Marble Palaces, Temples of Art: Art Museums, Architecture, and American Culture, 1890-1930. - Brief Article - Review - book reviews

Art in America, Dec, 1999 by Franz Schulze

This approach, Newhouse argues, evolved into the treatment of works of art as autonomous esthetic entities, particularly in the early days of modern art ("by definition self-contained and self-referential"). As a consequence, the museum in its modernist, ahistorical guise--a series of "white cube" interiors--grew ever more abstract and noncontextual until "instead of evoking the church's role in life the museum turned instead to an association with death: the museum as mausoleum." That cul-de-sac is the point of departure for the cultural ferment, and the wide-ranging architectural study, that follows.

In the 1970s, Newhouse declares, a new breed of directors and curators led the effort to open up the museum, to give it new meaning relevant to the present age, and to commission architects to produce a wider assortment of forms proportionate to the ever-growing assortment of museum types. In the spirit of this enterprise, Newhouse devotes a few beautifully illustrated pages each to scores of building projects from the last several decades. Collectively, these profiles constitute the bulk of her text.

The variety of forms and types is dizzying. A multitude of modernist, postmodernist and deconstructivist styles parade before the reader, but Newhouse sees architectural modes per se as less important than the distinctive purposes of the museums: their motives, their planning, their organizational structures and, hardly least, their relationship to the audiences and the society they serve. In that sense, the book is a model of the postformalist history and criticism that has become commonplace today. Newhouse writes, for example, of museums designed for (or by) individual artists--from one as standardly modernist as the Brancusi studio in Paris, by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, to one as vast and complex as the Chinati Foundation of Mafia, Tex., designed by the late sculptor Donald Judd to house his work and that of friends.

Here, as throughout the text, architectural style seems less significant than the author's functional classifications, each of which rifles a chapter. "The Museum as Entertainment" has as its classic example Paris's Centre Pompidou, by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Newhouse tellingly quotes the Pompidou's first director, Pontus Hulten, as saying that museums are "not about explaining but dreaming, excitement." Several recent realizations of "The Museum as Sacred Space" have, in the author's view, given new meaning to that rather shopworn idea. She cites the compelling reverential silence and serenity of the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, by Steven Holl Architects. "The Museum as Environmental Art," Newhouse explains, fosters a symbiotic relationship between works, events and the spaces they occupy. One prime instance is the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, by Eisenman Architects with Trott and Beam.

A consummate expression of the "environmental" concept, and the museum that earns the author's most nearly unqualified endorsement (to no one's surprise, given the rave reviews that have greeted it), is Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Newhouse is enthralled by the logic and scale of this building's 450-foot-long main gallery, where immense contemporary works seem ideally contained in and wedded to that space and no other.