architecture in the service of tourism

Wim de Wit

Head of the Department of Architecture and Contemporary Art, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

ICAM 15, Paris, session 2 • 1st of June 2010

ARCHITECTURE IN THE SERVICE OF TOURISM

I think it is appropriate that we all participated in architectural tourism and traveled from the

base of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (probably the icon of all icons) to this 19th century monument

of architectural and industrial history to talk about iconic buildings and their architects. As I hope

will become clear from my presentation, this chocolate factory shows some of the same

characteristics that we will find in the iconic buildings of the late twentieth and early twenty-first

centuries that were created by star architects. Designed by Jacques Saulnier in 1871-72, the

Menier Chocolate Factory is visually very powerful, with its out-of-the-ordinary crisscross steel-

skeleton structure filled in with decorative brick patterns. It is a proud visualization of what the

Menier Company had achieved and is in general considered to be one of the symbols of the

Industrial Revolution. Once one has seen it, it will stick in one’s memory and one will not mistake

it for anything else, the kind of building we now call an icon.

We are however not going to speak about chocolate or about the industrial revolution.

Instead we are going to talk about the modern version of the iconic building, the one that became

so popular over the last fifteen to twenty years. I assume that like everyone else who hears the

words iconic building, you think immediately of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao by Frank

Gehry. I will come to that building in a second, but will first show you another one, a proto-iconic

building, so to say, going all the way back to the 1970s. I am thinking here of the Centre

Pompidou by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano. Selected through a competition in 1971 to design

a building to house the twentieth-century art of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Rogers and

Piano created a building in which all the structural and infra-structural components that are

normally hidden behind walls (the conduits for electricity, the pipes for air intake and exhaust, the

columns and trusses, and even the stairs) had been moved to the outside of the building so that

the inside spaces for galleries and offices could be as open and flexible as possible. Even though

the building was not immediately liked by the Parisians (I remember that jokes abounded about

when the scaffolding would finally come down), the international world of tourism loved it.

Visitors basically overran the structure and its popular plaza in front from the day it opened. The

modern-art business followed suit. Galleries moved to the same neighborhood, thus changing the

so-called Beaubourg neighborhood, an area that until recently had housed a market—the famous

Halles Centrales—from a commercial district into a popular art zone. Overnight, it seemed, a

dilapidated area of Paris had become fancy and turned into a tourist attraction.

The story about the Guggenheim and Bilbao was not very different. A regional center that

until the middle of the twentieth century had been a wealthy hub for the ship building industry

and steel mills, Bilbao had to re-think itself in the late twentieth century after these heavy

industries had moved away. In response, the city fathers developed the idea of re-developing

the city as a tourist center and decided to bring in well-known architects to spruce up the image.

Wim de Wit • ICAM 15, 2010 • 2

Norman Foster was asked to design the city’s subway stations and Santiago Calatrava was

commissioned to design the city’s airport as well as one of his signature bridges across the

Nervión river. These kinds of infra-structural interventions were not enough to make Bilbao

into a tourist attraction. It also needed culture and the city government therefore asked the

Guggenheim Museum in New York to do something that at that time was more or less unheard of,

namely to establish a branch of its museum in this Northern Spanish town. As you all know, Frank

Gehry was hired in 1991 to design this museum; he completed the construction on time and

within budget in the fall of 1997. Placed on an old industrial site right next to the river, Gehry’s

sculptural structure covered in titanium plates became an instant success. The tourists streamed

to the city—1.3 million in the first year after the opening in late 1997. According to Charles

Jencks, by the year 2000, the total number of visitors had reached 3 million.1

The city of Bilbao had all of sudden discovered a new source of wealth. According to CNN Money

quoting The Financial Times, the Guggenheim “had generated €500 million in economic activity

for the region during its first three years, plus €100 million in taxes.”2 People in other cities

looked on jealously at what the media baptized the Bilbao effect. The authorities of these cities,

especially those that had fallen on hard times, tried to profit from this effect by hiring a famous

architect to design an innovative building for one of its cultural institutions.

A good example of a building in the United States that is successful as an icon and that has put

the city where it is housed on the map of those who are interested in seeing modern architecture

is the Milwaukee Art Museum. A mid-size city of 600-700,000 inhabitants north of Chicago,

Milwaukee was until the beginning of the 21st century primarily known for its German beer

brewers. It did not have much else to offer. The city had a museum, located near Lake Michigan

in three floors under an Eero Saarinen designed War Memorial, but not many people outside the

Midwest would ever go to Milwaukee for the specific reason of seeing the collections in that

museum. All of this changed in early 2001 when the museum opened a $100 million addition

designed by Santiago Calatrava and placed on a large empty parking lot next to the old museum.

The most striking part of Calatrava’s building is a huge movable brise soleil that can open its wings

during the day and provide shade over the building. This design element has become a symbol

for the city of Milwaukee, a real icon in the true sense of the word. And the museum is now

one of the main attractions of the city.

I should point out, however, that not every city succeeded in reaching that goal. In the United

States, the best example of a failed attempt to bring an iconic building to a city center is the

addition by Daniel Libeskind (the architect of the world-famous Jewish Museum addition in Berlin)

to the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado (2006). The lack of success may in part be due to

icon fatigue; it may also be because of the aggressive forms that Libeskind used for this building,

creating interior spaces that were not appropriate for a museum building. Another important

reason may be that Libeskind’s jagged building volumes in Denver were not so different from

what he had designed in other places, and most connoisseurs of modern architecture felt

therefore that there was nothing to get excited about. Whatever the reason, within a few weeks,

1 Charles Jencks, The Iconic Building, New York, Rizzoli, 2005, p. 18.

2 Gordon Anderson, “The Milwaukee Effect,” CNN Money,

http://money.cnn.com/2004/08/04/pf/goodlife/bilbao_effect/index.htm)


the museum had to lay off many security guards whom they had brought in to keep the expected

crowds under control. As the visitors did not come, the guards were not needed.

I would like to return again to the three examples of successful iconic buildings that I just

mentioned (in Paris, Bilbao and Milwaukee) and look at the characteristics that they have in

common. First of all, all three buildings were designed for neighborhoods (as in the Beaubourg

neighborhood in Paris that had lost its main function, the central market halls; and the huge

empty parking lot next to the museum in Milwaukee) or for a city as a whole (as in the case of

Bilbao) that needed to be re-invented. In all three cases, the museums placed in these areas were

able to revitalize these places. We should keep in mind, however, that, if the infrastructure of

transportation systems and hotels is not present, the museums alone cannot achieve that goal.

Second, each of the buildings is dressed in very sculptural forms, forms that easily stick in people’s

memory and that people interested in architecture will want to see with their own eyes.

Third, all three buildings are cultural institutions, in this case museums, but they could also have

been concert halls, libraries, or even sports facilities. What matters is that they are destinations,

places that people want to visit.

And finally, two of the three buildings were designed by famous architects: Gehry was already

world famous at the time he was working on the Bilbao building. He had already been featured

in numerous articles in the serious and popular press and his face had already been shown in ads

and billboards for American Express. Calatrava, too, had already drawn a great deal of attention

because of his organic, neo-gothic-like structures in steel and glass. As for Piano and Rogers,

the latter had already drawn some attention to the work he had done in the 1960s with Norman

Foster, but Piano was an unknown quantity. However, because of the long time between the

competition in 1971 and the completion of the building in 1977 and because of the publicity

around this building during its construction, by the time the Centre Pompidou opened, the

architects were already upcoming celebrities.

I should point out that Gehry and Calatrava were not just any kind of celebrities, they were and

still are stars, or as some people like to say “starchitects.” Star architects are an exclusive group

within the architectural world. Not just anyone can become a star architect. If it were easy to

become member of the “club of star architects” the exclusivity would disintegrate right away.

Building a number of good buildings is in general not enough of a qualification to enter the club.

The buildings need to stand out because of their remarkable materials or construction features

that look good in architecture magazines or on tv or on the web. In fact, star architects are to

a large extent creations of the media, which always need new subjects to write about and have

discovered that architects can be treated as movie stars, who of course also are creations of the

magazines and tv stations. I do not think that architects will ever make it on the front page of

People magazine or even inside popular magazines. What I mean to say is that just like movie

stars have a love-hate relationship with the media, which on the one hand invade their privacy

but on the other hand enable them to keep up their status and thus demand huge amounts of

money for a performance in a film, similarly architects need to appear in the more serious media,

so that they can get commissions that give them a lot of freedom to create unique buildings for

which they are paid extremely well. And indeed the clients need the star system as well. They

are not so different from collectors who, in order to be taken seriously, have to have a few works

by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. Thus, a client who wants to make a statement with a building


wants to commission one of a small group of architects who is certain to draw attention from the

media.

As you can see the star and the icon are inextricably interconnected. I don’t want to say that

every building by a star architect is an icon, and I also do not think that every building that people

call iconic was done by a star architect, but most of them are. I want to give you one more

example—an example that better than anything I have said so far explains what the connection

is between the client, the architect and the iconic building. Let’s look at Abu Dhabi, one of the

emirates in the Persian Gulf, and its museum island, or as it is called in Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island.

Having become an extremely wealthy state in the second half of the twentieth century because of

the oil found under the desert ground, Abu Dhabi is aware that it will have to take steps to keep

up its wealth as the oil that can be found in this region will probably be spent in the next 15-20

years. Like Paris, Bilbao and Milwaukee, Abu Dhabi has had to rethink its raison d’être. It came

to the conclusion that there is one industry that could help compensate for at least some of the

potential loss of oil revenue, and that was global tourism. Like any other country or city

government, the leading families of Abu Dhabi were of course aware that the income generated

by tourism worldwide was exorbitantly high. For example, in 2007, the year when Abu Dhabi

announced its plan for the development of the Saadiyat Island into a cultural destination,

worldwide tourism generated over US$900 billion (over €600 billion).3 Abu Dhabi had not yet had

an opportunity to profit much from that source. According to the Art Newspaper, in that same

year Abu Dhabi attracted 1.2 million tourists per year, which is not much when one compares it to

the numbers of tourists visiting Paris or London (tens of millions per year) but those cities are of

course much larger. The Abu Dhabi authorities set the goal to raise, within a period of ten years,

the annual number of tourists to 3 million, which is an increase of 150%.4 Abu Dhabi decided that

the best way of reaching those numbers was by bringing—mostly Western—culture to museums

and other institutions to be built on an island off its coast linked to the mainland by two highway

bridges [see image 1 at the bottom of the text]. The Abu Dhabi government was able to convince

the directors of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums to work with them on establishing

branches of their institutions on this island, and commissioned the world-famous architects,

Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry, to design these buildings [see images 2 and 3].

In addition, they commissioned the Japanese architect Tadao Ando to design a Maritime

Museum; the British architectural office Foster and Partners to design the Sheikh Zayed National

Museum (which is a museum devoted to the cultural heritage of the United Arab Emirates in

general and Abu Dhabi in particular); and the London-based architect Zaha Hadid to design the

Performing Arts Centre [see images 4 and 5]. Each of these designers came up with a

monumental design using voluminous forms and requiring bold strokes of engineering that are

bound to impress future visitors. The design of these buildings is estimated to cost $27 billion.5

In addition, the government has set aside $13 billion for infrastructural work and other facilities

to accommodate the visitors, including hotels, high-end resorts, and a Biennale Park with

3 “Tourism,” see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tourism

4 Antonia Carver, “Guggenheim sells Bilbao effect to Abu Dhabi,” The Art Newspaper, March 2007, pp. 32-33.

5 Idem.


pavilions designed by such architects as Greg Lynn, David Adjaye and Hani Rashid, making a total

expenditure of at least $40 billion.

Since its first announcement in early 2007, the Abu Dhabi museum-island project has become

world famous and the name Saadiyat Island evokes images of opulence and provocative

architecture. We will have to wait and see if this business plan will work, but there is no doubt

that Abu Dhabi wants to recreate itself into a destination for wealthy tourists. If you don’t share

my lack of doubt, I suggest you look into which agency within the Abu Dhabi government is

overseeing the plan for the construction of Saadiyat Island. It is called the Tourism Development

and Investment Company or TDIC, which is part of and overseen by the Abu Dhabi Tourism

Authority. TDIC’s website states that its main objective is to assist Abu Dhabi “in its goal of

becoming a truly international destination of distinction.”6 I think therefore that I am not too far

off when I suggest in my title for this talk that the star architects hired by TDIC and the ABU Dhabi

government are working in the service of tourism.

There are in my opinion two questions that we as historians in general and members of ICAM

in particular need to ask ourselves about this conclusion. First of all, what does it mean that our

culture needs star architects. And, second, what does this phenomenon mean for us as collectors

of architectural archives.

We live in a culture where the unique, original, and high art is valued better than the copy or

popular art. This is the case in the contemporary art world where we do not necessarily talk

about “stars”, but where there is an entire system of high-end galleries (Gagosian and Matthew

Marks, to name just two in the US) and a world of art fairs and biennales to maintain not only this

system but also the exorbitant prices that come with it. Similarly, in the architecture world our

culture needs a select group of designers who are allowed to work in relative freedom to create

buildings that because of their unique forms are categorized as the high art of architecture.

Affordable to only a small group of cities, these same buildings also establish a wide gap between

the star architects and the rest of the architectural world, which can strive to equal or surpass the

design, but will in most cases not succeed, as the universe of architectural mega-stars does not

have enough space to also house mini-starlets.

The client also plays a special role in this system. When one speaks of the star and the icon,

one gets the feeling that one is referring to l’art pour l’art, or a phenomenon with an autonomous

artistic value. As we have seen, this is not the case. Very often, the client who hires a star

architect (especially when we are dealing with an institutional or governmental client) has an

ulterior motive, which is to make the new structure a destination and thus attract visitors who

will bring in revenue. The architects should not be blamed or praised for doing this kind of work.

They need after all to bring in new commissions to keep the office going. We curators, however,

have to keep in mind what the origin of a certain job is when we ask ourselves the question if we

should acquire the drawings and models for a star-designed iconic building.

I don’t think I can offer you one all-conclusive answer to that question. We all have different

collecting policies, as we may hear tomorrow, and an acquisition consideration that works for

my institution may very well not work for yours. I do think, however, that better insight into what

the real background is behind a specific commission will enable us to see if certain jobs are too

6 http://www.tdic.ae/en/article/about-us/our-philosophy.html


much alike and do therefore not all need to be acquired. The design materials for one Abu Dhabi

museum may constitute a fantastic acquisition; getting the designs for all three of them plus

those for the Biennale pavilions may be way too much. Like the cultural institutions that I have

mentioned here in this paper, we as architectural museums also have to think about the numbers

of visitors coming to our institution. If certain collections of drawings and models (electronically

or otherwise) do not attract anyone to come look at them, then it is probably better not to have

them. And if we do not take everything, then we will leave some interesting projects for our

colleagues in other institutions. With the huge archives that architects are producing these days,

sharing may be the way of the future anyway.

Masterplan

of Saadiyat Island

Courtesy of TDIC

Jean Nouvel,

Louvre Abu Dhabi

© Ateliers Jean Nouvel

Frank Gehry,

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Courtesy of

Gehry Partners, LLP


Tadao Ando, Maritime

Museum. © Tadao Ando

Zaha Hadid, Abu Dhabi

Performing Arts Centre,

North Elevation. Courtesy

of Zaha Hadid Architects

architecture in the service of tourism

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