Interview with Stephen Rustow on New Strategies for Museums

Posted by Defne Aydintasbas on October 19 at 6:00 PM DMD chats with architect Stephen Rustow, author of the latest DMD whitepaper New Strategies for Museums: Assets, Audiences, and Alliances (http://dmdinsight.com/papers/), on the challenges and opportunities for museums in the current economic climate.

During the economic boom, design was a way for a museum to differentiate itself from others, to almost reinvent the whole organization, which led to a building bonanza. In these tough economic times, you are suggesting that design can once again help an institution, this time to stay afloat. What is different in the way architects/ designers work with museums now?       

What’s changed most is the focus of the design process: when the objective was a new building or an addition, the focus was on site selection, on integration of the old and new, on programmatic improvements and modernization and on creating a new image with the architecture.  Now the focus is on how to rethink what museums have already built and how they operate in order to deepen use, add flexibility, maximize efficiency and find strategies that make the institution more valuable to its audiences.  These are all very significant design problems and architects and designers work fundamentally in the same ways they always have: clarifying problems, analyzing contexts and exploring alternative solutions.  The essential difference is in how the problem is defined.  Prudent, thoughtful use of resources is imperative for cultural institutions in boom times or bust; a tough economy simply makes it easier to use all resources responsibly.


Was the last museum building boom once in a century moment? Will we not see one for a while you think?

Building booms in the cultural sector are cyclical and the last wave of museum building went hand in glove with building in several other sectors, notably office and certain kinds of residential construction.  As a proportional increase in new museum construction, I’m not sure that the last boom was more significant than the previous boom in the 60’s and 70’s.  In this country at least it certainly doesn’t compare proportionally with the amount of museum construction between 1900 and 1930, inspired by the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the City Beautiful movement, indeed much of the most recent boom was additions to those original buildings.  That said, museums have never before been as mediatized or as subject to the social mechanics of consumption and spectacle that we’ve witnessed in the last 25 years.  I think that particular caravan may move on to other sites and subjects, particularly in Europe and the U.S. But in emerging economies, museums (and the cultural sector in general) still seem to have a potential for extraordinary growth and there is always the chance – and the danger –  of another boom that leaves us with scores of half-empty, poorly conceived and struggling institutions.


How do cultural institutions fare in sustainability compared to for-profit or other institutions?

Museums as a building type have certain particularities that make it difficult to adapt some of the most obvious sustainable practices, for example they consume enormous amounts of energy to maintain constant interior environments and appropriate lighting.  Concert halls, theaters and libraries all have their own peculiarities that make them resistant to certain kinds of straightforward ‘best practices’.  I’m not certain that ‘for-profit’ or not makes a critical difference. But institutional buildings can adopt recycling strategies and other green initiatives more readily than conventional office towers or residential blocks because of the centralized way in which they operate.
 

What are some examples of institutions that have been nimble in adopting to the times?

There have been many different kinds of initiatives recently: lots of large and mid-size museums are rethinking their approach to use of the internet, the design of their own web-sites and are starting to exploit social networking sites.  The virtual presence of the museum has a rich and complimentary potential to what happens ‘on the walls’.  Just to look at examples from local museums: the Guggenheim’s on-line ‘sketch-up’ architectural competition that accompanied the Frank Lloyd Wright show was a terrific idea. The web-site, multi-media anthology that MoMA created for ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’ placed the works shown in a much broader and richer context than the gallery alone could achieve. The Rubin Museum’s current performance series around the publication of Jung’s Red Book is an intriguing example of forging cross-institutional alliances around a special event that shows the museum’s collections in a different light.


How do you think the financial crisis will change today's museums in years to come?

It will make them smarter about their resources and their core mission.  Over the last two decades, the art museum became the darling of a set of fickle financial interests that have started to abandon it and may not return.  Although museums will always rely on philanthropic support of various kinds, they will have to be tougher-minded about the limits they set on what to do with it.

Topics: architecture and design, arts and culture, philanthropy        SHARE: