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Frank Gehry, Architect: Designs for Museums

On the tenth anniversary of the opening of its Frank O. Gehry-designed facility, The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota will present Gehry’s designs for museums. A 2001 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York displayed the range of Gehry’s work, from scientific laboratories to shopping centers. The Weisman exhibit will focus on his extraordinary museums. Victoria Newhouse says, in her book Towards A New Museum (1998), "Gehry’s invention of new forms, and his plurality of forms, provide a model for future museum architecture . . ." The Weisman’s exhibit will focus on four museum buildings and several as of yet unrealized museum designs. In unexpected ways in Gehry’s museums, form follows function--the designs mirror the changing roles of museums in the contemporary world.

Though the history of collecting is much older, museums as a specific building type emerged about 200 years ago. Before then, public collections were displayed in converted palaces or commercial buildings. The earliest buildings designed as museums allowed historically sequential viewing of objects and the safeguarding of priceless treasures. Today's museums are as much about audiences as collections and as much about experiences as history. Newhouse wrote: "In a world that has become increasingly virtual, the museum is an important refuge of reality, making both its contents and their relation to architecture more important than ever." Gehry’s museums provide unique experiences of collections that cannot be duplicated by the computer--or any media.

Echoing the intent of museums themselves, museum buildings traditionally had a highly specialized function of protecting and displaying collections. Museums in the last quarter of the twentieth century became increasingly complex organizations. As they evolved from quiet places primarily for contemplation into places for diverse educational, social, and even commercial activities, their buildings moved away from designs that emphasized the quiet sacredness of the museum’s holdings. Museums today look to architecture to signal the increasing diversity of their missions. Gehry's complex museum exteriors mirror the complexity of what happens inside.

Expanding expectations for museums to play a role in solving urban social and economic problems have emboldened architects to create buildings that are beacons--landmarks to signal the museum's important new role in the urban infrastructure. Gehry’s shining sculptural museums have revitalized cities.

For decades architects, artists, and curators have argued about whether a museum should be an active or passive container, a background, or a foreground for the museum's contents. Gehry has brought the museum distinctly into the foreground. His galleries interact with the art rather than simply providing a blank space in which it can exist. Gehry commented on his Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota with the statement, "They told me not to build another brick lump." His galleries interact with the objects they display without overpowering them.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries new museum designs are far from being the most traditional buildings in their neighborhoods--they are on the cutting edge of architecture. Gehry's use of new technology has freed his museum forms from the limitations of traditional structural and construction requirements and his gleaming titanium surfaces provide a glimpse of the future--perhaps they are the future.

Projects to be included in the exhibition are:

Built Projects
Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany
Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Address
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO, Bilbao, Spain
Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington, USA

Not yet built
Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
Ohr-Okeefe Museum of Art, Biloxi, Mississippi, USA
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA
Museum of tolerance, Jerusalem, Israel
Museum of Biodiversity, Panama City, Panama,
MARTa, (art and design) Herford, Germany

The exhibition will be divided into sections that use examples from the above listed projects to illustrate how Gehry's museum designs meet the needs of museums in the twenty-first century. Models and drawings will also give a hint of the process of design--from form to function to form and back again!

  1. The exhibition will be introduced with a series of giant photographs showing the complex exteriors of Gehry’s museums--exteriors that reflect the diversity of the activities that go on inside.
  2. A series of models and photographs will explore the context of Gehry's museums and their role in the infrastructure of cities and towns. The "Bilbao effect" will be revealed.
  3. Models and photographs of the interiors of these museums will illustrate how the architecture interacts with the objects--and the visitors--in the museums.
  4. The use of technology, particularly in the design process, and new materials and techniques in construction will be explored using photographs, computers, and samples of materials.