Imagining The Future Of The Museum Of Modern Art

Edited by John Elderfield. Introduction by Glenn D. Lowry.

The thesis seeks to explore the implications of the emergence of the digital media as a new art form on the museum space. The museum as an institution has faced some ideological and philosophical contradictions in recent times. Economically, heightened competition for dwindling funds has begun to shape programming decisions. Philosophically, the museum's perceived authoritarian role clashes with the critiques of cultural hegemony that are so much a part of the contemporary art world. Contemporary art forms that intentionally subvert the equation of art and object are often less compatible with traditional conceptions of museum space. And socially, museum expansion is often used as a tool for the gentrification of museum neighborhoods, a stratagem that cheers civic boosters and troubles social critics. All these point to a social, philosophical, political critique of the museum as an institution. The thesis does not attempt to resolve all the issues rooted in the current museum culture/structure. Rather, it seeks to study the various museums built historically and propose a new way of understanding the role of the museum in relation to the issues brought up by artists, social critics, historians alike. The exploration involves both spatial and material articulation. What could a museum be?

Following on the widely-read The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues, which explored how museums are changing through conversations with today's generation of museum directors, New York-based author and cultural strategy advisor András Szántó's new compilation turns its attention to architects. The conclusion of The Future of the Museum was that the "software" of art museums has evolved. Museum leaders are "working to make institutions more open, inclusive, experiential, culturally polyphonic, technologically savvy, attuned to the needs of their communities, and engaged in the defining issues of our time." It follows that the "hardware" of the art museum must also change. Conversations with a carefully selected group of architects survey current thinking in the field, engaging not only architects who have built some of the world's most iconic institutions, but also members of an emerging global generation that is destined to leave its mark on the museum of the future. CONVERSATION PARTNERS: Kunlé Adeyemi (NLÉ), David Adjaye (Adjaye Associates), Paula Zasnicoff Cardoso & Carlos Alberto Maciel (Arquitetos Associados), David Chipperfield (David Chipperfield Architects), Minsuk Cho (Mass Studies), Elizabeth Diller (Diller Scofidio + Renfro), Frida Escobedo, Sou Fujimoto (Sou Fujimoto Architects), Lina Ghotmeh (Lina Ghotmeh – Architecture), Bjarke Ingels (BIG | Bjarke Ingels Group), Kabage Karanja & Stella Mutegi (Cave_bureau), Li Hu & Huang Wenjing (OPEN), Jing Liu & Florian Idenburg (SO – IL), Yansong Ma (MAD Architects), Winy Maas (MVRDV), Roth – Eduardo Neira (Roth Architecture), Stephan Schütz (gmp Architekten), Kerstin Thompson (_KTA), Xu Tiantian (DnA Design and Architecture), Kulapat Yantrasast (WHY), Liam Young (SCI-Arc) ANDRÁS SZÁNTÓ (*1964, Budapest) advises museums, cultural institutions, and leading brands on cultural strategy. An author and editor, his writings have appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, the Art Newspaper, and many other publications. He has overseen the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University and the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Szántó, who lives in Brooklyn, has been conducting conversations with art-world leaders since the early 1990s, including as a frequent moderator of the Art Basel Conversations series.

Art museums, cases of beauty and calm in a fast-paced world, have emerged in recent decades as the most vibrant and popular of all cultural institutions. But as they have become more popular, their direction and values have been contested as never before. This engaging thematic history of the art museum from its inception in the eighteenth century to the present offers an essential framework for understanding contemporary debates as they have evolved in Europe and the United States.

Conceptual ordering, spatial and social narrative are fundamental to the ways in which buildings are shaped, used and perceived. This intriguing book explores the ways in which these three dimensions interact in the design and life of buildings.

The first transnational history of photography’s accommodation in the art museum Photography was long regarded as a “middle-brow” art by the art institution. Yet, at the turn of the millennium, it became the hot, global art of our time. In this book—part institutional history, part account of shifting photographic theories and practices—Alexandra Moschovi tells the story of photography’s accommodation in and as contemporary art in the art museum. Archival research of key exhibitions and the contrasting collecting policies of MoMA, Tate, the Guggenheim, the V&A, and the Centre Pompidou offer new insights into how art as photography and photography as art have been collected and exhibited since the 1930s. Moschovi argues that this accommodation not only changed photography’s status in art, culture, and society, but also played a significant role in the rebranding of the art museum as a cultural and social site.

As museums worldwide shuttered in 2020 because of the coronavirus, New York-based cultural strategist András Szántó conducted a series of interviews with an international group of museum leaders. In a moment when economic, political, and cultural shifts are signaling the start of a new era, the directors speak candidly about the historical limitations and untapped potential of art museums. Each of the twenty-eight conversations in this book explores a particular topic of relevance to art institutions today and tomorrow. What emerges from the series of in-depth conversations is a composite portrait of a generation of museum leaders working to make institutions more open, democratic, inclusive, experimental and experiential, technologically savvy, culturally polyphonic, attuned to the needs of their visitors and communities, and concerned with addressing the defining issues of the societies around them. The dialogues offer glimpses of how museums around the globe are undergoing an accelerated phase of reappraisal and reinvention. Conversation Partners: Marion Ackermann, Cecilia Alemani, Anton Belov, Meriem Berrada, Daniel Birnbaum, Thomas P. Campbell, Tania Coen-Uzzielli, Rhana Devenport, María Mercedes González, Max Hollein, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Mami Kataoka, Brian Kennedy, Koyo Kouoh, Sonia Lawson, Adam Levine, Victoria Noorthoorn, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Anne Pasternak, Adriano Pedrosa, Suhanya Raffel, Axel Rüger, Katrina Sedgwick, Franklin Sirmans, Eugene Tan, Philip Tinari, Marc-Olivier Wahler, Marie-Cécile Zinsou

As a building type, art museums are unparalleled for the opportunities they provide for architectural investigation and experimentation. They are frequently key components of urban revitalization and often push the limits of building technology. Art museums are places of pleasure, education and contemplation. They are remarkable by their prominence and sheer quantity, and their lessons are useful for all architects and for all building types. This book provides explicit and comprehensive coverage of the most important museums built in the first ten years of the 21st Century in the United States and Europe. By dissecting and analyzing each case, Ronnie Self allows the reader to get under the skin of each design and fully understand the process behind these remarkable buildings. Richly designed with full technical illustrations and sections the book includes the work of Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Peter Cook & Colin Fournier, Renzo Piano, Yoshi Taniguchi, Herzog & de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, SANAA, Daniel Libeskind, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, Steven Holl, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Bernard Tschumi, Sauerbruch Hutton, and Shigeru Ban & Jean de Gastines. Together these diverse projects provide a catalogue of design solutions for the contemporary museum and a snapshot of current architectural thought and culture. One of few books on this subject written by an architect, Self’s analysis thoroughly and critically appraises each project from multiple aspects and crucially takes the reader from concept to building. This is an essential book for any professional engaged in designing a museum.

Museums are among the iconic buildings of the twenty-first century, as remarkable for their architectural diversity as for the variety of collections they display. But how does the architecture of museums affect our experience as visitors? This book proposes that by seeing space as common ground between architecture and museology, and so between the museum building and its display, we can illuminate the individuality of each museum and the distinctive experience it offers - for example, how some museums create a sense of personal exploration, while others are more intensely didactic, and how the visit in some cases is transformed into a spatial experience and in other cases into a more social event. The book starts with an overview of the history of museum buildings and display strategies, and a discussion of theoretical and critical approaches. It then focuses on specific museums as in-depth case studies, and uses methods of spatial analysis to look at the key design choices available to architects and curators, and their effects on visitors’ behaviour. Theoretically grounded, methodologically original, and richly illustrated, this book will equip students, researchers and professionals in the fields of architecture, museum studies, curating, exhibition design, and cultural studies, with a guide for studying museums and a theoretical framework for their interpretation.