Why museum expansion is the drug architects just can’t quit

There have been periods during my career as an architecture critic when it seemed the job consisted primarily of traveling to review extensions to American art museums. Atlanta. San Diego. New York. Chicago. Denver. Boston. Minneapolis. San Francisco. Toledo. Miami. Seattle. Houston. Akron. Chicago again. Denver again. San Francisco again. (Partial list!) An alarming number of these new wings were designed by Renzo Piano Building  Workshop, a firm that made its name with a pair of exquisite gallery buildings, Houston’s Menil Collection (1987) and the Beyeler Foundation (2000) in Basel, Switzerland, and now has nearly three dozen museums to its credit, including three separate projects on the same side of a single block: On Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, between Fairfax and Curson, there are the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (2008) and the Resnick Pavilion (2010), both designed for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (2021) next door.

Over time I came to see this parade of openings as emblematic of deeply misplaced priorities in contemporary architectural practice and museum leadership, to say nothing of architecture criticism. An arm’s race emerged in which the directors and trustees of seemingly every American art institution decided that physical expansion, be it a new wing or a satellite in a smallish city on the come-up, should be their most pressing priority, often at the expense of improving relationships with local communities, diversifying their curatorial ranks (or simply paying their employees a better wage), or fine-tuning their collections.

It was rare, though, for any of us involved to meaningfully question this state of affairs, which accelerated dramatically after the runaway success of Frank Gehry’s 1997 branch of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. When a decade later the Barnes Foundation announced an all-star short list of architects it was considering for an ill-advised move to Center City Philadelphia, trading its charmingly idiosyncratic Paul Cret–designed building in suburban Merion for a new building twelve times (!) its size, I finally threw up my hands and wrote a kind of protest essay, hoping against hope that architects would find the backbone to begin rebuffing some of the endless entreaties from museum boards and their search consultants. (The headline for that piece: “Right Design for the Barnes? None.”) After all, I argued, the most satisfying experiences looking at art can often be found in the very buildings that museum administrators tend to write off as severely limited in size or (especially) amenity.

The essay had, as you might guess, zero success in convincing American museums that they might be better served by appreciating, and taking better care of, the buildings and gallery space they already had, nor in persuading architects to be more circumspect about these commissions. The Barnes Foundation plowed ahead and chose Tod Williams and Billie Tsien to design its new home, a 2012 building whose mammoth scale overwhelms its generally fine detailing. (It is a cutting irony of the museum-expansion era that Williams and Tsien saw their odd and compelling towerlet for the American Folk Art Museum demolished, only two years after the new Barnes made its debut, to make way for an enlarged Museum of Modern Art along West 53rd Street.) I was back on a plane to see another gleaming museum wing in a matter of weeks, if not days.

Julian Rose, who interviewed many of the field’s most prominent museum architects for his new book, “Building Culture,” sees these trends from a different vantage. Rose, who conducted the earliest of these conversations while working as an editor at Artforum in the 2010s and is now completing a PhD in architectural history at Princeton, argues that museum commissions “offer one of the few remaining opportunities for architects to realize the full potential of their calling.” He suggests that while architects today are on the whole “narrow specialists” whose work is “largely alienated from the physical fabric of everyday life,” the museum stands as “an almost miraculous exception” to these conditions. This despite more than a century’s worth of critique of the museum as an institution, at least in the West, that keeps itself at arm’s length from day-to-day reality, for better and worse, while operating as the place artworks go not to live but to die.

“Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association,” as Adorno put it.

In his detailed introduction, Rose flirts with the critical register, taking aim at fat targets including a “turbocharged donor class,” which increasingly sets museological priorities as surely as curators do, and the proliferation of high-end art fairs. (He memorably describes the latter as “the Procrustean bed through which any cultural practice—all manner of images, objects, and ideas—must pass in order to achieve viability as ‘contemporary art.’”) Yet while he concedes the point that many museums have become “beholden to capitalist mantras like grow or die,” he never questions this expansionist logic at any length; after all, it is the same logic responsible for generating many of the buildings under consideration in his book. The Barnes saga goes unmentioned, as do the most useful lessons we might draw from it.

Throughout, Rose positions himself less as a historian or critic than as an unusually sophisticated analyst of the state of the museum-building business, generally supportive of arts institutions and their supersized ambitions. He wraps up his introduction by mixing the familiar idea of the museum as cultural incubator with a sort of McKinseyan call to arms: “At its best, the art museum is a space in which both artists and architects can push their work to reverberate with many possible futures, where new collective and cultural forms can take root. This book is envisioned as something like a manual for all those who wish to understand these opportunities, and perhaps to seize them.”

According to Rose, art museums today “effectively enjoy a monopoly on aura”—he means the Walter Benjamin, rather than TikTok, version—“offering direct physical encounters with authenticity in ways that almost no other platforms or institutions can.”

Can aura be analyzed? Broken down into its constituent parts? Made to hold still for critical dissection? After finishing Rose’s book I’m not sure, but I will say that he is a superb interviewer, highly informed on the long and troubled history of museum-making, an architectural specialty still struggling, at least in the West, to shake off its colonial origins. (“On a fundamental level,” he observes at one point, “the museum is a machine for deracination.”) He has a good sense of when to let a conversation flow or even meander and when to step in to ask for clarification or more details. (This may be another way of saying that these discussions are skillfully edited, by Rose or his editors at Princeton Architectural Press.) His list of interviewees is well considered if rarely surprising. Renzo Piano is on it, naturally, as are other prominent figures, including Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, Peter Zumthor, Annabelle Selldorf, Jacques Herzog, Kazuyo Sejima, and Denise Scott Brown. Shohei Shigematsu of OMA, whose addition to the New Museum on the Bowery is set to open later this year, makes an appearance, as does the LA-based Kulapat Yantrasast, who was mentored by Tadao Ando before founding WHY Architecture and whose Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum debuted in May to generally strong notices.

Landscape remains a neglected feature of museum architecture, an oversight made up for here, if only briefly, by the appearance of Walter Hood. Hood details his work on the de Young Museum in San Francisco (a 2005 collaboration with Herzog and his partner, Pierre de Meuron); the Oakland Museum of California (2021), where he extended a famous if rather hidden series of gardens by Dan Kiley atop a building by Kevin Roche; and the International African American Museum (2023) in Charleston, South Carolina, where a landscape by Hood, marking the location of Gadsden’s Wharf, the arrival spot for nearly half of the enslaved population brought to this country from Africa, slides under a raised block by Henry N. Cobb.

Liu Yichun provides an overview of contemporary museum-building in Shanghai and other Chinese cities, charting the ways that headlong urban growth has raised the professional status of architects in his country. “I’m not sure if this will continue in the coming years,” he tells Rose, “but because Chinese architects have [gained] so much experience in the recent transformation of the urban environment, their voices are highly respected.” How different this state of affairs is from the culture I encountered in China when I began traveling there in the early aughts, watching as Chinese leaders decided that in order to make a splash with the 2008 Beijing Olympics they would need to rely almost entirely on high-profile architects from Europe and the United States. (When the design teams did include prominent Chinese members—think of Ai Weiwei’s role alongside Herzog and de Meuron on the “bird’s nest” National Stadium—they were often expected, explicitly if not patronizingly, to Sinicize the architecture.) And how different from current conditions in this country, where even prominent architects are increasingly shut out of consequential discussions about the future of US cities.

In his introduction, Rose explains at some length his decision to include an interview with David Adjaye in the book, despite accusations of sexual misconduct and assault from three women, which were first reported by the Financial Times in 2023 and which Adjaye has denied: “Even as these accusations are extremely serious and have prompted important conversations about power and exploitation in the architectural profession, Adjaye’s built work … has already altered the course of museum design in the twenty-first century.” I find that claim overstated, though the strength of Adjaye’s design for the Princeton University Art Museum is likely to catapult him back into the architectural spotlight, for better or worse, when it opens in October.

I wish Rose had talked with his subjects in depth about clients and patronage: about the Mellons, de Menils, Gettys, Fricks, and Broads of the world and how their ambitions have supported or diverged from the goals of the institutions where they’ve parked—or whitewashed, as the case may be—their fortunes. I wish he’d featured interviews with architectural pairs (or trios) in addition to one-on-one conversations, as a way of acknowledging the range of ways that firms collaborate and dole out (or withhold) credit. Instead, we get Scott Brown without Robert Venturi (who, of course, died in 2018), Herzog without de Meuron, Liz Diller without Ric Scofidio (who died in March) or Charles Renfro, and Sejima without Ryue Nishizawa. (The other ways I’d tweak his list of architects are fairly modest: I might have added Allied Works’ Brad Cloepfil, whose 2011 Clyfford Still Museum in Denver is a small masterpiece, and, to represent a younger generation, Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu of SO-IL, now at work on a new museum building for Williams College, and Lina Ghotmeh. SO-IL and Ghotmeh were included in András Szántó’s Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects, published in 2022.) And I wish Rose had pushed back in certain interviews more forcefully; there’s really no reason to leave unchallenged boasts like the one Piano makes when he claims that each of his firm’s thirty-three museums, rather than relying on a certain repeatable design logic that is catnip to museum boards, “tells a different story.”

My favorite of the interviews—and I would not have predicted this going in—is with the British architect David Chipperfield. Unlike most of his peers, he is willing to challenge Rose’s larger thesis about the singular appeal of the museum as architectural commission. Chipperfield suggests that museum jobs are little more than a shiny lure for architects, given the pressing needs, ecological, social, and otherwise, in so many other areas of design practice and daily life. To begin with, he says, museum architecture almost automatically seeks “to attract tourists and increase visitor numbers, but we’re starting to realize—slightly too late—that tourism is ruining our cities.”

Chipperfield urges his colleagues to seek out other kinds of work, even if it means giving up plum museum commissions, “because that’s where the challenges are. I mean, you can’t live on museums. You need good housing, you need good schools, you need good infrastructure. And that’s where we as architects need to be looking.” He also throws some entertaining shade at Piano and Norman Foster, calling them the personification of “the pink-shirted high-tech vanguardist,” as opposed to the “bow-tied modernist” common at midcentury, before really twisting the knife: “They had both spent time in the States in the sixties, and I would say that they were both tremendously excited by corporate America.”

Richard Gluckman, a New York architect known for his minimal, even austere gallery designs, makes a deeply felt and somewhat off-brand argument against the White Cube philosophy, long out of fashion in any case, that museum architecture should operate as mere neutral container. “Good spaces need texture and scale and light, natural and artificial, to create a subtle context that relates to the visitor as much as the art,” Gluckman says. “There are always decisions to be made about what should come forward and what should recede.”

This becomes the book’s most significant running theme, with several of the architects taking issue with the tired trope of a fundamental binary in museum design, the choice between an expressionistic, virtuosic approach that competes with artworks on the one hand and a pliant, quiet one that capitulates to them on the other. In general, Rose chooses—wisely, I think—to leave out figures who operate at either pole. Daniel Libeskind is not here to defend extreme virtuosity, as exemplified most disastrously in his 2006 addition to the Denver Art Museum, just as Yoshio Taniguchi is not around to stand up for abstemious restraint—although Rose does, in his conversation with Zumthor, paraphrase what Taniguchi reportedly told his clients at the Museum of Modern Art: “Raise a lot of money, and I’ll give you great architecture. Raise even more money, and I’ll make the architecture disappear.”

This back-and-forth provides a tidy summary of the interests, and the limitations, of the book as a whole. Rose is content for the most part to stay inside the gallery, to explore with the selected architects their relationships with artists and their opinions on fine distinctions related to the hanging, lighting, and viewing of works of art; and this he does consistently well. He is less interested in how the contemporary museum presents itself to the outside world, which is to say how vulnerable or armored it chooses to be in its exterior architecture, how populist or exclusive, and in how these buildings navigate urban and political challenges alongside practical or curatorial ones. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this posture is analogous to familiar, reactionary defenses of architecture’s autonomy—Rose isn’t calling for a museum architecture sealed off from the world at large—but it did prompt me to wonder how broadly, exactly, he defines the “physical fabric of everyday life.” And it certainly leaves the book vulnerable to being overtaken by events. I read Rose’s interviews as the Trump administration was forcing out the longtime director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet; ordering the Smithsonian to reject funding for exhibitions that “divide Americans based on race”; and adding signage in national parks asking visitors to flag “any signs or other information that are negative about past or living Americans.” It is no exaggeration to say that the museum as Rose and his interviewees define it will struggle to survive under these conditions, at least in this country, or that those “opportunities” he encourages architects to “seize” may already be dwindling. Gather ye aura while ye may.

Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space by Julian Rose. Princeton Architectural Press, 368 pp., $35.

This essay is published in collaboration with the New York Review of Architecture, a remarkable publication to which you should subscribe, if you haven’t already.

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