In Building Culture, historian and critic Julian Rose assembles a series of interviews that he conducted with 16 prominent architects—some responsible for many of today’s most recognizable and innovative spaces for art. His subjects range from the Guggenheim Bilbao’s Frank Gehry and prolific museum designer Renzo Piano to Walter Hood, who re-envisioned the gardens at the Oakland Museum of Art, and Elizabeth Diller, whose proximity to performance art informed her firm’s design for the rolling Shed in Manhattan. Following is an excerpt from Rose’s introduction.

An often-repeated truism is that museums are the cathedrals of our time. This is usually meant as a glib expression of the fact that they are among the most important structures erected today, enjoying pride of place in our cities and absorbing more time, resources, and attention than other buildings. But Walter Benjamin reminds us that this analogy holds on a deeper structural level as well. Hanging on the walls of a museum, the easel painting originally intended for the private salon of a wealthy patron becomes something very like the figures carved in stone above a cathedral’s doorway or illuminated in its stained-glass windows. In other words, once fused with the primordial technology of the museum’s architectural frame, even a unique and original work of art functions like mass media and, by extension, becomes an object of simultaneous collective reception.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider the Mona Lisa, by all accounts the most visited painting in the world. Even after a dip in attendance caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Louvre receives close to 10 million visitors a year, and the museum estimates that some 80 percent of them see the Mona Lisa during their visit. This means that, this year, nearly 8 million people will pay for the privilege of seeing the painting in the “flesh.” If the Mona Lisa were a song, that would make it multiplatinum many times over, comfortably among the best-selling singles of the year.

As anyone who has braved the crowds for a glimpse of a painting like the Mona Lisa can attest, the museum’s transformation of an easel painting into an object of simultaneous collective reception is not a natural one, often resulting in something of an awkward fit. Contemporary art, on the other hand, has had the opportunity to evolve in tandem with the architecture of the museum and has developed a much more symbiotic relationship with it. In recent years, any number of commentators have noted that art is getting bigger, as is the audience for large-scale, site-specific installations, two key developments propelling the construction of ever-growing galleries for contemporary art in museums worldwide. Some critics bemoan this trend as the spectacularization of visual art. This complaint suggests that art’s expanding size is mainly a ploy for attention, as if the best way to lure increasingly distracted visitors through the museum’s doors is simply to make larger and more sensational works. It also suggests a kind of degradation of the individual viewer’s experience, as if deliberate and thoughtful contemplation had given way to more involuntary and superficial absorption.

But this trend is actually indicative of a much more profound paradigm shift: today, visual art is increasingly a collective form. Much contemporary art, in other words, is made with the museum in mind, and is intended to be seen in a crowd. This is a distinct break from long-established traditions of modern art. Despite the thread of utopian social ambitions running through the avant-garde movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, the bulk of modernist cultural production actually consisted of autonomous artworks, by and large intended for individual contemplation. It was perhaps inevitable that the modernist artwork would be primarily targeted at an individual audience, since the emergence of l’art pour l’art was itself enabled by a new economic model based on individual collectors: the rise of an acquisitive bourgeoisie offered an alternative to the official patronage of church or state and allowed artists to connect to a broad base of individuals with widely variegated taste, some of whom supported and encouraged radical aesthetic innovation. There was thus a period when the upper-middle-class audience for modern art was largely coincident with its base of economic support. In recent years, the audience for art has radically expanded, while its base of support has radically contracted. As in the Renaissance, when most art for plebeian consumption—the statue in a town square, the frescoes in a church—was commissioned by the ruling elite and their institutions, today’s unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of ultrarich donors means that support for new art now increasingly falls to museums—and to the networks of corporations and oligarchs in which they are embedded.