Museums beyond the glass pyramid
Star architects modernise classic exhibition spaces matching 21st-century demands
MúzeumCafé 14.
The Guggenheim and Hermitage in Las Vegas, refashioned by Rem Kolhaas produced a loss. The works were squeezed out from the large hall by performances of The Phantom of the Opera. Profound silence and solitude mostly characterised those medieval spaces regarded as the predecessors of today’s museums. The treasures created by both nature and humans, and accumulated in one-person spaces of thinking – mystical chambers, studiolos and monasteries – could be accessed only by the privileged: scholars, aristocrats and monarchs. The royal collection of the Louvre in Paris was planned to partially open from the beginning of the 1700s, then Louis XV put this into practice in 1750. Visitors were allowed to view a single room at weekends. The first state museum, the British Museum, opened with Sir Hans Sloane’s collection of 70,000 items in January 1759. Its barely 5,000 visitors a year quietly knocked on entry. At that time only the privileged could visit the royal collection of Spain’s Ferdinand VII, though that became the basis of today’s Prado. The privately founded Guggenheim Museum was established with business-type considerations in mind. After its central museum opened in New York in 1954, branches were set up all over the world, which involved transferring the accumulated stocks from the storerooms. By now museums have been built by the hundreds and their success increasingly depends on communication strategy, modern services and an emblematic building, rather than their own collections. Besides the fact that star architects’ designs and models are displayed in the most prominent museums like MoMA in New York, their impact on the property market can also be felt. House prices shot up near the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and following extension of the Denver Art Museum with gigantic geometric shapes designed by Daniel Libeskind local apartments overlooking the museum were selling at higher prices than those with a view of the Rockies on the opposite side. The American miracle, the Guggenheim phenomenon which displaces basic museological approaches, has created a cult. Architects and their designs have both become the superstars of public life. For example, the Tokyo Miho Museum by Ieoh Ming Pei, who also designed the Louvre pyramid, was named among 1997’s ten best designs by Time magazine. Last year Forbes magazine ranked the Iraqi Zaha Hadid as one of the world’s most influential women, ahead of the presidents of Finland and Ireland as well as the queen of Jordan. In 2008 Time listed the Austrian Hans Hollein among the 100 most influential men. After medieval cathedrals, Bauhaus residential blocks and the skyscrapers of the 1960s and 1970s, museum buildings have emerged into the foreground of prestige. Architects awarded the ‘architecture Nobel Prize’, the Pritzker Prize, such as James Stirling, Ieoh Ming Pei, Richard Meier, Hans Hollein, Frank O. Gehry, Tadao Ando, Raffael Moneo, Renzo Piano, Rem Kolhaas, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel, have had freedom to implement their visions to an extent previously unimaginable. The most recent museum expansion plan of the Bilbao daredevil Gehry, for the Art Gallery of Ontario in his home town of Toronto, was regarded as being reserved, which really meant as compared to his earlier work. Gehry designed a blue glass cube behind and above the red brick façade with tympanum and a spiral shape winding out, which echoes that of New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The French superstar Jean Nouvel extended Madrid’s Reina Sofia, itself converted from an 18th century monastery, with a modest rear part. Compared to such designs, Daniel Libeskind, when designing the extension of the Royal Ontario Museum in 2007, treated space in a shocking way. His masterpiece has become the city’s fourth most visited sight. The crystal entrance was named after Michael Lee-Chin in recognition of his considerable financial contribution. Professionals often cynically remark that donations for spectacular developments are a luxury for which investors are easy to find. Yet it is far more difficult to find charitable donors to pay for the sky-high utility bills resulting from expansion. The extension of the Military History Museum in Dresden was also designed by Libeskind and, similarly to the Royal Ontario Museum, a triangular wedge as a symbol of military aggression was cut into the original building. Libeskind also made the plans for expansion of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which exhibits the stages of Jewish history in a long, zig-zag extension. The most interesting and fine-looking extension of recent years is also Libeskind’s creation. He added new parts to the old building of Osnabrück’s Felix Nussbaum Museum. A painter of Jewish descent, Nussbaum, died in Auschwitz. Empty canvasses in a harassingly narrow corridor leading into the main part symbolise the works Nussbaum was unable to create. Exploring the meaningful spaces of the Nussbaum Museum, visitors can appreciate how the extension enterprise addressing the expectations of our age can become pure philosophy and art.