Rating the New Museums: The Best (and Worst) of 2007---Part I

Top of the Heap: The New Museum on the Block

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

Last year marked both the 10th anniversary of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the 30th of Renzo Piano's and Richard Rogers' Centre Georges Pompidou--the two most influential cultural buildings of our time. As the worldwide construction boom spurred by those watershed projects continued unabated, 2007 witnessed the inauguration of still more museum buildings and additions. Here are my highly opinionated personal picks for the best new museum architecture of the year just past, to be followed tomorrow by my list of the worst.

New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, by SANAA. My choice for 2007's Museum of the Year. Okay, it's not perfect, but despite the industrial-strength fluorescent lighting, narrow stairways, and a few other lapses, no new museum in recent memory has exhilarated me anywhere as much. Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa's astonishing triumph over a tight budget and even more restricted site is an urbanistic tour-de-force. This Miracle on the Bowery, as I've called it, delivers spaces ideal for contemporary art of all kinds, as well as a stunning refutation of the grow-or-die philosophy epitomized by MoMA's soul-killing metamorphosis from artworld clubhouse to global corporate headquarters. The brilliant New Museum cost $50 million; the bloated new MoMA, more than $500 million. Museum boards take note: You sometimes get what you don't pay for.

Perelman Building, Philadelphia Museum of Art, by Gluckman Mayner Architects. Because Richard Gluckman earned his bones converting gritty industrial relics into peerless exhibition spaces, I had qualms about his turning a fancy Classical-Deco office building into a contemporary art annex. Not to worry. The Perelman feels absolutely right from start to finish, providing protective internalized rooms for light-sensitive photography, costume, and design, but also an airy, loftlike gallery that makes sculpture and installation pieces look terrific. Without being unduly deferential or disrespectful toward the landmark original, Gluckman and David Mayner again prove how their inspired retrofits trump many of today's start-from-scratch museum schemes.

Museo del Prado addition, Madrid, by Jose Rafael Moneo Arquitecto. An almost audible sigh of relief wafted through the artworld when Rafael Moneo's Prado wing debuted late last year. Although Moneo designed the imposing National Museum of Roman Art of 1980-86 in Mérida, Spain, for the Prado he rejected any hint of grandiosity and crafted an appropriately dignified amplificacion that neither plays dead nor pleads for attention. This stolid brick treasure chest pays subtle homage to the foursquare masonry of traditional Spanish architecture, and graciously focuses attention on the 19th-century art inside With consummate self-assurance, this modern master elevates himself high above the fray of today's sensation-seeking museum mongers.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, by Adjaye Associates. The London-based David Adjaye, 42, has swiftly become a fixture on the hippest architectural shortlists, including the New York commission won by SANAA (above.) His invigorating design for the New Museum's Denver counterpart confirms him as an international leader among the profession's mid-career generation. After Daniel Libeskind's sculpturally overwrought, functionally troubled, titanium sheathed Denver Art Museum addition of 2000-06, Adjaye's elegant minimalist box (go here and click: "New Building"), sheathed in smoky tinted glass, seems the antithesis of such dated post-Bilbao "destination" architecture. Although this flexible series of display spaces has struck some as insufficiently defined, I'll take Adjaye's adaptable amorphousness over Libeskind's Cinderella-slipper formalism any time.

Greek and Roman Galleries, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, by Jeffrey L. Daly after a plan by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates. Although not a freestanding addition or autonomous wing, the Met's spectacular new Greek and Roman Galleries merit a high place among 2007's museum successes. The idea for converting the Met's erstwhile cafeteria (dubbed the "Dorotheum" after its chi-chi 1940s makeover by decorator Dorothy Draper) into gallery space grew from the master plan of architect Kevin Roche, but design credit belongs to the museum's Jeffrey L. Daly, with considerable help from Greek and Roman curator Carlos Picón and colleagues. Machado and Silvetti's unironic recasting of the Roman replica Getty Villa in Malibu, completed in 2006, took the high-style curse off historical revivalism and indirectly legitimized the unapologetic traditionalism of the Met's latest museum-within-a-museum--the final triumph of Philippe de Montebello's long, glorious, and lamentably concluding directorship.