{"id":3071,"date":"2016-04-18T08:46:01","date_gmt":"2016-04-18T12:46:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/?p=3071"},"modified":"2016-04-18T08:50:42","modified_gmt":"2016-04-18T12:50:42","slug":"cultural-strategies-structures-and-subtexts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/main\/cultural-strategies-structures-and-subtexts.php","title":{"rendered":"Cultural strategies, structures, and subtexts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theater<\/em> journal has just published my review of Peter Frumkin and Ana Kolendo’s book on cultural construction projects: Building for the Arts: The Strategic Design of Cultural Facilities<\/em> (University of Chicago Press: 2014). Here’s the opening excerpt. The full review is available for download<\/a> (pdf format).<\/p>\n

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Although architecture may appear to be rooted in pragmatism, it is a powerful and extraordinarily revealing expression of human psychology. . . . It also reflects the ambitions and insecurities and motivations of those who build; because of that, it offers a faithful reflection of the nature of power, its strategies, its consolations, and its impact on those who wield it.
\n\u2014 Deyan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex<\/em><\/p>\n

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs, and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
\n\u2014 Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Theater<\/a>Architect and urban planner Daniel Hudson Burnham famously said (or was later paraphrased to say): \u201cMake no little plans; they have no magic to stir men\u2019s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.\u201d As the force behind such civic megaspaces as the city of Chicago and Washington, DC\u2019s National Mall, as well as Union Stations in Chicago, Washington, Pittsburgh, and El Paso, Burnham knew about big plans. In Building for the Arts: The Strategic Design of Cultural Facilities<\/em>, we see in sometimes tragic detail why cultural facility projects must<\/em> be big to attract attention, funding, and favor, and why they are so difficult to control once the blood is stirred.<\/p>\n

A curious tension runs through Peter Frumkin and Ana Kolendo\u2019s strategy guide for cultural construction. It springs from the yearning for order and reason the authors bring to the subject, and that readers will likely bring as well, set against the relentless evidence of power, politics, wealth, and happenstance delivered by each richly written case study. The text speaks confidently about strategic alignment, but the subtext swirls with dramatic irony.<\/p>\n

To be fair, much of this curious tension comes from the complex intersection where the book\u2019s subject lives. Planning, funding, building, and operating new or expanded arts facilities combine urban planning and architecture, sociology and psychology, economics and acoustics, politics and power, all at a significant scale and intensity among players who generally have not had a rehearsal before the show. All in all, Building for the Arts<\/em> makes a solid contribution to understanding this highly complex work, even if it forces the strategy frameworks from time to time.<\/p>\n

A 1994 \u201cNational Cultural Facilities Study\u201d by the Nonprofit Facilities Fund (now the Nonprofit Finance Fund) first captured many of the dynamics described here, concluding that:<\/p>\n

while arts organizations operate under tremendous constraints, they frequently undertake projects in ways that contribute directly to their problems. And despite lessons to be learned from such experiences, the field as a whole lacks a mechanism to do so. Among the prevalent practices:<\/p>\n