On Art

...It would put us one up on the Italian Futurists—able to enjoy our automobiles and Aphrodite in the same delirious climb...

...What it suggests, very forcibly, is a Bauhaus version of an Egyptian necropolis...

...The increasing public flocking to the museums has created a demand for expanded services: for lecture halls and cafeterias, for rest-rooms and offices, for air-conditioning and entertainment—for facilities often hidden away in the nether regions of older institutions...

...It removed from circulation the accumulation of household products and treasures that might otherwise have acted as a glut upon the market (an early version of planned obsolescence...

...From Ahmedabad to Minneapolis plans are being drawn, foundations poured, and cornerstones laid...

...For the man who has everything: a well-appointed tomb...

...For them, no one could be modem who failed to see that a speeding automobile was more beautiful than the Victory of Samo-thrace...

...Laconically noting the vehicular precedents for Wright's design, the Modern's note goes on to suggest that the Guggenheim "appears as the first step to a very contemporary solution: a drive-in museum...

...Selected by Ludwig Glaeser, the Modern's associate curator of architecture and design, the exhibition includes photographs, drawings and models of museum construction over the past several decades, much of it the work of the most famous names in modern architecture...

...That would be a convenience to boggle the mind...

...The bolte a miracles, the adaptable box, as the exhibition makes clear, was Le Corbusier's ideal solution...

...As a system of cultural packaging, the box in its variations and refinements appears to have secured the field from Newark, New Jersey, to Kamakura, Japan, even though—as Le Corbusier himself demonstrated in his chapel at Ronchamp—the use of reinforced concrete might lead to more sculptural forms...

...In many quarters, the museum and its fellow-traveler, the culture center, are being promoted as both the cure for downtown blight and the solution for that threatened leisure time which will be our lot in a fully-automated society...

...It had no generous storage facilities to begin with, and has since discontinued its cafeteria and taken over space from the adjoining administration building to provide more room for exhibition areas...

...No less spectacular in its ground-hugging disposition is the new Oakland Museum by Kevin Roche, John Dinkerloo and Associates, a sprawling seven-acre culture complex in the heart of downtown Oakland...

...The museum houses exhibition space for three distinct collections—art, cultural history, the natural sciences —and includes lecture halls, an auditorium, offices, a restaurant, a 200-car garage, plus an outdoor court for exhibitions and concerts...

...There are several logical reasons for the new surge of museum building and renovation documented by the Modern's show...

...Given the rising real-estate values in most urban locations and the pressure to develop every inch of overhead space, one can only commend the architects for having achieved a scheme so remarkable in its inconspicuous consumption...

...Thus as an example of museum design, it can boast of a unique form with function following after...

...Pei's forbidding medieval fortress for the Everson Museum in Syracuse, opened last week...

...Fortunately, most of these difficulties have been worked out by the museum's resourceful staff...

...The box, too, figures in the solution Marcel Breuer and Hamilton Smith adopted for the new Whitney Museum, inverting the usual progression of spatial volumes with an upside-down ziggurat that provides, in its top gallery, one of the largest exhibition lofts in New York...

...The whole effect is of a series of open stepped-plazas interspersed with terraced gardens...

...Johnson, an International Stylist lately turned eclectic, is an avid collector of the American vanguard...

...The comparison of museums and morgues was, at least, grounded in historical precedent...

...In the Modern's exhibition, it serves as the basic structure for a number of recent museums: Mies van der Rohe's glassy rectangle atop a granite podium for the just-opened New National Gallery in Berlin...

...tax-incentives have spurred the flow of priceless works of painting and sculpture into the welcoming arms of museum directors...

...his museum is decked out with a full complement of minimalist sculpture and the most recent trends in painting...

...For the most part, however, the above-board box has prevailed in the cultural constructions of the past few decades...

...Judging from the handsome exhibition, "Architecture of Museums," now on view at the Museum of Modern Art, the equation of museums and cemeteries is not out of date...

...Lucrative construction contracts have spread the good news of culture throughout the business community...

...The visionary scheme for a museum and temple of fame by the 18th-century Utopian architect, Etienne Louis Boullee, bears some striking, if superficial, resemblances to the work of present-day primary structuralists...

...Making available a maximum amount of wall space, the box, in modular units, lends itself to complex and expandable horizontal configurations, as well as to vertical stacking...

...Although the program notes for the exhibition do not mention it, Wright used a spiral ramp and glass dome in the interior of the V. C. Morris store in San Francisco (1948), a structure which, oddly enough, was converted into an art gallery this year...

...The notes do contain something else: a wonderfully sly remark that is evidence of the rivalry now existing among museums...

...The several examples by the German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel alert us to the sources of those neoclassical temples of art?pillars piled upon podia—that sprang into being throughout the 19th century...

...The interior is a good deal brighter than the underground associations might suggest...

...Wright's solution disposed of the troublesome museum traffic problem once and for all by feeding the viewers into the top and sending them gently on their way down the ramp...

...Italy, they said, had become a graveyard of antiquities, a vast bureaucracy of culture, of pettifogging professors and archeologists dedicated to the "useless administration of the past...

...Nor has it always been easy to dismantle one exhibition on the continuous ramp while another was in progress...

...Then, there is that background of civic expediency and moral uplift nowadays associated with culture...

...it has, in fact, provided a number of modern architects with ingenious formal solutions...

...A clean, well-lighted, smartly-furnished place, it has movable walls that allow the art to circulate while the viewer remains seated...

...Johnson's compact Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica...

...The show is an extremely informative one, revealing the present range and extent of museum building, and offering a brief yet thoughtful glimpse at past efforts...

...The growing class of artisans, therefore, had an understandable concern with the mortuary practices of its masters...

...His scheme soon ran into some snags, though—the hanging of large paintings on the building's curved walls and the positioning of sculpture along its inclined ramps being among the earliest...

...Surrounded by the artistic heritage of centuries, the dead weight of the past, they wanted to burn down the museums, flood the cellars with canal water and enjoy the spectacle of priceless canvases floating helplessly on the tides...

...The notable exception to this trend toward cubiculture, of course, is Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral-ramped, circular Guggenheim Museum...

...and the small vertical museum by the Austrian architects Karl Mang and Eva Mang-Frimmel—a stack of interlocking cubic volumes proposed as a bell tower but converted into a museum for one of the masters of modern architecture, Adolf Loos...

...The most striking example of an underground treasury is architect Philip Johnson's private museum in New Canaan, Connecticut—a vault dug out of the ground with nothing but a grassy mound above it and an entrance that appears as menacing as the passageway to a military bunker or a crypt...

...The purposes may have been religious—to provide the solace of a familiar environment for the otherwise bleak afterlife—but the practice also served a useful economic function...

...Still, it is no secret that the Guggenheim has been in need of additional space almost from the moment it opened...

...Le Corbusier conceived of a squared-off ascending ramp in his plan for the World Museum, but Wright developed the circular plan used at the Guggenheim as early as the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective and Planetarium of 1925, and again in later designs for a parking garage and a community center in Pittsburgh...

...There was something more to the Futurists' propaganda than the wish to nettle the bourgeoisie—that solidly-entrenched, money-making class so addicted to the culture of the past...

...The functioning elements are tiered one upon another so that the roof of one unit becomes the terrace of another...

...Variations of it occur in his World Museum of 1929, part of his ill-fated project for the League of Nations, in the recently-built Ahmedabad and Tokyo museums, and in the Centre Le Corbusier, a prefab structure built in Zurich after the architect's death...

...Contemporary artists, too, have contributed to the need for drastic changes: The scale of their works calls for new installation procedures and larger and more flexible exhibition spaces...

...For the ancient prototypes of museums are to be found in the burial tombs of kings and Pharaohs, repositories not only for the famous dead but for the precious art and artifacts they collected and commissioned during their lifetime...

...In all of this activity, it is strange how long the ancient mortuary associations have lingered on, breathing new life into old dreams...