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

Today's digital technology has enabled architects to model/design on their own, with unprecedented swiftness. This development began in the 1980s when computer systems began to invade architectural offices, allowing a single designer to turn out 3-D CadCam models by simply drawing on a desktop, achieving results that previously required multiple hands at the drafting tables. At the New Museum in early 2003 a provocative architecture exhibition devoted to the profession's newest practitioners ("Superficial: The Surfaces of Architecture in a Digital Age") was presented entirely through virtual access--on computer terminals in the museum's tiny Media Lounge, linked to a glowing Web site. Young "paper" architects have always announced their presence via drawings and models. But I suspect the "Superficials" (among them the SANAA group that later landed the commission for the new New) see their terminal-based images as central, not peripheral, to their work, nearly all of it based on the use of digital software to design, plan and construct.

Meanwhile, the built museum increasingly enhances its virtual competition. The rapid increase of virtual visitors to institutional Web sites has inexorably put pressure on museums to provide more choice, easier access and more useful information than ever before. (When the Louvre opened to the public, captions placed on the wall were revolutionary instruments of democracy.) All this is certain to drive the Third-Kind museum architect to provide access to endless keyboards and mural-size screens, and encourage museums to produce special programming for the Web.

The relentlessly progressive Tate Modern in London, not simply satisfied with Herzog & de Meuron's renovated power plant in once-drab Southwark, now employs a curator of Web-casting who regularly presents live lectures and events to an international Web audience approximating the number of "real" visitors to all other programs. (10)

Here, in passing, I want to confront the fear (we encountered it during the advent of TV and video art) that a new, apparently dematerialized medium-i.e., the Web--will somehow drive us all indoors, away from public spaces like theaters, movie houses or museums. The very reverse, of course, happened in the '60s and '70s, and will again: information breeds like rabbits, access leading to a hunger not only for more but for going out in search of different forms of art creation. (11)

In their design for the new ICA in Boston (which from afar resembles nothing more than an open, upside-down laptop), Diller and Scofidio envision a wireless electronic system linking the museum visitor at each point to every other point--as in their Eyebeam proposal--on rows of computer screens that provide, in effect, infinite choices of seeing or knowing; it will include access to the digital arts throughout the world, via a resident database. The museum, which will appear to float (if not blur) upon its waterfront site on a pier adjoining Boston Harbor, also plans to host performances and digital art displays in its main space, incorporating a 300-seat theater where the glass walls can adjust to various performance needs, ranging from transparency to filtered light to total blackouts.