Prize and the designer of, among other museums, the much-praised Oakland Museum and various additions to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Because the museum had to be built within the town’s historic area, behind a restored public hospital, Roche said in an interview that he chose to simply put the museum underground and hide its roof by surrounding it with a 12-foot-high colonial brick wall.

A ‘Non-Building’

The result was what Roche called a “non-building,” a solution that he felt was the most appropriate for the museum. He explained that, after all, it was the collection that was the most important part of the museum, not the building.

Brown observed that only a much-honored architect with a strong ego could respond in such a manner to such a design problem.

“Most architects, and most museum boards, want the attention a distinctive design promises and will take chances, even if the art and perhaps the viewing public will eventually suffer.” Brown said. “You have to understand it is an architect’s bid for immortality.”