Centres of attention

Architectural innovation has transformed galleries and museums. We take you on a tour of the best

In an incisive new book ‘The Art Museum in Modern Times’, art historian and former chief of the Royal Academy of Arts Sir Charles Saumarez Smith traces the evolution of these cultural hubs into destinations in themselves.

Here, he introduces our round-up of museums that made waves and galleries that changed the game...

Art museums have been sites for architectural innovation ever since Edward Durrell Stone came up with the design for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with one of its trustees, Philip L Goodwin. Together they produced an emblem of a new type of museum: flat-fronted, no columns, opening straight on to the street, with six floors stacked like an office block and a terrace at the top to look out over 1930s Manhattan. It was connected to the surrounding city, rather than set apart from it.

From this point onwards, it was not nearly as clear as it had been in the past what an art museum should look like or how it should be designed. With the advent of modernism and the beginnings of a belief that new art was at least as interesting and worth collecting as old, there came an urge to experiment with new ideas about how a museum should operate and relate to its public.

They began to show contemporary art, photography, design and architecture as well as paintings and sculpture; meanwhile, the public became more demanding of better facilities and more information about the works on display. There was a growing belief that museums should be less fusty and more democratic. The age of authority was dead – and now a new era of radical experimentation, interaction and architectural invention had begun.

Each decade since the Museum of Modern Art has produced a new museum of extraordinary significance: Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim, which opened its doors in 1959; the original Whitney Museum, designed by Walter Gropius opened on Madison Avenue in 1966 and the São Paulo Museum of Art, by Lina Bo Bardi, was inaugurated (bizarrely) by the Queen two years later; Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano made their reputations with Paris’ Centre Pompidou, which they won in an open international competition in the 1970s; and Norman Foster consolidated his through the industrial design of the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts in Norwich.

The approaching millennium marked another turning point, with the opening of the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997 and Tate Modern in 2000, both of which were all about contemporary art and much less interested in its history.

So, what next? There are plenty of new museums planned for the next few years, including Jamie Fobert’s new-look National Portrait Gallery and the LACMA expansion by Peter Zumthor in Los Angeles, both set for 2023. Galleries of the future are likely to be lighter weight, more ecological and even more contemporary – let’s hope they demonstrate the same swagger and confidence as their predecessors. ‘The Art Museum in Modern Times’ by Charles Saumarez Smith (Thames & Hudson, £30) is out in hardback on 24 March