The museum of the Third Kind: in which the author envisions new directions for the art museum as audiences change, architecture evolves, institutions subdivide and electronic resources expand our capabilities and expectations

Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Douglas Davis

Today's museum-architecture-on-the-edge can indulge visual innovation as flamboyantly as in the past, while signaling new priorities. In this sense, the opening in spring 2004 of the "new" Brooklyn Museum (it no longer specifies "of art"), with its $63-million facelift, is virtually a pedagogical act, a declaration of the vast difference between our needs in this century as opposed to the last two, if not three. Driven by a conceptually demanding director, Arnold Lehman, and an equally demanding architect, James Polshek, the renovation is dedicated to what Polshek calls "the borough of refuge."

The Brooklyn job is the essence of deconstruction. The moment we emerge from the newly renovated Eastern Parkway-Brooklyn Museum subway stop, we see how much the focused Neo-Classicism of McKim, Mead and White, who first planned and began to build "the world's largest museum" in 1896 (they only completed one wing), has been gently but firmly reformed. Facing us is a half-cupola in glass, flooding the once-dark lobby in sunlight. Better, we're offered choices as to both entrance and viewing: up the wooden deck stairs we can go, tracing a semicircular path around the Beaux-Arts facade that once loomed here, ogling the museum's exhibitions from slits in that facade ... then back down again, if we wish, on the reverse side.

The words that come often to the mouths of both Polshek and Lehman--"transparency," "asymmetry," "interaction"--reflect explicit Third Kindism. When Polshek insists his inviting and humane tier of steps plus viewing decks is a "hemicycle" correcting the "frontality" of the revered McKim, Mead and White classic, he speaks for the larger spirit of the movement I'm beginning to describe.

Our current taste for complexity provokes a heightened appetite for shapes that defy modernist textbook norms. None of the forward-looking structures discussed here is simply modern, postmodern or even a hybrid of the two. Today, the lean, simple geometry of a modern classic, say Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building on Park Avenue, seems not only abstract, but unreal--a toy of the mind, cut off from what we see as truly real in our lives and work, which are increasingly dense, complicated, unpredictable.

As for the transformed MOMA in midtown--the reopening of which was this season's headline museum event--its final configuration took place at the hands of director Glenn Lowry, the curators of his famously headstrong departments and, of course, architect Yoshio Taniguchi. Ironically, many of us were misled by the radical signs of asymmetry, complexity and contradiction at MOMA Queens, the museum's temporary quarters--its wide-open galleries and ungainly clutch of marine plywood forms on the roof spelling out its logo. But radicality-in-reverse is the hallmark of the new $425-million, high-modernist MOMA, which is primarily a quantitative expansion of its earlier quarters, despite the surely well-intentioned interpretations of its furiously engaged makers. The galleries, as we now see them, are palatial and self-absorbed--so large they make Alfred Barr's original democratizing (if claustrophobic) drive to force the public into the equivalent of a middle-class living room space a lost, if not demolished, idea. The early, and provocative, desire of Lowry to weave departments into closer interaction with each other is overwhelmed now by stylistic neutrality and stupendous scale. The result, paradoxically, seems monumentally and quintessentially Second Kind. (9)