Art or Architecture?

A few weeks ago, as I stood at the Getty Museum on a hilltop overlooking Los Angeles enjoying southern California's temperate breeze and ...

A few weeks ago, as I stood at the Getty Museum on a hilltop overlooking Los Angeles enjoying southern California8217;s temperate breeze and the site8217;s spectacular mountain, city and ocean vistas, I realised that art museums abroad have started adopting a new approach to the exhibition of painting and sculpture. The idea of sacred museum space is obsolete and pleasure is supplanting pedagogy.

Nowhere is this better experienced than at the Richard Meier-designed, one-billion-dollar J Paul Getty Museum. Here there is as much entertainment as enlightenment and this is a place as much for relaxation as for revelation. From the moment you arrive at the car park and await the tram to transport you to to uphill museum you get the sense of a theme park. On arrival, you feel as though transported to a modern day Zanadu with luxuriant gardens, fountains and pools, sun-drenched exhibition spaces, covered outdoor walkways, gourmet restaurants and terrace cafes with incredible views. It is estimated that every year 1.5 million visitors will spend at least half a day at the Getty and it is my belief that a significant percentage of these will have come not as much for the art, as for the overall experience.

In the past museums have always been identified by their collections. The Louvre is the Mona Lisa and the Museum of Modern Art is Demoiselles d8217;Avignon. The new museums however are being identified by their dominant architecture. Rem Koolhaas8217;s Rotterdam Kunsthal, Frank Gerby8217;s Bilbao Guggenheim, Richard Meier8217;s Getty Museum and Mario Botta8217;s San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are pointing the way for the museums of the 21st century. Today8217;s museums have many more functions to perform and a greater range of art that they have to contain. This has led to a new rational in their design and it has also changed the dynamics between art and architecture, forever. Also it has naturally sparked off discussion and debate Should the architecture be an active or passive container for the art? A background or foreground for the museum8217;s contents?

Gone is the didactic approach to art, the isolation of objects in pristine while artificially-lit rooms. Today8217;s explosion of art forms such as site-specific installations, conceptual, video and performance art necessitates a different kind of space, different from the one in which paint on canvas and traditional sculpture were shown. Today8217;s experience of seeing original art in uniquely designed museums by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Richard Meier and Frank Gehry guarantees that art will no longer be seen in quot;calm surroundingsquot; and that visitors can playfully experience any object and it8217;s history instead of passively observing it. There will be nothing pared down or subtle anymore about a museum8217;s presence in a city.

In the US, 600 museums have opened in the last 30 years. My guess is that many more art museums will be created worldwide and will become institutions that will enjoy a proliferation of facilities unequalled at any other time in history. In 1967, Fahlstrom, a Swedish painter, envisioned the ideal art museum as a pleasure house with theatres, discos, meditation grottos, gardens, restaurants, hotels and swimming pools. I may not agree with this, but I do believe that contemporary art forms will dictate new concepts for museum design and that one of the most signiicant developments of this century is the museum that is as important architecturally as it is for the art that it contains.