It’s All a Big Facade : The rush for hugely expensive distinctive digs takes the focus away from works of art.

L.A.-based architect Frank O. Gehry is responsible for the design of the two most widely acclaimed art museum buildings of the last quarter-century. Remarkably, these two buildings represent the yin and yang of present-day museum culture.

One building is the Geffen Contemporary, the modestly refurbished industrial warehouse in Little Tokyo that serves as one of two buildings occupied by the Museum of Contemporary Art. The other is a flamboyant branch of Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum built in Bilbao, Spain, where the 21st century in architecture can literally be said to have begun on the day the building opened to the public two summers ago.

Architecturally, the two museum buildings couldn’t be more different. The 55,000-square-foot Geffen Contemporary, which initially cost about $1 million to open in 1983, embodies the adaptive reuse of a 50-year-old existing structure (actually, two adjacent structures). The 256,000-square-foot Guggenheim Bilbao, its undulating forms clad in a light-reflective skin of titanium panels, cost $89 million to build from scratch.

The Geffen was radical because, as Gehry put it, the most important design decision he made about the warehouse space was to pretty much leave well enough alone--clean up the grime and get out of the way. The Guggenheim Bilbao was radical because it brought to maximum completion the startling new vocabulary of architectural forms Gehry has so magnificently pioneered.

In very different ways, the Geffen and Bilbao pinpoint both the reality of post-industrial society and its latent sense of possibility. In Los Angeles, the bricks and mortar of the industrial past became the literal space of a museum, which was once aptly characterized as the place where the modern world proudly displays ways of life that we have made impossible. In Spain, a decaying urban-industrial site became the ground from which a computer-morphed fantasia grew into eye-popping reality.

In both places, it took an art institution to be the necessary patron for such ambitious articulations of revealing architectural ideas. Yet, there’s another difference between the two art museum buildings that’s worth paying some attention to.

About the Geffen Contemporary it’s common to hear enthusiasts remark: What a great building! And did you catch the great show of--fill in the blank with any of a half-dozen exceptional or unprecedented art exhibitions--that was there?

About the Guggenheim Bilbao it’s common to hear: What a great building!

To be fair, the Bilbao museum is young (though the Guggenheim is not) and the Geffen has a longer track record of exhibitions on which to draw. It also takes time to understand how a new building works best for art.

Still, it’s important to remember that art is the museum’s focus. In the current phase of the art museum boom, when buildings are being erected by the score, it’s often easy for the life of art to get lost in the shuffle.

Precise statistics being unavailable, educated guesses put the number of American art museums currently engaged in substantial building expansion or renovation projects at somewhere between 50 and 60. They come in every size and shape.

On the modest end is the Long Beach Museum of Art, where the imminent construction of a new 12,000-square-foot pavilion will finally bring more than 20 years of repeatedly aborted expansion plans to fruition. The grandest is the Museum of Modern Art, where half a city block in midtown Manhattan is being gobbled up by the latest expansion of the existing facility, which will include erecting a mammoth, half-block long, eight-story building.

The budget at Long Beach, where L.A.’s Frederick Fisher is the project architect, is $5.6 million. The budget for MOMA, designed by Tokyo-based Yoshio Tanaguchi, is $650 million. Both figures cover the cost of construction, while also including additions to each museum’s operating endowment.

Overall, the combined budgets for the 50-plus museum building projects underway around the country top out in the vicinity of $2 billion. That’s a lot of cash. But museum building programs are not carried out on a whim, so there’s every reason to believe that museum governing boards in Long Beach and Manhattan--as well as Boston, Fort Worth, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, San Francisco and all the rest--are fully confident the money will be raised.

Now, try imagining this: Fund-raising efforts being marshaled all over the country to raise $2 billion to buy art, not buildings.

Having trouble picturing it? So am I.

The conventional wisdom is that high-profile new buildings will attract gifts of art, so a building campaign means a museum gets both for the price of one. True or not--and experience shows the claim can be overstated--the scheme distracts us from other possibilities.

One is that there’s a difference between having faith in art and artists and having faith in art institutions. Both are perfectly fine and respectable things to do, but in the end they’re not the same. To see how, just imagine the transformative effects of a $2 billion infusion into the American art market over the next few years, rather than into the building construction market.

The expansion of art institutions is always a double-edged sword. While the benefits are many and obvious, the often unconsidered drawback is that the pool of potential money is limited. Every dollar that’s spent on an institution is a dollar that can’t be spent on art. And while it’s true that far from every dollar earmarked for an institution would automatically be spent in the art market, the discrepancy simply indicates the degree to which any institutional expansion involves interests other than artistic ones.

An out-of-state friend who lives in a rapidly growing city just beginning to feel its cultural oats not long ago told me of the interest he and a number of patrons had in getting a new museum of contemporary art off the ground. With the right architect and a few sizable lead gifts, he was certain a lot of money could be raised for a building. What did I think?

Don’t do it, I advised. Yes, start a museum, but don’t build a signature building. Hire the best engineer in town, build a big industrial warehouse, then bring in that exceptionally talented architect to retrofit the place for museum purposes. Do a Geffen, not a Bilbao. It’ll cost a small fraction of a spanking new signature museum building and a large pool of money will still be available for art--that is, for the far more difficult and (dare I say it) more important activity of nurturing the life of culture from the ground up, rather than the top down.

Today, it seems like every city on the make wants to go the other way and build a new museum to be the next Bilbao. It’s a great building that everyone should see--but, did you catch those amazing shows of L.A. art in the ‘90s, the history of American and European Conceptual art, Robert Gober’s sculpture, the relationships between art and language, the Lannan gift of Minimalist and perceptual art, the connections globally between performance actions and art objects, 40 years of Sam Francis’ paintings and the rest that were all at the Geffen Contemporary?