The architectural historian Victoria Newhouse, by choosing mid-to-late-twentieth-century art museums as her subject, is telling a bigger story about architecture in the United States and Europe than her selection of building type might first suggest. To design an art museum is the preeminent architectural challenge today, not only because museums are such important symbols of our cultural aspirations, but also because they are immensely difficult to do well. The forty-four built museums described and evaluated by Newhouse, and the many others she refers to more briefly, constitute a superb account of the best work of the best architects of our era. Since no comparable book exists, it is fortunate for both the reader and for the historical record that she describes each museum so carefully. Only after discussing its reason for being, the organization of its functions, its site, landscaping, structure, dimensions, materials, and colors does she step back to offer critical assessment.

Newhouse begins with a brief history of the development of private collections, an activity that has gone on since antiquity. At first art objects and other treasures were secreted away in tombs, temples, and crypts. The earliest private art museums were the portrait galleries that began to appear in English and French country houses and castles at the beginning of the sixteenth-century. Simultaneously, in Italy, small studios for the contemplation of art appeared in a few of the grander palaces. Soon, throughout Europe, cabinets of curiosities—assortments of odd and strange objects of nature, as well as works of art— began to cram closets and cover the walls of rooms the aristocracy set aside for such acquisitions. Gardens, enhanced by summerhouses, loggias, pavilions, and grottoes became the settings for collections of antique sculpture. By the end of the sixteenth century, such aristocratic collectors as the Hapsburg Ferdinand II began to separate their art from other treasures and build distinct galleries for it.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the merely rich, as well as the aristocracy, were commissioning architects to house their collections. Many of these buildings, once designed for private use, have or will become public. Others from the outset were intended for the public. Newhouse includes twelve twentieth-century collector’s museums, most notably the Menil Collection in Houston (1987) by the Genoese architect Renzo Piano, this year’s Pritzker Prize winner. She finds much to praise in the architecture of the Menil and other relatively small, private, collector-inspired and directed art museums:  

With a single client and no board of trustees or staff to deal with, the architect’s task is simplified; the existence of a strong collection to which the architect can design is also an asset. Where no such collection is in place, museum architecture almost always fails. Clearly formed ideas—usually one person’s— of what and how art should be viewed, and reaction against operational aspects of public museums, have generally resulted in private museums matching art and architecture most successfully.

The late Dominique de Menil was a patron and collector with very clearly formed ideas of how art should be viewed. At the time that she engaged Renzo Piano, her collection included more than ten thousand works of art. De Menil determined that only 10 percent was to be exhibited to the public at any one time, with the rest stored in a rooftop penthouse, her “treasure chamber,” designed as an efficient and pleasant space for curators and scholars. The public galleries were to have natural illumination modulated by weather and the time of day. Piano’s simple sixteen-foot-high spaces, which admit daylight through a sophisticated but unobtrusive ceiling and roof system, are bounded by smooth, white wall surfaces with black-stained pine floors. These galleries serve her heterogeneous, frequently rotated collection quietly and well.

Single-artist museums, like those built for private collections, have contents that can be focused in settings that are almost residential in scale. Ideally they should contain all the artist’s available completed work, as well as the sketches or models that led to it, displayed in spaces that approximate the artist’s working environment. “If successful,” writes Newhouse, “this museum type enshrines the artist and illuminates the output, providing a chapel-like setting animated by the dynamic relationships between objects.”

As single-artist museums are relatively rare in the United States, Newhouse found only two of interest for her book—Richard Gluckman’s Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (1994) and Renzo Piano’s Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston (1995). The former is housed in a 1920s warehouse. “Given that Warhol used mass-production techniques and called one of his studios the Factory,” she notes, “the warehouse museum is an apt replication of his famed workplace.”

The author finds Piano’s Italianate pavilion for Twombly appropriate because, she says, the artist’s “refined scribbles and abstract calligraphy are grounded in the Classical past,” and because he has spent a major portion of his life in Rome. Although some may not consider Twombly classical, or even good, and might have difficulty associating his work with Rome, Piano’s elegant formal arrangement of rectangular gallery spaces is well proportioned to the paintings, and once again, as in the Menil, the architect has devised a ceiling of soft luminescence that does as much as possible for the art.

The six other single-artist museums included in the book are all in Europe. The Hans Josephsohn Museum in Giornico, Switzerland (1992) by Peter Märkli is one of unusual interest. The Swiss sculptor Josephsohn is a seventy-eight-year-old German Jew, orphaned by the Nazis, who took refuge in Zurich. “His life,” according to Newhouse, “is reflected in the alienation of his bronzes: human figures that convey a sense of metaphysical discomfort.”

Märkli built, in the beautiful Alpine foothills of the upper Ticino district, three interconnected rectangular halls of raw concrete, extending 138 feet along the edge of a hayfield. These halls are quite narrow, as the sculptures in the form of reliefs or half figures need not be seen in the round. Roofed by skylights, they are without electricity, water, climate control, shops, and security. For Newhouse this museum is simple as a Barnett Newman painting is simple. Although the museum is remote and hard to reach, approximately three hundred visitors a month find their way to it— mostly European and American student groups. “What is remarkable about this,” the author explains, “is that Josephsohn is not a world-class artist, nor is Märkli’s architecture, on its own, so extraordi- nary. Rather, it is the two together that provide the powerful aesthetic—even spiritual—experience.”

Although Newhouse offers only minor reservations about most of the private-collector and single-artist museums, she becomes sharply critical in the chapter “Wings That Don’t Fly.” Here she inveighs against art museums that are too big and the additions that she believes are making them even worse:

The lack of architectural integrity that is characteristic of so many expansion projects is unexpected in institutions that stand for the highest standards of art preservation and connoisseurship. The redundant enlargement projects undertaken between 1984 and 1987 by New York City’s four major art museums—the Metropolitan Museum (whose Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, like the other museums’ enlargements, was for 20th-century art), MOMA, the Guggenheim and, in its first, unrealized effort, the Whitney—as well as Paris’s Louvre, all sacrificed architecture to expansion.

Well, all did, but not in every case as egregiously as Newhouse charges. In her view, the Metropolitan has not much left but its art. Referring to additions that began with the 1970 master plan of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates and that continue under Roche’s direction to this day, the author declares that “little significant architecture survives, and with the latest five-wing addition the museum has lost all sense of place and procession. Equally disorienting is an unfortunate mixture of art and commerce created by the insertion of sales counters at critical points throughout the building.” A walk through the museum guided by the visitors’ map, however, reveals that the designed expansions extend or reinforce earlier processional axes and create new ones. Nor are the shops disorienting. They orient very well, their placement at exhibition exits a signal that one has come to the end of the show and it is time to buy the related catalog, book, video, poster, or T-shirt.

By the time the first major additions were all completed, Newhouse observes, twenty years had passed and “the architects’ monumental, geometric glass-and-steel aesthetic was hopelessly outdated.” Hopelessly? Architectural styles disappear and return, modified and transformed, with new labels. Today, Roche’s glass enclosures look quite contemporary—neo-modernist even.

Not all museums, however, have lost their architecture in the act of expanding. Newhouse gathers the extensions she considers successful under the title “Wings That Fly”: that is, “innovative statement[s] that leave the original building intact.” Included here are the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven (1953) by Louis I. Kahn and the Staatsgalerie New Building and Chamber Theater in Stuttgart (1983) by James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates.

Newhouse places all the art museums not designed for individual private collections, the work of single artists, or as extensions of existing museums, in one of three typological categories, a chapter for each: “The Museum as Sacred Space,” “The Museum as Entertainment,” and “The Museum as Environmental Art.” To help explain “sacred” museum space, she quotes from Carol Duncan’s book Civilizing Rituals (1955):

Just as images of saints were, by example, supposed to trigger in the initiated a quest for spiritual transcendence, so in the museum, art objects focus and organize the viewer’s attention, activating by their very form an inner spiritual or imaginative act. The museum setting, immaculately white and stripped of all distracting ornament, promotes this intense concentration.

She also quotes the German artist Georg Baselitz’s rejection of architects’ efforts to integrate the design of galleries with the kind of art to be exhibited, and his call for nonintrusive space: “high walls, few doors, no side windows, light from above, no partitions, no baseboards, no base molding, no paneling, no shiny floors and finally, no colors either.”

Newhouse contends that architects attempting to achieve such space today frequently fail or at best achieve mixed results. “Sacred museum space,” she argues, “originated in another era for a different kind of art from today’s: it is difficult to resurrect a style that belongs to the past.” Nevertheless, she admires Steven Holl’s almost completed Kiasma Museum for Contemporary Art in Helsinki, a building that aspires to be a sacred temple of art. Holl has designed the interiors to be silent and serene—to contrast effectively with boldly expressive art, or to be in the spirit of art that is calm.

Although she believes that “sacred space” has become with a few exceptions a thing of the past, the art museum as a place for play as well as pedagogy has long been with us:

To think of art in terms of entertainment is simply a return to the astonishment and delight associated with the first private Renaissance museums; a sensuous, thought-provoking discovery quite different from the dutiful didacticism of most large contemporary institutions where people often spend more time reading about the art than looking at it.

Newhouse favors the museum as entertainment just so long as the fun doesn’t get in the way of the art. Thus she unsparingly quotes the director of the Museum of Modern Art, Glenn Lowry, who “pictured the future of his venerable institution as a scene from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera: ‘a loud cacophonous environment in which fun is had by all.’” This is not the sort of entertainment Newhouse has in mind.

She also faults I. M. Pei & Partners for closing the Louvre’s former separate entrances to its wings and replacing them by the single point of access through the glass pyramid, connected to an underground circulation system lined by shops. “You don’t enter a palace through its basement or via a shopping mall,” she admonishes, but today, at the Louvre, you do.

Newhouse considers the J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles (1997), designed by Richard Meier & Partners, to be a modern-day Xanadu of entertainment, and it is. She predicts that this minicity, perched like an acropolis on a 110-acre site at the top of one of the Santa Monica foothills, will be visited as much for its marvelous views as for its art. The art museum itself is one of six buildings devoted to conservation, art education, electronic art information, grants and research, and the only one open to the public. It is an assortment of pavilions, beautifully proportioned inside and out, separated at the ground level by tree-filled courtyards and above by balconies, rooftop terraces, and staircases that overlook intricately composed Le Corbusian segments of the building as well as the surrounding hills.

There is much aesthetic pleasure at the Getty for those who admire the felicity of Meier’s variations on Le Corbusian modernism. The fun stops, however, in the galleries decorated by the New York-based French architect Thierry Despont, and in the garden assigned to the conceptual artist Robert Irwin. The museum trustees, perversely, invited Despont to devise rich and elaborate traditional rooms for the decorative arts galleries, as well as period wall fabrics for some of the fine arts galleries. “Fake containers,” Newhouse writes, “for real contents.” The trustees, backward-looking in their choice of Despont, descended into fatuous trendiness in their choice of Irwin, who created a garden that deliberately disrupts and violates Meier’s aesthetic. “Having committed itself initially to a classic Modern architect,” Newhouse writes, “the Getty Trust gradually allowed its commitment to erode. By imposing Despont, Meier’s Modernism was overshadowed by academic historicism. By bringing in Irwin, Meier’s orthogonal landscaping was confused by an intervention equally at odds with it.”

Newhouse brings her book to a close with an essay on the art museum as environmental art. In this category are works by Peter Eisenman, Wolf Prix, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Frank Gehry. Although each has his own vocabulary, taken together they are creating museum architecture which the author believes to be not only genuinely new but also the current standard. For Newhouse, Gehry is indisputably the leader of this latest avant-garde with his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1997). She finds the galleries to be “among the most evocative forms ever made.” In her judgment, much of the art selected for the inaugural exhibition— works by Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Beuys, and Jenny Holzer effectively holds its place, and strongly interacts with Gehry’s computer-generated curvilinear volumes.

Sol LeWitt, Daniel Buren, and Richard Serra, among others in the inaugural, created art in response to Gehry’s forms. Yet while Newhouse expects and hopes that the Bilbao Guggenheim and the other new architecture-dominated museums will become catalysts for new art, what of the artists who don’t wish to be inspired or controlled by the container? Or those who may resent the hubris of museum directors and architects who challenge them to dance to the tune of new architecture? Such artists prefer that architecture surround their art invisibly. May they prevail.

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