Museum Architecture

Steven Litt in ArtNewsOnline covers the changing attitudes among those responsible for new museum buildings: he says expensive flash is largely out of favor. Money, or relative lack of it, is pretty clearly a driving force. The Milwaukee Art Museum and its addition by Santiago Calatrava is held up as an example.

Despite the trend toward conservative Modernism in museum design, there are powerful exceptions. David Gordon, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, unabashedly champions Milwaukee’s decision to build the expansion designed by Calatrava, with winglike, mechanized sunscreens that open and close. He says the museum has raised $19 million to pay off its $25 million debt, and he believes it will gather the rest. A native of Great Britain, Gordon says he has adopted an American, can-do attitude. “In the States you do something ambitious, you go out on a limb, you find a way to raise money, and you ride on,” he says.


Mitchell Kahan, director of the Akron Art Museum, is confident he’ll raise the additional $10 million he needs to complete the museum’s $38 million expansion, which will be the first in the United States designed by the chic Viennese architecture firm Coop Himmelb(l)au... “If cultural institutions do not embrace innovation in architecture, no one will,” says Kahan. “It is truly our responsibility to push the envelope, because the commercial sector will not.” Kahan also believes art museums need to stretch financially to make significant architectural statements. “At Milwaukee the focus is on the cost overrun,” he says. “That’s a choice they made, and I admire it. A few years of tightening the belt is nothing compared with having something that serves the community for the next century. I don’t know why people are so critical.”

The easy response, of course, is that the costs are beggaring some institutions, but Kahan has a good point. It will come down to what compromises the individual institutions are willing to make, and if, once made, they can pull it off. The Milwaukee Art Museum addition had a significant positive impact on Milwaukee's self-image, and apparently on its image elsewhere. That's no small thing.

Museums like Milwaukee's do now need to concentrate on paying off their debts, significantly increasing their endowments, hiring more curators, and improving the quality of their display collections. Doing that is going to boil down to more money, and lots of it. Getting that money and spending it wisely may well require an evaluation of their goals: what is important to be doing really well a decade or two out, what they should be doing, tho perhaps not so well, and what they shouldn't be attempting at all.

Equally important is acting on the implications those decisions have for collections: some should likely be disposed of entirely and the resources concentrated on those which further the goals, whatever those may be. That is a very tough decision to act on, but those museums which aren't committed to excellence really don't deserve support from those ppl who are.

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