To most laypeople, spectacular architecture probably doesn’t sound like a bad thing. Why shouldn’t a well-designed building be exciting, popular, eye-catching—in a word, spectacular? But, in the more rarefied terminology of architectural criticism, this word has taken on a distinctly pejorative cast, used to skewer buildings in which too much attention has been paid to how things look on the outside and too little to what happens within. There are further implications, too: that the designer who’s allowed to get away with such a gross miscalibration of form and function is the dreaded starchitect (which is why spectacular is often paired with adjectives like extravagant, willful, or pompous) and that such buildings are inherently superficial, in the sense that they are intended to exist primarily as images—to photograph well and to look enticing on screens rather than to serve the people who actually inhabit them.

This kind of spectacular architecture is associated with one building type more than any other: the art museum. Of all the buildings constructed around the world in recent decades, museums have tended to take the most head-turning shapes, designed by the most celebrated architects. These museums, in turn, have become a cornerstone of development around the world, playing a key role in branding, tourism, and economic growth. Indeed, most of what is implied by spectacular also falls under the umbrella of the “Bilbao effect,” coined to describe that Spanish city’s dramatic regeneration and meteoric rise to global fame after the 1997 opening of Frank Gehry’s paradigm-shifting outpost of the Guggenheim Museum.

Some 30 years later, the paradigm is shifting again, with spectacular architecture becoming both less feasible and less palatable. This is due in part to blunt geopolitical realities. The Bilbao effect emerged from optimistic assumptions in the 1990s about the ease of transitioning from declining industrial production to an “experience” economy, and it was grounded in the assumed stability of a post–Cold War world order dominated by a new Europe and an apparently unchallenged United States. A quarter of the way through the 21st century, this confidence has been shaken by a global recession and a global pandemic, along with a host of other crises. Years of austerity have meant shrinking public budgets for cultural endeavors in many countries, while economic and political uncertainty has left private patrons and investors skittish, making it difficult for new Bilbao-style projects to get off the ground. Meanwhile, the field of architecture has changed too, with the Bilbao effect increasingly understood as a Faustian bargain. In becoming spectacular, architecture was celebrated and uplifted but also distorted and curtailed; in exchange for newfound celebrity and influence, architects ceded many of the broader urban and social dimensions of their practice—their longstanding role in shaping the physical framework of public life—to new imperatives of form-making and brand-building. Perhaps most importantly, cultural institutions themselves are rethinking their role in society, with an increasing concern for social justice bringing questions of access and equity to the fore. In this context, spectacular architecture has come to seem troubling—at best, quietly complicit, uncritically reinforcing existing power structures; at worst, actively exclusive, serving to intimidate and alienate broad swaths of the public.

It might seem safe to assume, then, that the decline of spectacular architecture would entail the end of the museum boom of recent decades. But, paradoxically, while there are fewer big-budget ground-up buildings appearing these days, the rate of new museum construction has slowed little, with museums around the world continuing to renovate, expand, and rebuild at a brisk pace. All the new pressures and perspectives bearing down on the art museum have catalyzed a rapid and profound evolution in its nature and purpose, and this kind of programmatic transformation inevitably requires architectural evolution. For example, as museums come under increasing political pressure from various constituencies—artists, activists, the public, even their own staff—to expand, reorganize, and reframe their collections to present new narratives about culture and history, these reconfigurations create new spatial requirements for their galleries. Similarly, as museums increasingly seek to engage new audiences in different ways, they will require physical spaces for this expanded social role.

In the end, this renewed focus on the museum’s program will probably create even more opportunities for architects than the exuberant form-making of the Bilbao era, simply because the program of the art museum is so deeply architectural, uniquely anchored in the intersection of aesthetic, spatial, and social experience. The success of a good museum, in other words, plays out at human scale, in terms of space and material, light and movement, in the densely intricate choreography of physical encounters between visitors and works of art. Working with the complexity of this program, in turn, encourages a mode of architectural authorship much better suited to the current moment: collaborative and synthetic, rooted in the broad base of technical and cultural knowledge that allows architects to engage meaningfully with the full range of stakeholders in a given museum.

To help architects seize these opportunities, critics must develop a more subtle and precise vocabulary. Many of the same voices that have decried the art museum as the apotheosis of spectacular architecture also warn that the museum itself is evolving into a kind of spectacle machine. Concerns focus on the darker side of museums’ exploding popularity: the blockbuster shows drawing record-setting crowds that make contemplation impossible; the proliferation of gift shops, cafés, and restaurants, which, in combination with the rise of immersive installations and interactive artworks, threaten to blur the line between the art museum and a department store or a shopping mall. Spectacular architecture, the thinking goes, reduces culture to spectacle.

Just as the phenomenon described by spectacular is receding, the term seems to be losing its utility. It has been in such widespread use for so long that it’s easy to take for granted. The use of spectacular in the critical sense—as opposed to the more positive meaning in common parlance—can be traced directly to theorist Guy Debord’s 1967 book Society of the Spectacle, a seminal examination of the effects of advanced media technologies, novel advertising techniques, and rising consumerism on postwar culture. Most critics today use the word reflexively, perhaps even unaware of their debt to Debord, but it’s worth reexamining this history. Debord was justifiably concerned about the social changes he observed, but it is crucial to understand that his primary points of reference were the dominant mass media of the 20th century—magazines, film, and, above all, television. To put it another way, he was born in 1931, which means that if you are a mid-career artist, architect, critic, or curator today, this is literally your grandfather’s spectacle.

The anachronism of applying Debord’s framework to contemporary museums should be obvious. In 1997, it might still have made some sense to worry that art museums were turning into shopping malls, but today the mall is going extinct while the art museum is a fixture of any city or region with a modicum of wealth and ambition. “Blockbuster” museum shows still draw enormous audiences, but these days not even the perennially reliable superhero franchises can deliver actual blockbusters at the movie theater. Even more crucial are recent revolutions in media technology. Whatever their other problems, the mass media of the 20th century created, by definition, a collective audience. The social media of 21st century have proven more conducive to solipsism than collectivity, and screens have shrunk along with audiences, to the point that most media today are experienced in a state of algorithmically atomized individuality. As more and more of social life—along with most forms of consumption and entertainment—is migrating into the virtual world, the art museum’s growing popularity feels like a thrilling exception to cultural currents portending as yet unexplored possibilities. The museum’s persistence as a physical destination, its continued grounding in embodied experience, its ability to induce so many people to travel in person to the same place to do the same thing during the same set period of time by offering them the opportunity to join a collective audience, to participate in a shared experience—all this is surely a sign of the ongoing vitality of both art and architecture today.

This is not to say that all recent evolutions of the museum are inherently good, or that the pressures currently reshaping them do not require critical evaluation. But it does suggest that even in a post-spectacle era, architecture will remain crucial for the art museum—because urgent questions about who and what these buildings are for will always require architectural answers.