The Brooklyn Rail

In his latest book, Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space, the architectural critic and historian Julian Rose frames the design of museums today within the historical framework of architecture’s declining participation in broader social and political projects. Through the preface and introduction of conversations with sixteen prominent museum architects, the book argues that museums are the strongest building types for architectural invention and meaning today. With this work, Rose identifies that architecture is at its best when it is a practice guarded by the bourgeois needs of the cultural sphere and engaged in the production of space tied to the everyday realities of the public. Today, the type of architecture of the modernist period, with its promises of mobilizing the spatial forces of a brave new world of technology, urbanization, and social progress, is gone, stripped of utopia. With most of the architects interviewed in this book being born and trained in the modernist period, we see they struggle with the loss of an architecture that envisions transcending given structural conditions and new possibilities for society and culture. Rose identifies here where this architecture has gone: to the museum.

Rose’s pedigree is evident in this work. As a student of Hal Foster, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, and Yve-Alain Bois (who wrote the foreword), Rose comes from a group of art historians and critics, loosely organized around the academic journal October, that have continued the critical theory intellectual project of the Frankfurt School and the spatial turn in spatial theory of the seventies and eighties. This school of thought is concerned with understanding and critiquing how art and architecture express (formulate and meet) the logic of capitalist production. Focusing on spatiality throughout the book, and the repeated critique of iconicity and spectacle in service of contributing to the circulation of imagery for economic means, Rose emphasizes, as the October figures did, the importance of the lived bodily experience of art consumption in producing an engaged and critical public.

But where Rose differs from these figures is in having a more sober view of art and architecture’s limited capacity to enact serious political and social change. In this same way, he is of a younger generation. This generation does not have the memory of imagining a new world—one which has even a modest transformation of society away from capitalism, or a less extreme version of the one we are living through now. But this is the case for most of the architects in this book, who were born in the mid-century or earlier. They found their position within the discipline in the death of modernism, in its rejection, and in doing so, were still contending with its failures and hangovers, trying to reformulate them within a relativist, pluralistic, neoliberal landscape, one more concerned with identifying the other than in identifying a project.

Now, we are no longer responding to the moderns, we are no longer post-modern, but stuck in an ever-expanding present with no future. What, in this contemporary condition that Rose identifies, is there left for architecture to do? What meaning can we find in this context? These are the questions that Rose asks these architects, specifically about museums, as it is this building type that he identifies as having the best answers.

Rose explains that the core premise of the book is that museums, “rather than being symptomatic of the plight of architects today, … offer one of the few remaining opportunities for architects to realize the full potential of their calling.” In interviews with architects as prolific as Frank Gehry, Peter Zumthor, Elizabeth Diller, Jacques Herzog, and Kazuyo Sejima, Rose discusses projects that have presented paradigmatic shifts within the discipline of architecture. These are shifts in: the social function of public space, a dialectic relationship between new forms of art making and new architectural spaces for its display, technological innovation and its role in reconstituting how we experience art today, repatriation of stolen cultural objects reshaping international power relations in a post-colonial world, and an iconic formal architecture that revealed the potential for the circulation of image to be a major urban economic engine. These contributions to cities and the architectural discipline are possible, as Rose and these architects demonstrate, because these buildings cannot be “optimized,” meaning they are spaces designed by the desire to participate in the collective project of cultural production—and in the historical and social developments of the time—as opposed to the rationalized instrumental needs of space that is conceptualized and produced through the dominant structure of capitalist development. Homogenized abstract space is characterized by its detachment from the spontaneity of free social interaction and its reduction to a set of measurable, geometrical, and instrumental qualities. We can understand that the designs of these museums are driven by the architect’s spatial representation and framework for production of art because Rose directs his questions towards the influence and exposure these architects have with the art world. We see that their own lived experience informs the kinds of spaces they want to produce for the display and viewing of art, and the conditions in society they viewed as necessary to incorporate into their buildings.

With most buildings, architects inherent briefs, programs, and square footage optimized for the market or state needs. Here, instead, the architect has inherited the white cube. An empty space, a primordial space, a container ready to receive fragmentary contents, a medium into which disjointed things, people, and habitats might be introduced—incoherence disguised as coherence. These architects demonstrated their freedom to build off this space as much or as little as the artistic and cultural context of the time suggests. Here, we see authorship is strongest in the cultural sphere of architectural production.

Rose’s great contribution with this book is to demonstrate, through the career of prolific museum architects, that the introduction of neoliberalism in the 1970s entrenched the economic as the primary societal issue for politics. In turn, the social and cultural became consumed by the economic and became more autonomous. This is made evident in the present, where visual culture functions increasingly not only as a social system of narcissistic distinction and enforcement of class differences, but also as a cynical palliative of the universal condition of consumption and commodification. This is, as we can see in this book, partly because the post-war artistic efforts to challenge the commodity form of the art object failed to offer an alternative to capitalist reification and subsumption into the experience economy. Formerly radical site-specific, performance, participation, Land, and Pop art have now become darlings of the international blue-chip gallery system. Except for Elizabeth Diller’s Shed, the creation of these institutions are not driven by architects but large bodies of capitalist and state stakeholders.

It is finally understood that institutional spaces of culture have always commodified cultural objects, just as Yve-Alain Bois opens the foreword with two critiques of the inchoate condition of the modern museum as places that render artworks in the commodity form and decontextualize work from their cultural and material environments of creation. In this acceptance—or rather defeat—architecture as a cultural practice has become more autonomous, turning inward towards discourse and issues concerning its own terms. This produces a more authored architecture because there are no longer any definitive rules or universal guiding principles driven by larger political or moral ambitions.

When Rose explains that museums are exceptional types of buildings, he is not isolating them from the other buildings that shape our cities. It is worth stressing this point because what Rose is considering here by focusing on museums is in tracing the changing of course, not only in the history of art and architecture, but also in the history of modern society and its spaces.