Museums in the 21st Century

continued

even more amazing than its origins.

After my detour at the wave, I return to the exhibit’s official starting point, a photo of what will become the Denver Art Museum, and look around for the building’s prospective comple-tion date. The edifice is a pile of massive triangles balanced at impossible angles, gleaming in impossible, Photoshopped sunlight. I’m thinking this thing could never hold up, but then I see the construction dates: 2003–2006. I’m stunned: this thing exists? A video shows the architect Daniel Libeskind talking about the project. “All the world’s a stage,” he quotes. And all the men and women merely characters in a sci-fi novel, I think.

My suspicions are confirmed by Austria’s Kunsthaus Graz, which looks like some sort of deep-sea creature, or a giant pool floaty with a bunch of air holes, plopped in the middle of a neighborhood with aged trees and old brick buildings. The air holes—termed “nozzles”—are actually north-facing skylights that stick out through the “skin” of the museum’s curved blue acrylic frame. In Graz, the Kunsthaus is known as “the friendly alien,” and it strikes me as nearly plausible that it woke up one morning to find it wasn’t in outer space but in central Europe and quite happy to be there. (It’s easier to get my head around this explanation than to try to understand the physics.)