The College Hill Independent, April 19, 2007

Lewis Sharp, the Denver Art Museum's director, responded to visitors complaining that Daniel Libeskind's new design for the building made them dizzy by saying, "Do you get vertigo when you go to the Guggenheim? Do you get vertigo when you look over the balcony of the great hall of the Met? Those are what great architectural spaces do to you." Denver's dizziness, though, is entirely different from the Guggenheim and the Met's, resulting from spaces that oppress instead of liberate.

Libeskind's museum makes a dramatic counterpoint to another dizzying new design, Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston. (The ICA opened in December, Denver in October.) It's a pairing that shows what works—and what doesn't—in museum architecture today. The ICA is not only a success, but a beacon. In challenging the traditional physicality of art museums, it ushers in a new, digital age of museum design.

Looking In (Denver)

Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim is a single towering space that disorients the visitor with its vastness. Libeskind's museum does just the opposite. Instead of opening up the visitor's gaze, the building's chaotic interior of jagged intersecting planes limits it, disorienting the visitor by forcing him to conform to Libeskind's claustrophobic design.

It's a question of focus. The Guggenheim's hollow core shifts your attention alternatively from the art on the wall to the spiraling sea of visitors. Wright's building is an early example of the museum-as-mall—the pinnacle of which is Richard Rogers's 1977 Pompidou Center in Paris. In his design, Rogers, who last month won the Pritzker Prize (architecture's highest honor), turned the Guggenheim inside out, putting stairways and escalators—and the masses of people moving through them—on the museum's exterior.

This emphasis on the visitors built on the Guggenheim's success in placing art in the broader context of museum-going. That's a good thing because it encourages the visitor to make the art personally relevant. Jean Baudrillard wrote that the Pompidou destroyed the traditional idea of the museum as a place where artworks are revered as independent entities. No longer just a painting, the art object is now a part of an expansive whole, visitor included.

In Denver, the focus is on the building itself, leading not to an expansion of space but rather an oppressive tightening of it. The outside of the building—a mass of diagonal lines that extend out across the Denver skyline—belies a closed, compressed interior that truncates the visitor's gaze. The floor plan seems to be all corners. Startlingly low overhangs jump out to clothesline unsuspecting museum-goers. It's a sculpture into which art and people alike are shoved—railings that keep visitors from bumping their heads on the jutting angles were thrown in as an afterthought. These cramped galleries refuse to open up into a space large enough to allow for free flow of the visiting masses or of the individual visitor's attention.

The spaces aren't disorienting because they encourage a context for the art beyond the museum's walls, but because they deny it. It's not vertigo you feel, but claustrophobia.

Looking Out (Boston)

Boston's ICA is different. Its spaces don't limit the visitor's focus to the architecture as Libeskind's do, nor do they expand it only into the context of the museum-going experience like the Pompidou or the Guggenheim. Instead, the ICA welcomes visitors into a world entirely beyond the museum—beyond its architecture and beyond its visitors. Vertigo in the ICA comes from being pushed out of the museum and into an indefinite and ever-growing expanse of information. It comes, in other words, from the destruction of the museum itself.

This isn't a new idea for Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio (Charles Renfro joined their firm in 2004). They've spent most of their careers dismantling our notions of what the museum should be—most famously in their 2002 Blur Building. A temporary exhibition space for the Swiss Expo, the Blur Building sat on the edge of a lake and consisted of a giant steel frame shrouded in mist (lake water pumped through 31,500 high-pressure nozzles). Diller and Scofidio completely erased the museum, leaving visitors lost in a white-out. Without walls at all, save for the vaporized lake, the building focused the visitor's attention beyond the exhibition space to the expansive natural world around it. Five years later, they're at it again.

Architectural Record said the ICA looks like a periscope, and that's exactly what it is—a device that expands your view. Diller Scofidio + Renfro thought of it as an extension of Boston's HarborWalk: if you let your eye follow the pathway up the museum's steps, through the lobby and across the folded floor slab to the top level, the museum's great cantilevered gallery shoots your attention out over the bay to the skyline beyond. Inside, it's the same effect. The building's glass front frames the unlimited outside world. It's a testament to the museum's focal point that when I visited, more people were staring through the glass off into space than contemplating the artwork.

Looking Up (Google)

The best example of this projected gaze—and the most stunning room in the museum—is the Mediatheque. This small theatre hangs below the cantilever and ends in a tilted pane of glass overlooking the bay. Walking down the half-dozen rows of benches towards this window, you feel like you're falling right into the water below. This is the ICA's vertigo—disorientation caused by an expansion of sight into the threateningly vast space outside the museum's walls.

The bay, though, is only a symbol. Each bench in the Mediatheque faces a computer screen, and it's these windows that open the museum to the realization of this exterior world—the internet, the digital vapor that surrounds us.

The computers connect to the Mediatheque's homepage, which displays not only the art on view in the adjacent galleries but also a number of digital pieces designed specifically for the web. There's also a link to the "What Makes It Art?" forum where visitors can post their musings on contemporary art, and a function called "tagging" that lets users put searchable labels on the art displayed. You can sort paintings into categories like "angry" or "colorful," or just browse visitors' comments.

Like the museum-as-mall, these computers encourage contact with other museum-goers and allow you to see the art in the broader context of general opinion. They remind you that you aren't the only one looking. But the Mediatheque expands your view even beyond that because it forces you to confront the internet's flood of data. An infinitely expanding database of art and public discourse, the Mediatheque's computer network is a museum in its own right—one without any physical structure at all.

In a lecture at Brown University this fall, Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry showed a slide of Ed Ruscha's "Los Angeles County Museum on Fire" and proclaimed that "the future of the museum can only survive if we destroy the institution." The ICA does just that.