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comment New museums: The good, the bad, and the horribly misguided
Last year marked both the 10th anniversary of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the 30th of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s Georges Pompidou Center—the two most influential cultural buildings of our time. The worldwide construction boom spurred by those watershed schemes continued unabated during 2007, which witnessed the completion of still more museums and additions. The sheer volume of such projects could support a publication devoted solely to that subject, and at times it seems as though this column should be renamed accordingly. Nevertheless, there are limits to how much space even specialist periodicals can devote to any one building type, albeit the hallmark category of our period, and journalists must decide which contenders among an overcrowded field are most deserving of their attention.
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Let me be the first to declare my list of 2007’s highlights (and lowlights) of new museum architecture to be far from definitive. Certain obvious absences are not unintentional, however, particularly Steven Holl’s Bloch Building at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri [RECORD, July 2007, page 92], which critics overwhelmingly praised. However, after I wrote two negative paragraphs about Holl’s Simmons Hall dormitory at MIT [RECORD, May 2003, page 204], he shot off an angry letter summoning me to his office for what he called “re-education,” a term I last heard during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution as a euphemism for the persecution of intellectuals.
Naturally, I ignored Holl’s invitation, and knowing that the only thing architects hate more than a bad review is no review at all, I gave his Nelson-Atkins addition a pass. Certain drumbeat buildings demand every critic to weigh in, like it or not: Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, Yoshio Taniguchi’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) expansion, and Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum wing come to mind. But beyond such rare media blowouts, skipping one museum or another nowadays seems less a sin of omission than necessary triage. Here, then, is my highly opinionated, wholly arbitrary, glaringly incomplete, and gleefully polarizing list of the best and worst new museums of the preceding calendar year, in ascending order from the ridiculous to the sublime.
John S. and James L. Knight Building, Akron Art Museum, by Coop Himmelb(l)au. Just as there are fashion victims whose gullible trendiness blinds them to how comical they appear, so there are architecture victims. Among the latest is the Akron Art Museum, now saddled with my nominee for architectural dud of the decade: the formally chaotic, haphazardly detailed, instantly dated-looking wing by Wolf Prix, of the annoyingly named Vienna firm Coop Himmelb(l)au. A leading exponent of Deconstructivism, Prix gave these misguided clients the gee-willikers conversation piece they wanted. But far from being the next Bilbao, this provincial embarrassment offers graphic evidence of the contemporary museum world’s inverted priorities. The Akron addition’s strenuously flamboyant yet oddly inhospitable public spaces lead to some of the dullest, least imaginative exhibition galleries I’ve seen lately, making this my suggested first stop on a how-not-to-do-it tour for museum building committees.
Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky, by A.M. Kinney Associates. At a time when museums are accused of turning themselves into theme parks, along comes a bizarre new institution that makes Walt Disney World seem like the Albertina. This is not surprising, since the displays of cartoonish dinosaurs and humanoids at the Creation Museum—devised to supplant Darwin’s theory of evolution with a Bible-based fantasia of the world’s origins—were dreamed up by a former Universal Studios designer, Patrick Marsh. I use the term “institution” in both the museological and the psychiatric sense, because this only-in-America loony bin is no more a museum than I am Napoleon. Even more unsettling than its mission to enlist impressionable children in the Christian fundamentalist crusade against scientific reason is the fact that there are already two dozen such creationist museums around the country, though none equals this in impressive presentation values that make it all the more pernicious. In flat-out rejection of the Enlightenment rationalism that brought the United States into being, the Creation Museum is more frightening than Disney’s Haunted Mansion. Let us pray.
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