Description

The comparison between artistic and religious experience as it became a conventional formula above all in the German Romantic movement,[1] and the conception of the museum as a pedagogic facility are the two poles of the museum concept[2] that have decisively marked the appearance of museum architecture all along. The duality of edification and education, which found expression in the museum buildings of the nineteenth century in a finely-grained hierarchy of architectural formulae for dignity, now characterises more than ever the different views of the relationship between that which is exhibited and the architecture that houses it. If the historical consciousness of the nineteenth century – and of the early twentieth century as well – required that works of art be presented in a stylistically appropriate architecture in chronological order – such as in the Bavarian National Museum in Munich – now the so-called ‘neutral’ case or envelope is considered the ideal, at least among museum experts (fig. 1). The ‘white museum’ first realized in 1950-51 by Franco Albini in the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa[3] reflects on one hand the post-war notions of a new beginning and, on the other hand, is a construction – seen as inimical to history – of the purist modernism that stages itself. However, the supposedly neutral envelope does not result in the oft-proclaimed ‘democratic’ proximity at all, but instead isolates the art works and in so doing, distances or alienates the observer.[4] As an aesthetic principle, the isolation is an achievement of the last hundred years and therefore anything but timeless, emphasizing the unique aura of the work of art and elevating it to a “zone of unquestioningness …, which is the secular correspondent of worship.”[5] As far as that is concerned, the neutrality of the white cube[6] is a stubborn myth aptly apostrophized as “pride of asceticism,”[7] which conceals a specific attitude to the function of art that cannot claim universal applicability at all. Rather, it raises the question as to whether in our own time – in which the real is increasingly superseded by a virtual world – in addition to the aura of the original work of art, the aura of the space of the museum too will become increasingly significant and anthropologically important, because it offers spatial experiences (fig. 2) that are becoming increasingly rare in view of the developments in media society.[8] Seen from this perspective, the controversy about whether architecture should serve art or art architecture turns out to be obsolete in the end – not least because in the transformation of culture by mass civilization, art, like architecture, has long since been subsumed by that event culture in which the museum is also part of the tourist industry and art too a form of entertainment.[9] In this connection, the polarity between edification and education, supplemented by the factor of the experiential character, broadens into a three-way relationship in which the museum – in addition to being an ‘aesthetic church’ dedicated to contemplation as well as a place of teaching and learning, in the end, as an ‘entertaining museum’ – also functions as a sort of art fair. The architectural conceptions of the museum, ranging from the elite treasure house (fig. 3), via the reduction to the functional container of a factory hall, to the ambitious work of art , are correspondingly varied. It is self-evident that this categorization is itself only a construct whose boundaries can hardly be sharply drawn in view of built reality, in particular because of the high value that the aesthetic criterion of originality was accorded in the twentieth century. Although the ambiguity of the concept of the museum on one hand and the stylistic variety of contemporary architecture on the other hand renders it difficult to attempt to discern something like a semantics of museum architecture, in view of the ambition common to almost all museum buildings, it appears justified.

Function and Symbol

In modern museum-building, the search for a symbolic architectural language characterizing the task of building a museum[10] led initially to the sawtooth roof construction, which, as a relatively conspicuous architectural characteristic, resolves one of the most important technical museum problems, at least for picture galleries, which is to say the right lighting – and at the same time, brings it into focus. Thus the sawtooth roof construction is implemented as a design feature by architects who are hardly comparable otherwise, such as Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus Archive in Berlin (fig. 4),[11] Gigon & Guyer’s Museum Liner in Appenzell (fig. 5),[12] or Hans Hollein‘s Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum in St. Pölten (fig. 6),[13] – even, in the last case, to purposely differentiate between the picture gallery and the natural history wing across from it, whose telescoped volumes appear almost zoomorphic.

While in these cases the choice of the sawtooth roof has primarily a functional justification, it is also used in Gustav Peichl’s small caricature museum in Krems[14] (fig. 7) as an architecture parlante to transform the façade into a wavy roof landscape, whose silhouette fits together with the pointed structural elements of the upper storey to suggest a clown’s mask – an unmistakable reference to the purpose of the building.[15] The fact that the implementation of anthropomorphic elements in architecture has a long history[16] does not change the semantic effect of this façade at all. Shanghai’s art museum appears in its design to be incomparably more lavish, but in its immediate architectural reference to the content of the museum, it is entirely comparable (fig. 8).[17] This museum’s exterior is oriented on one of China’s oldest vessels, the bronze ‘thing,’ several examples of which are contained in the precious collection of the museum, whose interior has a largely conventional design. In a similar way, the parabolic cupola in Friedrich Kiesler’s Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem has an illustrative character, in that it is supposed to be reminiscent of the cover of that vessel in which the Qumran scripture rolls that are now exhibited there survived the centuries. Yet such examples of direct architectural illustration – to which one could add the design of the Keramion in Frechen (fig. 9)[18] which is supposed to remind one of a potter’s wheel – remain isolated and can certainly not claim to express the meaning ‘museum’ clearly and in a universally valid fashion. The Evoluon technology museum in Eindhoven (fig. 10)[19] gives evidence of the ephemeral character of architectural connotations of forms adopted from the domain of technology in particular. Opened in 1966, the museum is supposed to represent a flying saucer. At first it was a magnet for the public, but with the victorious advent of virtual worlds, it lost its futuristic attraction and was closed in 1989, since then serving primarily as a conference centre. It is true that the design of a rotating body such as Oscar Niemeyer’s museum of contemporary art, opened in 1996 in Niterói in Brazil[20] is able to evoke fascination as always, but it is here chosen primarily because of its unusual location on a cliff jutting out over the ocean, and thus has more to do with a concern with the surroundings than with illustrative symbolism.

The design of the Vulcania museum, opened in 2002 in the Auvergne in France, with which Hans Hollein attempted to represent the subject of volcanism through architecture, is inspired by the unusual landscape to the same degree that it is marked by archetypical symbolism. In dialectic correspondence to a deep artificial crater, a truncated cone rises 28 meters into the air; it is split in half, with the two halves telescoped against each other, its interior panelled with golden titanium screens: it is a paraphrase of the volcanic cones in the surrounding area, just as it symbolizes the eruptive force of red-hot magma (fig. 11).[21]

It is clear that such a graphic illustrative form relatively independent of function but deeply symbolic re­mains the exception. Let us therefore turn back once again to the the sawtooth roof design, whose form, doubtless primarily functionally determined, can also be used to adapt to the topographic context, as the Museum Ludwig complex at the foot of Cologne Cathedral shows. It is above all in some smaller interior rooms that are almost literally crushed by the form of these sawteeth, equally-dimensioned throughout, where it becomes evident to what a large extent the formative influence of the sawtooth roof structure reacts primarily to the dominant architecture of the Gothic cathedral, and not to functional considerations. Thus we must remember that a motif like the sawtooth roof – resulting out of the function of optimum lighting – is only relatively seldom used in a form-determining way, and that non-functional limitations such as taking account of the surroundings further relativise its semantic connotation to the museum concept. For the most part, the sawtooth roof – de facto quite often used – is concealed, as it is, for example, in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K21) building in Düsseldorf, whose elegant curved façade of granite polished as smooth as glass suggests refinement and value, and with which this motif derived from factory architecture does not appear compatible.

In addition to the right lighting, visitor circulation is a central problem for museums. Although the quality of the routes and spatial connections, extremely important for conditioning visitors’ attitudes, by its very nature manifests itself only in a limited fashion in architectural motifs that can be classified as a language and interpreted as signs, it is precisely here that it becomes evident that the symbolic language of architectural postmodernism, admittedly able to generate semantic categories in a special way, can also be developed without using motifs that are associated with certain historical connotations.

The access at the entrance area very often proves to be a place where heightened design aspirations aim well beyond simply fulfilling functional requirements. Thus the enormous dramatic stairway in the Ludwig Museum (fig. 12) presents an unexpected contrast to the modesty of the entrance. In the end, however, the almost baroque gesture of this cascade of steps is unproductive, because it opens into a room that feels much too low-ceilinged under the omnipresent sawtooth roof. This would indicate that a solution that is formally unsatisfactory cannot produce convincing iconological content either, yet nonetheless this content is recognizable and proves itself to be entirely acceptable.

In Aldo Rossi’s Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht (fig. 13), a stairway placed exactly in the axis of the symmetric, three-winged building extends across the whole depth of the space. It leads into a domed room, whose purist coldness presents a peculiar contrast to the metal-clad exterior of this most striking part of the building. This stairway cannot deny its origin in palace architecture; there is a hint of it in the ground plan of the Bonnefantenmuseum as well and one is thereby reminded of one of the roots of museum architecture per se. It is above all the communicative component of the museum – which is set against the moment of meditative concentration in the almost bodiless space under the cupola – that is manifested in the stairway, interrupted by several landings and in which something of the ceremonial character of baroque stairways becomes perceptible. While in Maastricht this antagonism of mutual encounter and immersion is designed as a sequence of route and goal, in the concentrated architecture of the Kunstmuseum in Bonn it is astoundingly summarized in a central rotunda which is nothing more than a stairwell from which all views and routes depart – a motif that in Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne eventually broadens out into an enormous, funnel-shaped stairway which, in a single gesture, links the three main levels of the museum and with its two wedges opens into a multi-storey rotunda dominated by an enormous domed skylight.

In the combination of rotunda plus stairway, we encounter a motif that is used remarkably often in museum architecture. Its careful staging usually goes far beyond the necessity of simply fulfilling functional requirements; it consists in the use of certain forms aiming at a statement about the content, forms to which particular meanings have accrued because of particular historical constellations.[22] Karl Friedrich Schinkel, for whom ‘the architectural ideal’ was only fully attained when “a building fulfills its purpose entirely, in all its parts and as a whole, intellectually and physically,”[23] called the rotunda vaulted over by a coffered dome in the centre of his Altes Museum in Berlin (fig. 14) a “shrine in which the most precious objects will be conserved.”[24] Without doubt, Schinkel is alluding here to the Pantheon in Rome and in so doing, following the classical tradition of evoking the character of a sanctuary. This is just as well known as the fact that the rotunda of the Museo Pio-Clementino in the Vatican (fig. 15) and many museum designs by French architects during the Revolutionary era (fig. 16) have also played their part in securing this form its place in the vocabulary of architecture as a museum characteristic.

This link to the past, repeatedly taken up in the new museum architecture, becomes very clear in the architecture of Mario Botta, who, in the centre of his Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco places a rotunda in the form of a cylinder with a slanting cap – the same form that he also (and certainly not by chance) used for a sacred building built at the same time, Evry Cathedral near Paris.[25] Botta again chose the motif of a central rotunda for the Museum of Rovereto, opened in 2002 (fig. 17).[26] A dome of steel and glass with a round roof opening, it is not only reminiscent of the Pantheon model, but also matches its absolute dimensions to a large extent. The crucial difference from the unmistakably quoted model consists – despite the different styles and materials – in Botta’s rotunda being a publicly accessible external space, a piazza, from which the interior of the museum is accessed.

In this way, a further level of meaning is added to the link between museum and sanctuary, which has become a topos since Schinkel, namely the linking of the museum with public space. This means nothing other than the architectural concretization of the ambiguity of the term museum outlined at the beginning, which oscillates between edification and entertainment, contemplation and communication.

If we look at Aldo Rossi’s Bonnefantenmuseum once again under this aspect, then the fact that its stairway is bounded by raw brick walls (fig. 18) proves to be meaningful and informative. For the time being, it can be understood as a clear allusion to the grand, long stairway in unplastered brickwork that Hans Döllgast inserted into Munich’s Alte Pinakothek (fig. 19)[27] in place of Klenze’s loggia, which was destroyed during the Second World War – a homage to a double incunabulum as it were, of museum architecture. In addition, however, because the brickwork is used nowhere else in the interior, the walls of the staircase become exterior walls so to speak. These exterior walls now give the stairway running between them the character of a public route – somewhat like the one to be found in the magnificent Mont de Bueren complex in Liège, only 30 kilometres from Maastricht (fig. 20).

We encounter this phenomenon of a public route bounded by exterior walls inside a building in a series of other museums, for example, in the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, through which runs an angled ‘museum passage,’ which, like a ravine bridged over several times and with a variety of views of all the levels, forms the backbone and the access route of the museum bursting forth from its external bounds. The street character of the Hanover Museum’s passage is clearly represented both by the materials and by the very sophisticated detail design (fig. 21). A wide, bridged-over ramp, which enables views into almost all the areas of the buildings, informs the interior of the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, completed in 1979 (fig. 22)[28] and brings its access system into focus. Finally, in the spindle-formed convolutions of the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, whose ramps appear to be permeable in all directions in different ways and with differing intensity (fig. 23), the routing goes far beyond simply the fulfilment of functional requirements and in itself, represents to a certain extent the concept of this museum.

The staging of the routing often leads to a picture puzzle interplay between inside and outside that brings the communicative aspect directly into view, as it does, for example, in Frankfurt’s Museum für Kunsthandwerk and in the stairway in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London. This interpenetration of exterior and interior space (figs. 24 and 25) shows that here, architecture wants to be more than an elementary envelope. It thematizes itself and in so doing, becomes the object of observation. In that it frequently does not content itself with an abstract representation of its basic possibilities, however, but has recourse to certain motifs and examples from its own history, it not only emphasizes its historical dimension, but also its participation in modern art, which is characterized not least by its self-referentiality.

In exemplary clarity, but at the same time with playful lightness too, all these aspects are united in James Stirling’s Neue Stuttgarter Staatsgalerie, which is considered to be the incunabulum of new museum architecture, probably not unjustifiably. Stirling has designed the generally accessible connection required by the property developer between the two streets running along the sides of the museum as an exciting route through a dynamic architectural landscape, which leads eventually through a central rotunda and in so doing, makes it into an external space (fig. 26). In contrast to Schinkel’s Altes Museum, whose ground plan disposition (fig. 27) is intentionally quoted here as one of the prototypes of this architectural endeavour, Stirling’s rotunda is designed not as a dome-vaulted ‘Pantheon of the arts,’ but in ironic reversal of this neoclassicist formula for pathos, as a hollow cylinder open to the sky, whose walls are overgrown with vegetation like those of a ruin (fig. 28). The fact that the spiral-form route leading along the high wall of the rotunda additionally quotes the twisting exhibition ramp in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York (and with this allusion also reverses inside and outside) is further proof of the intentional ambiguity of this architecture, which in any case can claim to express the meaning ‘museum’ and to continue in the tradition that refers to the sanctuary too. Perhaps it is due not only to Stirling’s memorable knotting together of these lines of tradition, but also to the incredible response from the media that accompanied the erection of the Neue Stuttgarter Staatsgalerie, that the motif of a central rotunda, and also the staging of the circulation inevitably awakens these associations.

The semantic field ‘sanctuary’ that evokes the museum concept linked to the ‘temple of the muses’ does not limit itself at all, however, to the motif of the rotunda, however it may be quoted or alienated, but is also linked to the temple metaphor,[29] which is also based on Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin, although its façade lacks one of the temple’s essential traits, the front gable. Perhaps it is precisely this combination of typological difference and aesthetic affinity to the classical temple that makes the Schinkelian motif into the progenitor of such varied architectural adaptations of this formula of dignity as the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (fig. 29), the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska (fig. 30),[30] and the Carré d’Art in Nîmes (fig. 31).

The Museum as City

Can the motifs we have considered be grouped together under a common denominator? With the aid of the examples shown, it was recognizable that the phenomena marking the different museum positions, i.e. of walking, of lingering, of communication, and of concentration, have found their architectural expression in the motif of a central rotunda – however modified – and in the theme of more or less lavishly designed visitor circulation. In both cases, one could allude to models, which, because of the historical distance and particular constellations, not only had come to convey the aforementioned meanings, but with which we have also learnt to associate the concept of the museum.

However, the overarching context of this motif is nothing other than the city.[31] The most exposed expression of architectural environmental design, the city is one of the oldest utopias of mankind apart from Paradise, the imagined happy place of primeval times and the end of time in the form of a garden with a fence around it. As the focus of social life-processes, the city is the venue for social and political developments and controversies, economic processes and cultural stimulation. From the outset, the characteristic features of its architecture have been the walled enclosure, the street, the block of houses, the market, the shrine, and the citadel.

Until well into the nineteenth century, the city wall was one of its most striking distinguishing features. Its dual function – protection against attacks from outside and demarcation of the system of order enclosed by it – corresponds to a double origin, one technical and practical, one ritual. The latter means the conception of the city as temenos, as a clearly defined, inviolable district.[32] After what we have said, it is not in the least surprising that we also encounter the motif of the city wall in the museum buildings of recent decades as a metaphor for the city – again, of course, in partially fragmented reflections. Thus the apparently genuine part of a city wall in the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach (fig. 32) turns out in the end to be the continuation of that brickwork that Hollein describes as “rice terraces” (fig. 33), which still belongs as much to nature as to architecture. In this way, the demarcating function of the city wall is thrown into question there just as it is in the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, where the protecting wall at the back of the museum (fig. 34) turns into a hill on the entrance side that can be climbed by means of steps set into it and whose surface structure, transgressing the boundaries of the building, continues into the interior of the museum. In both cases, the antagonism fundamental to the museum – between conserving (objects) and welcoming (visitors) – is brought to expression and simultaneously cancelled out by the motif of the city wall modified like this, its metaphoric significance remaining entirely recognizable. Primarily justified by the topographical situation, but as far as its effect is concerned, also implying the aforementioned aspects, a high wall shields the Kunstmuseum in Bonn from the outside, but through carefully selected openings allows the interior to be experienced as a form suggestive of the city. The Deutsches Architekturmuseum on the Museumsufer in Frankfurt once more brings into view not only the city wall motif in a different form, but also simultaneously thematises the idea of the congruence between building and city, through the ‘house in the house’ that develops out of a four-columned space, which as the primeval hut or canopy is of both archetypical and religious significance. This building reduced to its simplest form is enveloped by the cored villa, which is not only supported by the differently-coloured plinth, but is also circumscribed, as if by a city wall. A cult metaphor and a city metaphor as the image of the museum simultaneously conserving and presenting the works of art give access to each other and embrace each other.

In the first architectural treatise of the modern era, Leon Battista Alberti already demanded that the house be a small city. “For that reason, in building it, one will have to take into account almost everything that relates to the construction of a city.”[33] Hans Hollein’s variously composed building complex, the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach appears to be an implementation of this idea and can be interpreted as an abbreviation of a city and its building types.[34] The interrelations of its individual parts are no more rigidly fixed than those of the buildings of the Acropolis in Athens, in the history of modern architecture repeatedly praised as being of model character. (fig. 35) The comparison between the Nike temple on the Acropolis and the temple-like entrance pavilion, also pushed right up against the cliff edge is immediately evident. At the same time, though, the conversion of the Tempietto into a simple entrance – the museum as the real shrine is in the interior of the mountain – signalizes a degree of reflecting distancing that is no less ironic than Stirling’s transforming the rotunda by making it a ruinous exterior space. In comparison with Aldo Rossi’s museum in Maastricht, in which one reaches the sanctuary in the usual hierarchy via a stairway leading upwards, Hollein’s reversal of this arrangement and order of precedence does not mean that the semantic fields sketched out are removed, but as in every mannerism, their evidence is presupposed. Hollein underlines the relative importance of the extremely condensed access system in the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, which culminates in a turning point situated at the heart of the museum, by making it not only usable but also exposing it to view again and again, even exhibiting it demonstratively. Richard Meier, who was given the unique opportunity to design an art museum, the Getty Center, high over Santa Monica as a modern acropolis (fig. 36),[35] uses the street motif in the Museum für Kunsthandwerk in Frankfurt in an entirely different form, but undoubtedly with metaphoric intention too; its carefully executed axial cross evokes not only the structure of towns and field camps based on the right-angled intersection of two main streets, a structure introduced by the Roman agrimensors and their successors in the Middle Ages and still surviving in the term [city] quarter, but also goes all the way back to ritual beginnings when the augurs divided the horizon by marking the four cardinal directions.[36]

The network of streets and paths first acquired the structure that we experience as urban through having squares as their goal and point of departure. As markets, squares were always the focus of social and economic activities. Since antiquity people have gathered there and it is there that we usually find particularly important buildings. Surrounded by the clear and yet sophisticatedly arranged volumes of the museum spaces and the semi-circular classical theatre, the centre of the Museo d’Arte contemporanea in Prato[37] forms an irregularly shaped piazza, which creates an urban effect precisely through this irregularity. Ieoh Ming Pei’s light-flooded atrium crisscrossed by catwalks and bridges, around which he grouped the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington also creates the impression of an urban meeting point. Covering almost as much area as the exhibition rooms around it and being the place to which all the routes in the museum repeatedly return, this space brings to expression communicative qualities as a significant – and genuinely urban – aspect of today’s museum’s concept.

The structure of the museum wing designed by Pei, although geometrically severe and justified from the perspective of urban planning, but because of its triangular module not congruent with the model of a classical city, alerts us to the fact that the majority of the motifs discussed until now correspond to the ideal of a pre-industrial city, and in that regard represent a projection. It is not by chance that it is above all Postmodernism that likes to avail itself of this projection. If ‘the museum as city’ metaphor is to attain more far-reaching validity, one has to ask whether the interpenetration, the density and the transgression of the boundaries of the modern city, in which the order contained and constituted by the city walls is cancelled out and reversed, have also manifested themselves in today’s museum architecture. One will have to answer this question affirmatively, as one will be able to recognize traits of the modern city in the complicated interlocking access system of the Kunsthal in Rotterdam just as in the broken-open structure of deconstructivist architectures (fig. 37). Yet the affinities between the modern museum and the city lie less on the level of figuration than in their fundamental reaction to the mechanisms of today’s consumer society, which threatens to lead if not to the “de-auratizing of Van Gogh,” then certainly to an “auratization of McDonald’s.”[38] One does not have to go as far as to consider the goal of visiting a museum to be the arrival at the museum shop (after the spiritual experience of the untouchable and unpurchasable in the museum, the museum shop leads back again like a sluice into the customary consumer world)[39] to concede that economic necessity has long since become unavoidably prevalent in the domain of art, and the museum as well. This finds very varied expression in museum architecture; the so-called “dark museum” was already developed in the sixties, first in the Völkerkunde Museum in Berlin-Dahlem,[40] in whose interior the architecture takes a back seat to a presentation of the exhibits oriented on the department store’s display of its wares. An excellent example for this is the Römisch-Germanische Museum in Cologne,[41] which does not celebrate individual pieces as a rule, but instead is counting quite consciously on massing its exhibition objects in shelves or on pedestal islands (fig. 38). There, if the architecture comes to the fore at all, it does so as it would on the sales floors of department stores. Precisely the other way round, the showplace of economic transactions is effectively staged architecturally in the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie: the ticket window and the museum shop are located in a rotunda – this time vaulted over by a glass dome – whose semantic spectrum thereby once again comes into allusive use, and not without sarcasm. And Alessandro Mendini, the colourful figure who created the design for the spectacular museum in Groningen,[42] has again and again thematized a culture of the trivial and declared the museum the “department store of knowledge,”[43] a “supermarket with a collection of objects that are capable of generating human pleasure and craving, even if it is through false functionality, by suggestion, by appealing to the desire to play, neo-kitsch or fashion.” Thus the tower of the museum, covered with golden laminate, (fig. 39) evokes a fantasy world – somewhere between the Kaaba and Dagobert Duck’s treasure house of gold – that the philosopher Jean Baudrillard sees already realized in Disneyland, a social microcosm exalted almost religiously as the “imaginative exchange” of the city.[44]

Cities today define themselves not least through their museums. In 1961, the American cultural historian Lewis Mumford had already described the museum as the “metropole’s most typical institution” because it represents complexity and variety in concentrated form, but has also taken over many negative characteristics of today’s big cities: “the indiscriminate craving for acquisition, the tendency to exaggerated expansion and disorganization, and the habit of measuring its success by the number of people who enter it.”[45] Movement, dynamism, and flexibility are some of the positive characteristics of the city that can also be described as characteristics of the new museum architecture. Two museum buildings, whose appearance can hardly be more different, both of which are, however, considered to be milestones of contemporary museum architecture, might substantiate my necessarily fragmentary concluding remarks with which I have tried to hint at the spectrum of architectural possibilities of expression in museum building, a spectrum that since the Second World War has been not only stylistic, but also semantically broad – and for this reason, usually ambiguous. On one hand, we have the Centre Pompidou in Paris, opened in 1977, which the clients wanted to “mark our century” as a cultural centre in the form of an architectural and urban complex, but which was understood by its architects, in contrast, as an “event venue with information and entertainment.” On the other hand, two decades later, we have the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which has become the new emblem of the Basque metropole (fig. 40), and which is extolled as “one of the most complex formal creations of our time.”[46]

As the most important access ways circumnavigating all the floors, caterpillar-like tubular escalators mark the technoid Centre Pompidou, conceived as “flexible container and dynamic communication machine made of prefabricated parts,” and decisively determine not only its appearance (fig. 41), but also bring into clear focus the myth of movement and mobility that has become a leitmotif of the modern age. The bright colours of the exposed supply lines – blue ventilation shafts, green water pipes, yellow electrical installations – display elementary structural functions in pithy symbolism. It is not without reason that this building – in which not only are the boundaries between technology and architectural form suspended, but also the plaza in front of the building is allowed to become its foyer through the reversal of inside and outside – has become the epitome of a conception of culture provocatively transgressing the boundaries, representing as it does a counterweight to the design of the museum as temple. In contrast, the museum building in Bilbao, covered with titanium plates and executed with the help of a computer program borrowed from aircraft construction, appears to be a built sculpture, its effect emphasized even more by effective mirroring in the water. The architect says: “I have always thought ‘city’ in sculptural, three-dimensional categories … The city itself is a sculpture that one can form and in which certain relationships can be created.”

47

Coosje van Bruggen, Frank O. Gehry. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997, 72.

In actual fact, Gehry’s building is able to focus its heterogeneous surroundings apparently without difficulty, without giving up its aesthetic distance. Its biomorphic forms generate associations that range from an enormous animal to a ship, and in any case, embody movement, dynamic force, and growth – principles that characterize the essence of the urban. However, the enormously increased rhetoric and the concomitant loss of semantic clarity also allow one to interpret the complexity of this building and its illusionary effects – hardly less plausibly – as an expression of the omnipresent dominance of capital, that measures aesthetic sensation by its economic success.

48

upw Nagel, “Die Basken fressen mir aus der Hand…,” in: Der Architekt 9/1998, 508.

This too belongs to the reality of the urban – and thereby to the essence of today’s museum architecture.

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Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.