Dia:Beacon, Hudson River Valley

Quadracci Pavilion, Milwaukee Art Museum

Of course, a number of high-profile success stories have emerged over the past decade. Best known among such experiments, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, constitutes a kind of miracle. A tired old industrial city in the least glamorous part of the Basque countryside, Bilbao was seriously underdeveloped as a tourist destination. In the pre-Guggenheim era, fewer than 50,000 tourists on average visited the relatively charmless city each year. As a result of the city-funded Frank Gehry masterpiece that serves as its home, the Guggenheim Bilbao assumed its place among the great culture-industry success stories of the our time, attracting more than 500,000 visitors annually since its doors opened in 1997. Widely acknowledged as one of the last century’s greatest architectural accomplishments, Gehry’s titanium-clad sculptural structure immediately made Bilbao a must-see on the new grand tour of Europe. A great architect producing his greatest building in a city of the right scale prepared to build upon the momentum of the "event," the Guggenheim Bilbao was a particular kind of miracle that will hopefully never again be duplicated.

For what the Guggenheim brought to Bilbao was not really an art museum, but a civic cultural attraction posing as an art museum. An art museum springs from the collective imagination of a community of scholars, collectors and artists, and should serve as a site for the contest of that community’s values and ideas—a spiritual and intellectual oasis. The Guggenheim Bilbao has no such mandate, no real connection to its community (other than economic), no local curatorial initiative (it only takes exhibitions sent to it from the Guggenheim in New York), and no relation to the particularly rich culture of the Basque region.

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.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (Click image to enlarge)

Of the five, only the Mori constitutes a new institution as well as a new building. Still, in each case, the architectural project and its ensuing space represent an organic response to the demands of the institution’s mission. Call it enlightened entrepreneurship, but each of these four museums will build not only its local economy, but also in scale to its ecological environment. As New Museum Director Lisa Phillips puts it, "[The New Museum] is more than just the building we will design, build and program. It is a community of committed men and women with power, financial capacity, and the desire to make a difference in as many ways as possible."

In our ongoing fascination with the economic impact of a new museum building, we seem to have neglected one other truism: Just as a house is not a home, a museum building is not a museum. A museum, to qualify, must first be an organic reflection of a community’s relationship to art, education and public service. After that requirement has been satisfied—and only then—can we begin to assess its viability as a tourist magnet. And if that need can be satisfied too, well then everyone will have won.

David Ross is the executive director of the Beacon Cultural Project and serves on the board of numerous arts organizations.