Cities around the world suddenly want a Bilbao museum of their very own. “We’ve had calls from China, from Brazil, from Belgium,” says Gehry. “These are well-meaning people that think, ‘Oh, good, we’ll get Gehry here and he’ll do a building.’ Then I ask them, ‘Where do you want to put it? Do you have a museum director? Do you have a collection?’ And all the way down.” It’s not just Gehry getting the calls. The phone lines have been crackling at the offices of a global roster of star architects from Italy to Japan, inviting them to compete to design palaces of culture in the hope that these buildings will define, if not a whole city, at least an institution.
So we may well see a sprouting of new–and new-looking–museums. Suddenly art museums will seem like the best generator of municipal growth (followed closely by sports stadiums). The end of the last century left a legacy of stately stone Beaux Arts buildings to every town that had a roomful of old masters to show off. In contrast, tomorrow’s museums won’t look like anything that came before. Radical in design, sticking out along staid Main Streets, they’ll be wrapped in space-age materials like titanium and be full of interactive exhibitions and art in the form of new media and installations.
In fact, the moment for such museums is already here. The Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati–an institution made famous nine years ago when the police busted the director for exhibiting the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe–has commissioned Zaha Hadid of London to design its new building on the busiest corner downtown. Hadid is re-vered by critics for her ideas, but few of her radical designs have actually been built, which seems to make her the perfect architect for a museum devoted to “art of the last 10 minutes,” as its director, Charles Demarais, describes it. Her scheme for Cincinnati–with sloping floors, irregular rooms and “layered spaces”–was praised last year in The New York Times, even though the $30 million building won’t open until 2002. Demarais credits Bilbao with helping his center raise money for the building. “Some of our donors who’ve made major contributions since the Guggenheim opened in Spain have told me they’ve done so because of that,” says the director. “It’s clear that people are excited about exciting architecture.”
The Milwaukee Museum of Art, too, is going for a splashy effect with a $63 million addition to the museum’s modern building on Lake Michigan. The Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava has designed a swooping, birdlike form that’s already become the logo on the museum’s stationery, even though it won’t open for two more years. “I thought people would think it was a crazy architectural solution, but they really got it,” says the museum’s director, Russell Bowman. “They began to talk about it as a new icon for the city, our Sydney Opera House, our St. Louis Arch.”
Other U.S. museums are also commissioning cool, nonestablishment international designers. Daniel Libeskind, architect of the zigzagging, zinc-covered Jewish Museum in Berlin, is creating a Jewish museum in San Francisco in an old power station. Elsewhere in San Francisco, plans are being drawn up to replace the old De Young Museum, damaged in the 1989 earthquake. It will be designed by the hot Swiss firm of Herzog - deMeuron, architects of the soon-to-open Tate Modern gallery in London.
And last summer Gehry himself won a competition for an addition to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Attaching a Gehry-esque melange of curves and angles to a neoclassical building will require the most creative juggling in the nation’s capital since Congress passed the balanced budget. The museum has been very open about the process of selecting a design, in the hope that the public will support it and the city approval process will go smoothly. “People know right away it’s Frank Gehry,” says the Corcoran’s director, David Levy. “It’s like Bilbao but is also very different.” Just the right formula for the new millennium.
