The museum of the Third Kind: in which the author envisions new directions for the art museum as audiences change, architecture evolves, institutions subdivide and electronic resources expand our capabilities and expectations

Our current taste for complexity provokes a heightened appetite for shapes that defy modernist textbook norms. None of the forward-looking structures discussed here is simply modern, postmodern or even a hybrid of the two. Today, the lean, simple geometry of a modern classic, say Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building on Park Avenue, seems not only abstract, but unreal--a toy of the mind, cut off from what we see as truly real in our lives and work, which are increasingly dense, complicated, unpredictable.

As for the transformed MOMA in midtown--the reopening of which was this season's headline museum event--its final configuration took place at the hands of director Glenn Lowry, the curators of his famously headstrong departments and, of course, architect Yoshio Taniguchi. Ironically, many of us were misled by the radical signs of asymmetry, complexity and contradiction at MOMA Queens, the museum's temporary quarters--its wide-open galleries and ungainly clutch of marine plywood forms on the roof spelling out its logo. But radicality-in-reverse is the hallmark of the new $425-million, high-modernist MOMA, which is primarily a quantitative expansion of its earlier quarters, despite the surely well-intentioned interpretations of its furiously engaged makers. The galleries, as we now see them, are palatial and self-absorbed--so large they make Alfred Barr's original democratizing (if claustrophobic) drive to force the public into the equivalent of a middle-class living room space a lost, if not demolished, idea. The early, and provocative, desire of Lowry to weave departments into closer interaction with each other is overwhelmed now by stylistic neutrality and stupendous scale. The result, paradoxically, seems monumentally and quintessentially Second Kind. (9)

Digital Manifestations and Beyond

It is of course Gehry's success in Bilbao--offering a flamboyant, gently comic facade that both chides and graces the more conventional exhibition spaces inside--that is the key influence now shaping the coming generation of architects, designers, curators and artists, who are increasingly creating an interdisciplinary genre. Diller and Scofidio, who are driven to produce and occasionally participate in performances in their own structures, are vivid evidence of this trend. For their Blur Building, a media pavilion devised for Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel, shown in the form of photographs and models at their recent Whitney exhibition, they enveloped a sturdy steel structure in a filtered-lake-water fog, producing an aptly ironic metaphor fur Third Kindism. Blur visitors were outfitted with digitally managed "braincoats" that signaled the personality profiles of their occupants to others as they passed through the pavilion.

The Blur and its designers reflected signal changes of attitude, in both anti-formal design and professional behavior. The architect is now quite likely to emerge from a background of varied skills in addition to formal architectural training. Diller, Scofidio and other Third-Kind designers evidence a complex involvement in all the arts, as well as a concern for contemporary social and ecological issues. They aren't content simply to build. The latest Third-Kind architectural groupings mingle artists, curators and digital designers. A salient example is the multidisciplinary design team that created the new Dia facility in Beacon, N.Y., which included artist Robert Irwin and Dia director Michael Govan, along with the aptly named Open Office architects based in both New York and Los Angeles.