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| Arts |
Inartistic Revivals
David Ross
02/02/2004
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Yet in the wake of the press adulation for Gehry’s masterpiece, one could almost hear city planners around the world contemplating, then pressing for, how their own tired cities might be revived and, perhaps, even reinvented by similar acts of aesthetic legerdemain. Thomas Krens, the master dealmaker who championed the Guggenheim Bilbao, hoped to expand the Guggenheim franchise anywhere else that valued the empty success of the Bilbao model.
 | | Bellevue (Wash.) Art Museum |
For better and worse, Krens has transformed the manner in which museum professionals and their trustees regard their institutional attitudes toward growth. In fact, Krens himself continues to fuel this museum-building frenzy by pursuing similar projects in Brazil, Austria and anywhere a deal is dangled. What is most encouraging, however, is that the best new museum expansion concepts have been those that have evolved away from the Bilbao model. The Krensian entrepreneurial attitude, it seems, has matured and evolved, resulting in many new museum projects, each with the potential to not only add to its city’s cultural tourist draw, but unlike the Bilbao "miracle," to partake as well in transforming the cultural communities they serve.
In each instance, modestly scaled institutions with a fraction of the clout of major established collecting museums like the Guggenheim, have been willing and able to commission serious architecture and direct it toward the goal of building institutions with integrated programmatic visions that fully complement those of the architects. Three have already opened: the new Contemporary Art Center designed for Cincinnati by Iraqi-born, London-based Zaha Hadid; Dia:Beacon, a rehabilitation of a 250,000-square-foot, 80-year-old Hudson River Valley printing plant with design oversight by the California sculptor Robert Irwin; and the Mori Museum, designed for the top floors of the tallest building in Japan by the New York firm Gluckman Mayner Associates. Two such projects are still in the planning phase: the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, designed for the Fan Pier by New Yorkers Diller & Scofidio, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, designed for a site on the Bowery by the Tokyo firm SANAA. Each of these efforts has emerged as a result of financially enabling real-estate transactions, but more importantly, each has been situated in a receptive neighborhood specifically in need of revitalization.
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