Content area
Full Text
If the museum boom of the 1980s and 1990s is over, you wouldn't know it. A staggering number of the museums built or enlarged in the past two decades are going through new expansions, some involving tear downs of not-so-old work: Renzo Piano is designing an addition to Richard Meier's High Museum, in Atlanta, completed in 1983; the Chicago Art Institute, where Hammond Beeby Babka designed a new wing in 1988, is having Piano do one as well; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond, had Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer design a wing in 1985, and now has hired the London-based American architect Rick Mather to come up with yet another. Last year Rem Koolhaas won a competition (now on hold) to redo the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which called for obliterating the existing structures, including Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer's expansion of 1986. And then there is New York City's Museum of Modern Art, expanded and remodeled by Cesar Pelli in 1984: Yoshio Taneguchi is demolishing most of Pelli's building for his new, mega-size one. Asia House, in Manhattan, which hired Edward Larrabee Barnes to design its museum in 1980, commissioned Bartholomew Voorsanger to redo much of it in 2002. And Voorsanger's own 1992 expansion of New York's Morgan Library will be torn down for a larger version by (again!) Renzo Piano.
What can we make of all this? In some cases, it could be (as until just yesterday) a flush economy. In other cases, it could be that clients (museum boards and building committees) don't know what they want and how to get it in the first place. Or perhaps it is the trap of time and fashion: About the moment the architect finishes his or her first phase, the project looks out-of-date in a very competitive museum world. But what do museums do now that the economy has soured and so many projects are in design development or working-drawing phases?
At the heart of all these questions is the issue of growth. In times of easy money, it is hard for a museum, basking in its popularity, to ask if it is better off not growing too much. The observation that the museum often depends on the intimacy of the relationship...