Outside The White Box

Did the last decade's building boom truly transform the museum?

Joseph Giovannini -- Interior Design, 8/1/2009 12:00:00 AM

Spain's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, with Frank O. Gehry & Associates's vertical forms conducting natural light to galleries on all levels. Photography: David Heald/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

With billowing forms stretching several photogenic blocks, Bilbao changed the game in museum design. But the dirty little secret about Frank O. Gehry & Associates's masterpiece is that the museum that was so radically new on the exterior is surprisingly conventional inside. Past the lobby, intended to evoke Frank Lloyd Wright's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum rotunda, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao offers only a few galleries that deviate significantly from the white cube that has been standard since the Museum of Modern Art opened in New York in 1939. At the Spanish museum, Frank Gehry ironically took MoMA's side in the long-running interiors standoff between a cool, rational, Newtonian world and the warmer, more subjective universe of Wright, where the interior acts as an agent provocateur stretching artistic precedent.

What was new about Gehry's interior was that the free-form shapes outside were designed as chimneys of light to illuminate galleries two and three stories down. Furthermore, his powerful exterior accompanies the visitor inside as an afterimage, conditioning the eye to mystify even the most conventional of galleries. The exterior's impact on the interior is not formal but psychological.

Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral ramp for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum under construction in New York in 1958. Photography: William H. Short/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

If Gehry opted not to emulate Wright, other architects in the last decade did challenge the white cube. At an extension to the Denver Art Museum, Studio Daniel Libeskind worked with Davis Partnership Architects to express the exterior's fractal geometries inside, where a monumental staircase alerts visitors that they are ascending into a special realm. Previously, Daniel Libeskind designed the Felix Nussbaum Haus museum in Osnabrück, Germany, to showcase the work of an artist hiding from the Nazis. A poet of spatial subjectivity, Libeskind re-created a claustrophobic setting to evoke the attic where Nussbaum painted. At his Jüdisches Museum in Berlin, Libeskind evoked the Holocaust with shadowy dream-state interiors and a haunting void that pierces the angular forms.

Zaha Hadid's Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati also eschews loftlike neutrality, with the art displayed equally, in favor of what she calls a "catalog" of spaces varied in dimension, proportion, and tone. Zaha Hadid Architects is one of the few firms over the last decade to develop Corbusier's promenade architecturale, which leads visitors through an interior by provoking their curiosity. A vertiginous zigzag staircase serves the Cincinnati galleries. At MAXXI, her upcoming contemporary-arts center in Rome, she designed a more horizontal museum, but a ramped promenade still leads through the galleries via surprising turns and overlooks. She positions art and viewer in unexpected relationships, creating an engaging, interactive environment.


The Cor-Ten steel Snake by Richard Serra in the Guggenheim Bilbao. Photography: Roland Halbe/Contemporary Arts Center

Wolf Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky of Coop Himmelb(l)au were really the first architects in their generation to break out of the museum box by differentiating space: open versus closed, light versus dark, etc. At the Groninger Museum in Holland, years before the museum boom truly took off, the architects angled walls and built overlooks to diversify viewing angles and even proposed swinging, leaning triptychs to support paintings. If the triptychs had been realized, they would have positioned paintings off the walls, in the space of the viewer—who would have walked around and bent over them, "owning" them through acts of participation. At Ohio's Akron Art Museum, 13 years later, Coop Himmelb(l)au's spatial ambitions were confined to the entry, where a prismatic pavilion of sloping glass surfaces and a heroic flight of stairs precede the conventionally rectilinear galleries that house the collection. The administration asked for the white cube, but the entry sequence conditions the mind's eye, like the building exterior does in Bilbao.

The number of museums that aim to cultivate subjectivity is dwarfed by the number that continue to subscribe to the neutrality of the white cube. In one particularly ironic example, New York's old Huntington Hartford Museum—originally intended as a critique of MoMA's aesthetic—has been remodelled by Brad Cloepfil's Allied Works Architecture to become the white-cube Museum of Arts and Design. Given a choice, MAD also voted MoMA.


The Denver Art Museum's main stair, where Studio Daniel Libeskind's controversial leaning walls were allowed to remain. Photography: Jeff Wells/Denver Art Museum

There is nevertheless an art to the white cube, and some are more successful than others. At its best, the closed form can shape and hold attention and focus. The secret lies in visual stillness, the suppression of such pesky necessities as exit signs, electrical outlets, thermostats, and doorknobs. Firms that have beautifully mastered this task include Taniguchi and Associates—more at Japanese museums than with the expansion of MoMA. At the Brooklyn Museum, Arata Isozaki & Associates proved itself another Zen master in a collaboration with James Stewart Polshek and Partners. When scale, proportion, and light are so controlled, the eye and mind stay within a space brought to life by the glow of hidden or very discreet light fixtures. The advent of miniaturized lighting has helped to still the white cube, its simplicity being especially susceptible to disturbance by mishandled detail.

Renzo Piano Building Workshop has been the fallback architecture firm for quiet, handsome, centrist modernism. Designs are always civilized and generous, and Renzo Piano is a master of light, having perfected ceilings with multiple filters that transform daylight into an even, ambient glow. Art thrives in the luminous, buoyant spaces. Unlike Gehry, though, Piano doesn't deal spatially with the section, so it's only the top floors that benefit. His most successful projects are one-story: the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection in Houston and the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli atop Fiat's former Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy.

 
The steel staircase in the atrium of Zaha Hadid's Cincinnati museum. Photography: Helene Binet; A computer rendering of her MAXXI contemporary-arts center, slated to open in Rome next year. Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects

The inherent flaw of a multistory white-cube building is that the cube restricts interaction vertically—and to a degree horizontally—and this in turn restricts curatorial continuity. Wright's spiral ramp at the Guggenheim handles the issue of vertical circulation, effectively creating a one-story museum, but few architects dealing with the cube have solved the problem of how to connect levels. At SANAA's New Museum of Contemporary Art a few miles downtown, the boxes that compose the striking cubic massing on the exterior keep the three stacked galleries separate, locked in a stiffly conventional organization. Still, each cube offers a pristine environment fed by natural light.

A major reason for the small number of designs that attempt to rethink the white cube is activist curatorial resistance to those that have. Right before Bilbao opened, curators straightened out one of the only curved galleries that expressed Gehry's exterior shapes. Curators in Denver almost immediately ironed out the angles of Libeskind's leaning walls rather than inventing another way of hanging art to respond to them. An architect cannot successfully design a museum without developing an attitude on how to display art, but no theory has emerged to persuasively displace the cube. It remains a durable approach and, for now, the default position.


A Judy Chicago installation, The Dinner Party, at New York's Brooklyn Museum, renovated by Arata Isozaki & Associates and James Stewart Polshek and Partners. Photography: Richard Barns/Esto