A lecture and signing for the launch of the book reviewed below will be held Tuesday April 15, 6:30 p.m., at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The book is exclusively available at the museum store and is being sold at a discount.
Ronnie Self's eminently readable new book of case studies, The Architecture of Art Museums: A Decade of Design 2000-2010, provides in-depth descriptions of 18 prominent museums opened in America (mostly) and Europe during the booming first decade of the twenty-first century. Laid out chronologically by date of opening---from Tadao Ando's Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art to Zaha Hadid's MAXXI in Rome---the works are authored by SANAA, Herzog & de Meuron, Renzo Piano, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Steven Holl, Shigeru Ban, etc.; i.e., the apex predators of the architectural world, working on what was then, and still may be, the sociocultural equivalent of the Greek temple, Renaissance palazzo, Baroque church, or early-Modern housing.
Self, an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Houston, worked for Renzo Piano for 12 years, and he brings that office's heightened common sense to his task. He lucidly dissects how each of these often complicated buildings works in its context, how it is perceived and moved through by visitors, how exhibitions can be hung given the architectural strategies (he is less clear about curation), how the buildings are structured and constructed, how mechanical and environmental systems operate, and how each is serviced. (His attention to loading docks is much appreciated.) Each entry is 2,000 to 3,000 words in length, with excellent architectural drawings, regularly including details of how natural illumination is controlled, and just enough photographs to judiciously describe the points made.
The need to publish more on the recent avalanche of well-known museum buildings would seem to be marginal, but the initial purpose of the book becomes rapidly clear. It's useful to have all that information in one place, a great resource for architects, curators, and educators. There will now never again be the need to ask studio students to do this sort of data gathering, at least for these buildings. Though one could describe the relationship between boulders in an avalanche, Self keeps the descriptions largely discrete, allowing the reader to make necessary connections while providing clear means to do so (in setting out, for example, the four primary means of conceiving exhibition space: room, gallery, loft, and hall).
MAXXI interior.
Data aside, the great pleasure of reading the book is Self's particular voice. Like a very intelligent coroner calmly reading post-mortem reports at an inquest, Self builds his cases by the slow and logical accumulation of facts. You are led in innocently: the facts amass without overt speculation on motives. Self thinks carefully, and his writing is both earnest and without cant. Occasional abrupt shifts between paragraphs and slightly stilted grammar heighten this sense of earnestness, and the book can actually be read aloud to satisfying end. There is, of course, no innocent data. The particular skill with which Self pieces together the various skeins of site, program, experience, structure, and architectural intent invariably allows him, somewhere near the end of each entry, to quietly slip in an often profoundly critical observation without it seeming to be the sort of qualitative commentary it actually is.
So, for example, late in describing Hadid's building in Rome, Self points out: "the MAXXI has reverted back to the very long gallery type (exemplified by the Grande Galerie at the Louvre for example) defined here by continuous parallel or curved walls. The ceiling fins also follow the same geometry. Visitors are pulled through the space and past the works. At the MAXXI the experience should be more akin to navigating the internet or the changing scenes of cinematography. Movement and discovery are, however, at the expense of repose, focus, and meditation." Or, in describing Piano's use of imported materials at the Nasher—despite the architect's rhetoric of location—Self notes that rather “than ‘place,’ the approach in this instance might speak more of the seductive pedigree of European luxury.” The text is filigreed with similar scalpel cuts.
Nasher Sculpture Center, Renzo Piano, 2003. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Having visited most of the buildings covered, I consistently agreed with Self's incisive, often extremely subtle observations. Self's criticism has an admirable sense of balance, and he gives each architect his or her due before noting the shortcomings. There is a consistent point of view woven through the book, but Self reigns in his criticism well before it reaches the king has no clothes level. This may follow from an observation Self gives early in the book that the "ideal space to show contemporary art, or most types of art for that matter, escapes consensus." Yet enough darkness is cast on several of the entries to suggest a standpoint, without that forming a theory.
Perhaps attaining theory is not a reasonable demand, nor the book's intent. The individual entries began as discrete articles Self wrote on new museums, mostly in America, for the French journal Archicréé. To round out the list of buildings for the book, several additional European museums were chosen, but the list is not holistic enough to set out the limits of the discourse. Not included from the same decade are, among others, Moneo's Beck building in Houston (2000), or his extension to the Prado (2008), Williams and Tsien's American Folk Art Museum (2001), Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum (2001), Machado and Silvetti's Getty Villa (2006), Adjaye's Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver (2007), Chipperfield's Neues Museum (2009), and Siza's Serralves Foundation (2009). Any case-study based discussion of the status of museum and the question of the exhibition of art cannot be seriously had without including the arguments presented by these and other buildings.
Denver Art Museum, Studio Daniel Libeskind, 2003. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Here is the thing I most admire about Self's writing: These chapters began as journal articles about individual buildings. A basic rule of journalism is: don't bury the lead. But Self buries the lead, again and again, with tremendous success. Though an agenda is quietly present, you do not sense Self has an axe to grind, seemingly leaving the interpretation to the now sensitized reader. This, if I were to venture a guess, might be the structure of Self's ideal museum. If I had a criticism to offer, it would be that, as Self admits, these articles are written from the point of view of an architect. Architects notoriously treat museum as a formal dilemma (of the four architects short-listed for the Beck, only Moneo actually asked to see the collection!). A spectacular companion piece to this excellent book would be a similar analysis by artists, whose voice is largely absent here.
This lack of artists' perspectives does not really come as a surprise. Between the opening of Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 1997 and the economic crash in 2009, the urban program of art museum was not primarily about the exhibition of art: think no further than Libeskind's Denver Art Museum, with its refusal to provide vertical walls. That recent architects can speak of their buildings as supplanting artworks—as Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au does in a notable quote in Self's book—points to an aggressive cultural transgression. Architects (and worse, writers about architecture) have made a lot of noise over the past 20 years about how their buildings borrow from the forms of the artists they admire—Judd, Serra, Heizer, De Maria, Turrell, et al—but little about how such body-snatching fundamentally devalues the exceptional originals.
The recognition of Ban's disaster relief work in this year's Pritzker might signal the end to that line, but I wouldn't count on it. When the Museum of Modern Art went on a global search for work similar to Ban's several years ago (for the exhibit Small Scale, Big Change) it could count the number of critical architects productively engaged on 10 fingers, plus one toe. Many of those architects were rewarded for the recognition with—you guessed it—museum commissions.
by David Heymann
The Architecture of Art Museums: A Decade of Design: 2000 – 2010 (written by Ronnie Self, Routledge, 2014, 208 pages, softcover).
Discounted and signed copies can be purchased only at the MFAH until mid-May when it’s released in the US at a price of $46.50.
