Art Museums of the Future

As the British curator Charles Saumarez Smith (2006) convincely describes, the exhibition function is the essence of a museum and its reason to be, and art-related other activities are practical extensions of that. But there are growing pressures to integrate earlier unknown and external phenomena to art museum’s agenda, and especially digitalisation, commercialisation and civic activism ever more to become part of the nature of museums. This has often taken place with negative consequences. We may ask, what would be a beneficial combination of art, digitality and commerce for future art museums??

We need to think first what art – and the development of our culture –?would benefit and start to plan a museum only after that in order not to lose the essential function that?museums have in the art scene. However, there could be a possibility for new kinds of commercial, technological and cultural activities that can support better exhibitions, better understanding and better development of art. For example, digital and commercial means are basically able to lower elitist tresholds to common accessibility.?

The art historian John Walsh describes, how in the end, what visitors most want from art museums is to have access to works of art in order to change themselves, to alter their experience of the world, to sharpen and heighten their sensibilities to it, to make it come alive anew for them, so they can walk away at a different angle to the world (”Pictures, Tears, Lights, and Seats”, in Cuno 2004). How could the art museums’ ”extra-art” activities and its physical essence support this aim? In the following, there is a presentation of five concepts which could strengthen the art museum’s core mission, but simultaneously support its cultural relevance. There are also examples of museum buildings related to these concepts.

The following discusses existing and possible new concepts for progressive art museums and spatial examples related to these concepts. The reason for the need of changes in the design principles of art museums is that their context has changed. Whereas the dominant industries of the 19th and 20th centuries depended on materials and manufacturing, science and technology; the prominent industries of the 21st century seem to depend increasingly on the generation of knowledge through creativity and innovation, as Charles Laundry analyses (2000). Art museums have a great role as accumulators and generators of creativity (and preconditions for innovation) in this progress.?

A museum is, therefore more than a plain space for its collections. A museum is not only its exhibitions, but also its other events and its physical appearance has a big role in its impact. It is more than common that modern art museums have not only exhibition spaces, but also shops, seminar rooms, auditoriums, public pedagogic workshop spaces and libraries with both tangible and digital material.?

An art museum also has economic relevance. During the recent decades, there has appeared an enormous amount of new art museums and the extensions of existing ones, and they have contributed to the development of local economise. Sadly, very often, these are based on either conventional strategic and operational concepts or standard architectural solutions. Rarely, ambitious museum concepts meet progressive architecture. It is common that museums have extensive collections and forward-looking public programmes, but too often their architecture remains conventional. It is as if one should choose between social progressiveness and architectural radicality.?

It seems that especially university-affiliated art museums have ambition in redefining the art museum through new kinds of activities, such as public debates, profilic speaks, publication series, visiting artist programmes and pedagogic events for children. However, very often, the architectural counterpart to this novelty of activities is missing.?

As Pine and Gilmore (1999) define, museums create memorable experiences, which are considered often more valuable than tangible goods and in this sense they are part of experience economy.?It is not only the material architecture, but also room programming and the spatial organisation of contemporary art museums, which is an essential, but overlooked part of the museum experience – a?link between museum’s strategy and its spaces.?

1. Co-creation museums for the responsiveness between people

Image: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York (Antoine Predock, 2000). Photo by Saratoga Convention & Tourism Bureau.?

The Tang Museum is more than just a display of art in the sense that is is also an educational community centre, which has a striking architectural character that emphasises the museum as a hub and agora for the community and its development. The purpose of this museum, as it defines it by itself, is to awaken the community to the richness and diversity of the human experience through the medium of art. Critical to this end are direct experiential opportunities for the affiliated university’s students to participate in integral aspects of museum practice. The museum’s galleries and collection storages are used as teaching spaces, and they have the principle that artworks can and should be used to advance knowledge across the disciplines. As the image above shows, Tang Museum is landscaped to become sort of accessible crossroads. Even the museum's lift serves as an exhibition space, with an ongoing installation art called ”Elevator Music”. A multipurpose event space, serves as a venue for receptions, readings, musical events, film screenings, family activities on weekends, and other Tang and Skidmore events.

Related to the role of an art museum as a community centre, Weil (2002) scrutinises many essential viewpoints that challenge the planning and design of art museums. Bsed on that, we could ask for example, how the community's ongoing and/or emerging needs in all their dimensions – physical, psychological, economic, and social – might potentially be served by the museum's very particular competencies? In what ways might an art museum help the community to achieve or maintain social stability? In what ways might it energise and release the imaginative power of its individual citizens? Can it serve as a site for strengthening family and/or other personal ties? Can it trigger the desire of individuals for further education or training, inspire them toward proficiency in the creative arts or the sciences? The Tang Museum is an attempt to this direction.

In addition to the communal experience of art, also its production can be communal. Nowadays, art is not always produced in exclusion. Individual, unique and extraordinary art can be produced in a collaborative manner as well. For the architecture of an art museum, this co-development does not necessarily mean un-programmed spaces (read: empty ”shoebox” type neutral halls for changing activities) though, as Tang Museum shows. A museum, whose organisation and image is actually diverse, as Tang Museum, a sort of collage – inspires and urges different communities to participate in polyphony. They can suggest their own ideas and experiments in the manner of co-development.?Unconventional architecture might be essential, in order to trigger sort of ”co-critical” practice – analytical and questioning discussion together. This could mean for example events, where art professionals, academia and museum visitors engage in discussion and speculation, and enhance creative acts. Eventually, the co-creation of art increases understanding between different people and disciplines. How could diversified architecture support this?

2. Towards an interactivity between objects

Image: Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island, USA. Photo by AA.?

Established in 1877 as part of a vibrant creative community, the RISD Museum displays works of art representing diverse cultures from ancient times to the present. RISD Museum’s 34 US million Chace Center (in the image) was built on a parking lot in 2008 as an addition. It serves as the main entrance to the museum and includes an auditorium, a retail shop, and exhibition and classroom spaces. Close to RISD Museum, there is the RISD Nature Lab and for RISD students, it would be impossible to think about these two institutions apart from each other. They both – complementing each other –?serve the same function for the students of creative fields –?to inspire and support trajectories for new art and design.??

RISD Museum’s collection currently contains more than 100,000 works of art and design dating from ancient times to today including paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, costume and textiles, and furniture from all over the world. Together with the extensive collections of RISD’s Nature Lab, this type of a wide collection of sources can well ”enrich” our understanding of the present” and create ”instructions” and ”interpretations”, as Hans Ulrich Obrist sees the task of contemporary art in general (2007). Creative combinations of historical and new objects, as well as artistic and scientific objects, can support new classifications and interpretations, where the?meaningful juxtaposition of interrelated, unfamiliar material with familiar, increases the understanding of the unclear.

3. Future-orientation

Image: University of Michigan Museum of Art UMMA (Brad Cloepfil and Allied Works, 2009). Photo by Creative Commons, Michael Barera 2015. ?

UMMA has an ambitious concept as an art museum, but rather conventional architecture, spatial organisation and room programme. UMMA aspires to show?how an art museum can be a change agent –?opening eyes, educating in a new manner, civilizing bravely, enlightening and sophisticating with ambition. UMMA is ”the cultural heart” of the university. The museum intends to ”bring communities together” and ”enable compelling encounters” with art that ”ignites creativity and forges connections” across diverse disciplines, geographies, and cultures. The expansion of the museum in 2009 has enabled to triple the exhibition area, add classrooms, an auditorium, and a variety of gathering spaces. Simultaneously, in front of the museum, there?is created a vital ”cultural” town square. However, it was disappointing to see how the museum’s spaces and its architectural presence are not really synchronised with this ambitious concept.?UMMA is a remarkable meeting place especially for visitors and locals, but in addition to the art programmes, the museum building itself could be courageous –?giving example. We could argue that a future-oriented art museum should be able to offer creative ”instructions” and interpretations for the experience of art. These aims are how the eminent curator Hans Ulrich Obrist describes ideal art exhibitions (2007), in order to make possible soundings to futures as a collective inquiry. Art can establish new chronologies with the help of extraordinary work (Birnbaum 2005) and skilful spatial plans can help attaining that when it tunes the people to a proper horizon of expectations, or transforms them mentally, as important art does.

At best, a museum as a probe or catalyst to the future. It has collections and exhibitions, which inspire the creation of the new. A museum buiding could be about things, which don’t exist yet – ideas, thought, possibilities for future – imagination. Not only artists, but also visitors could be given the possibility to create their own speculative ”realities” (à la Birnbaum 2005). Could the museum building help the audience to get means to experience, understand and discuss new realities? A neutral spatial box as a gallery does not do that.

4. Ambiguity

Image: Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai (OMA 2017), which occupies a historical villa. Photo by AA.?

The playful ambiguity of recognisable cultural categories is evident nowadays. Museums increasingly remind of other places –?stores, conference centres and restaurants –?and many upscale stores and restaurants have become to remind of art museums in their appearance. For example Prada Rong Zhai store in Shanghai (designed by OMA) appears more like a museum, where one experiences art than a place to buy things. The beautiful rooms of the villa display carefully placed single items of fashion, but one cannot take them along. The customer –?or visitor –?selects and makes a mail order in order to get the purchase. This emphasis on display and collection –?the ”museumification” of a store – emphasises?sophisticated image and reputation of an institution.?

How can then museums maintain their specificity, when commercial corporations imitate them? Where should art museums develop into, in order to maintain a hygienic or protective distance to shops? Does it matter, if the logic of museums spreads elsewhere? Could art museum architecture intentionally play with the mixing of different interpretational categories? Could an art museum remind not only a factory (the loft museums are common nowadays), but an office building, a school, or a shopping centre? How the adoption of a different building type could be made in a cultivated manner, without disturbing the autonomy of art and the experience of a visitor?

Image: Helsinki Art Museum HAM store by helsinkizürich architects (2009). Photo by Joonas Ahlava.

Many museums have disrupted their artistic credibility by their own low-quality brand stores. Whileas commercial shops sometimes display physical objects in a museum-like manner, museum stores remind usually worst kind of odds-and-ends stores. In order to avoid this, helsinkizürich’s museum store at HAM (image) aimed to overcome the gap between art and bric-a-brac by introducing a museum store as a conceptual art object.?

Another phenomenon, in addition to commercialisation, that has changed the traditional visitor experience to art museums is digitalisation. Many museums have adopted digital ways of presenting material, but these have not been as popular as physical objects yet (Smith 2006). The audience seems to have a need to encounter physical objects and not digital reproductions of them or such digital content, which they can experience anywhere. Perhaps museums could learn from digital art about how to present educational and narrative digital material? In order not to lose the original intention of art museums –?to display excellent art in its actual presence –?we need to develop sophisticated ways for combining artistic, commercial, physical and digital material??

Antti Ahlava – Fredrik Lindberg – Kivi Sotamaa: ”Kissing Helsinki”, Guggenheim Helsinki, competition entry (2014). This was the only Finnish entry that received any prize in the biggest architecture competition ever organised.?

The ”Kissing Helsinki” group’s Guggenheim Helsinki design was based on a redefinition of the building type of an art museum. It featured extended public access and spaces for different degrees of publicness and a redefinition of the relationship between ”the audience” and ”the museum”, where the central atrium courtyard of the museum becomes a place, where citizens can make artworks and the most promising would be displayed in the museum. The flow of people is directed through the museum and in front of the building there is a square for urban activism and pop-up activities.?

Creative room programming and spatial organisation, and following them, hybrid building types, is the key to combining the artistic, commercial, private and public requirements and possibilities together. For example, Kissing Helsinki’s in Guggenheim Helsinki competition was very much based on new type of spatial organisation. This is an elemental part of architectural design, but often overlooked, when room programmes and design of the spatial envelope draws the attention. Could there be suitable new models of spatial organisation to support future art museums? ?

5. Locality

Image: Michigan State University Broad Art Museum (Zaha Hadid 2012). Photo by Wikimedia Creative Commons (DJ, 1997).?

MSU Broad Art Museum has a compelling, sculptural building mass and exciting facades, which, in a fabulous manner, elude simple understanding of the geometry. However, the room programme, the spatial organisation and the experience of encountering art in the museum are quite conventional, even if threre could have been a special emphasis on the linkage to its progressive art pedagogy. The striking architectural presence and Zaha Hadid’s architecture’s brand value can attract?new visitors to the museum and to help to turn it into an international attraction. The museum cost 28 million US dollars and has been expected to bring app. 5 M USD to the city per year by affluent culture tourists (calculated by Anderson Economic Group). This shows the economic impact of art museums to regions à la Guggenheim Bilbao. Anyway, simultaneously this project has been partially a lost opportunity in advancing radical ways to display art. The physical building envelope is progressive and radical, but the relationship between activities and interior spaces remain conventional. In addition, the building’s connection to locality is non-existent. Basically, this museum could be anywhere, it is not embedded in its site (geography, local urban culture and people flows) as for example Kissing Helsinki’s Guggenheim Museum is.?

As Hardt and Negri (2000) convincingly argue, globalisation is the competition between local differences. This can be seen in relation to art museums as well. Local peculiarities can better create meaningful context for museum artefacts than standardised or reproduced mass museums (Smith 2006). Museums can help to recognise local talent and extraordinariness as well. They can also catalyse local development and create meaningful combinations of old and new (Landry 2000).

We need to support the essentials of the museums –?what attracts people to art, what lays at the heart of experience when?going to art museums. Not all change is good, but a better understanding of the relationsghips between art museums and society could help creating even more meaningful and comprehensive experiences in museums, where the museum building is deep and meaningful contemporary art as well.?

Sources

Charles Saumarez Smith (2006): The Future of the Museum. In Macdonald, S.: Companion to Museum Studies. Malden USA, Oxford UK, Victoria Canada, Blackwell 2006.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Futures, Cities (2007). In Journal of Visual Culture [https://vcu.sagepub.com ] SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) Vol 6(3): 359–364 [1470-4129(200712)6:3]10.1177/1470412907084517

Birnbaum, D. (2005) Chronology. New York: Lucas & Sternberg.

Cuno, J. (ed.) (2004) Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hardt, M – Negri, A (2000) Empire. Harvard UP.

Landry, C. (2000) The Creative City: A Conceptual Toolkit. Stroud: Comedia.

Pine II, B. J. and Gilmore, J. H. (1999) The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business a Stage. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Weil, S. E. (2002) From being about something to being for somebody: the ongoing transformation of the American art museum. In Daedalus; Boston Vol. 128, Iss. 3, (Summer 1999): 229-258.