To celebrate its own decision to enlarge its existing building with an addition by Michael Graves, the Whitney Museum of Art is currently featuring seven designs for new museum buildings or for enlargements of other American museums, all either in the design stage or presently underway.[1] Only a small portion of the many museum projects on the drawing boards today, they represent merely the latest stage in an extraordinary expansion of art museum facilities around the world since 1960.
In fact, the most creative public-building type during the past quarter of a century has been the art museum. It has not been the governmental building or the theater, although some outstanding examples of these will come to mind; nor has it been the public memorial or transportation terminal, which the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made much of. Although civic centers and convention centers have become the latest architectural measure of municipal respectability and enterprise, even less can be said of them; we have yet to see anything better than C. F. Murphy Associates’ McCormick Center in Chicago of the mid-1960s (although I. M. Pei’s current design for New York’s convention center may set a new standard for the type).
Why is it that the art museum, of all public buildings, seems now to be the most creative building type? The phenomenon has something to do with the increasing visual emphasis of twentieth-century culture—from printed illustrations and photographs to movies, slides, television, computer graphics, and
