An architectural historian explains why we’re all stargazers in a world in love with museums

The rise of ambitious, starchitect-driven museum projects is the subject of a historian’s talk next week at New York University Abu Dhabi.

Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao touched off a new trend in global museum-building. Tim Graham

To paraphrase the artist Richard Hamilton, co-founder of the Independent Group and father of British pop art, just what is it that makes today’s museums so different, so appealing?

Bernd Nicolai believes he has the answer. A professor of architectural history at the University of Bern in Switzerland, Nicolai is currently writing a history of global architecture from 1970 to the present, and on Monday evening he’ll take the stage at the NYUAD Institute to provide his perspective on what is happening on the other side of Saadiyat Island, as well as in Bilbao, Beijing, Shanghai and beyond.

The professor believes that contemporary museum collections, architecture and exhibitions have been transformed because of the enormous increase in their numbers and a need to generate tourism, rather than the education-focused logic of old.

“Museums today are one of the most advanced and precious building types, they are like the cathedrals of our age,” explains the gently-spoken academic. “But we’ve witnessed an incredible torrent of museums in the last three decades.”

The effect, Nicolai argues, has been a growth of museum buildings where, even though the scope of their collections may have expanded, the architecture takes precedence over the content.

The situation in China is a case in point, thanks to a process that Jeffrey Johnson, director of Columbia University’s China Megacities Lab, has called the “museumification” of the People’s Republic.

According to the country’s last five-year plan, one of whose principles was to establish culture as a key pillar of the economy, the country was to have 3,500 museums by 2015. China reached that target in 2012, a year in which a record 451 museums were opened, many without collections or curators.

The driving force behind the museum boom in China is driven partly by a sense of having to play catch-up with the West. Two years ago there was just one museum per 395,000 people across China and one per 200,000 in Shanghai. By comparison, Paris has a museum for every 16,000 people.

For Nicolai, however, the recent mania for museum-building is also part of a more a globalised approach to contemporary architecture and urbanism that has occurred since the 1990s.

The construction of the Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997 set an intoxicating precedent for arts-led regeneration and a numbers-based approach to museum management while ensuring a market for big name “starchitects” and what Nicolai describes as global “event architecture”.

When it came to its own cultural five-year plan, Nicolai says, Abu Dhabi consciously turned to the “Bilbao effect” as a way of increasing its pulling power as a tourist destination, and in doing so, he says the emirate also placed itself in the vanguard of the globalisation paradigm in contemporary museum architecture.

“Abu Dhabi decided that Saadiyat would commission the most prestigious architects from the western world. They are not local architects – I would even classify Tadao Ando as a western architect – and in Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid you have three key figures in global architecture.”

As an alternative to the kind of generic, plug-in architecture and urbanism that Nicolai associates with the work of Hadid and Rem Koolhaas – whose seminal 1995 text S,M,L,XL set a new standard for globalised, context-lite design – Nicolai champions what he describes as the architecture of "otherness".

“It’s a sort of international regionalism that would provide a sense of identity to local and regional communities, which is hugely important,” the historian says, pointing to the kind of sustainable, bottom-up, community-focused projects that are frequently recognised by the international Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

“They try to promote architectures which are very much based in sustainable, regional patterns that can enhance local conditions for local people.”

Like Richard Hamilton, whose influential collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? adopted a nuanced stance on the seductive pleasures of mid-fifties American consumer culture, Bernd Nicolai is asking us to reflect on the relationship between consumption, power, culture and economics.

 The Globalization Paradigm in Museum Architecture, a talk by Bernd Nicolai, professor of architectural history at the University of Bern, is being hosted by the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute on Monday 29 February. To register visit www.nyuad.nyu.edu/en/

Nick Leech is a features writer at The National.