The "Bilbao Effect"

If You Build It, Will They Come?
Museums
By KATE TAYLOR
November 6, 2007


Ten years after the Guggenheim opened its extremely successful Frank Gehry outpost in Bilbao, a museum-building boom is occurring worldwide. From Los Angeles to Minneapolis to Abu Dhabi, new buildings designed by architects such as Renzo Piano, Herzog & de Meuron, and, of course, Mr. Gehry, are sprouting up everywhere.

In America, two dozen art museums have opened major expansions in the last decade, and a dozen more are currently engaged in building projects. In New York, these include the Museum of Modern Art, whose $425 million Yoshio Taniguchi building opened in 2004; the Morgan Library & Museum, which opened a $106 million expansion designed by Mr. Piano last year; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which opens its new home on the Bowery next month, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which is planning its own Renzo Piano branch in the meatpacking district.

Abroad, China is also going through a burst of building, with the construction of new museums such as the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, funded by a Hong Kong jeweler; the Zendai Museum of Modern Art, funded by a real-estate development company; the state-owned Duolun Museum of Modern Art, and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, founded by a Belgian couple and opening this month in Beijing.

Meanwhile, the government of Abu Dhabi has announced its intention to build a $27 billion "cultural district" on Saadiyat Island. As planned, the district will include four museums ?- one of them a Gehry-designed Guggenheim, another a Louvre Abu Dhabi designed by Jean Nouvel ?- and a performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid.

In 25 years, will this construction binge seem brilliant or foolish? Will it have advanced the mission of art museums, or merely diffused it? The answer may be very different in different places and for different projects.