ARTS AND THE PUBLIC REALM.

Buildings for the arts are intended to help you think. They have to weave a subtle fabric between individual and society: making them is one of the most important tasks of the profession -- and one of the most difficult. Buildings for the arts are, almost by definition, part of the public realm. From earliest times, the rich and powerful have given large volumes of (usually covered) space to gain respect and adulation from the public: hence, in Rome, the Theatre of Marcellus, the Flavian amphitheatre (Colosseum); [1] and in the last century, the Frick and the Tate galleries (one founded on exploitation of steel, the other on West Indian sugar). In our day, we have the Guggenheim museums and the Saatchi gallery in London (the former from a metals fortune, the latter from an advertising empire, and made principally into a mechanism for generating value in previously unknown but definitely flashy artists for the benefit of its proprietors). [2]

But, since the eighteenth century, governments and municipalities have also invested in opera houses, theatres, galleries, concert halls, museums - cinemas even. There is an Enlightenment-descended belief that the arts are good for the populace -- albeit in an unquantifiable way, which will, in the end, benefit society as a whole. The spectrum of places and spaces so generated is, in many ways, a map of modern public life. At one end, we have the opera, and at the other, the library. Few people go to the opera (or the theatre) by themselves: opera houses are places for public display, for haul-bourgeois social interaction, [3] as well as appreciation of the most elaborate (and expensive) form of performance art. J.L.C. Gamier, the architect of the Paris Opera, the most lavish and technically adventurous arts centre of the nineteenth century, claimed that in his auditorium, the eyes begin to be gently charmed, then the imagination follows them into a sort of dream; one drifts into a feeling of well-being'. [4 ] The audience is intended to be given an experience that transports them all into a commonly shared other world, far beyond the everyday.

Shared experience

At the other end of the spectrum of buildings for the arts are those for the more individual pursuits of history, literature and scientific scholarship. The library is essentially a place for private contemplation and activity -- we rarely go there in groups, and each of us almost certainly has different interpretations of experience. Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx both worked in Sydney Smirke's British Museum library, but emerged with radically different views about the nature of society; Lenin and George Bernard Shaw must have been contemporaries there too, but, although both were left wing, the Irishman had nothing of the iron fanaticism of the Russian, nor the Russian the wit of the Irish. Yet, all users must have had some degree of feeling in common: they were working in a great temple to knowledge; they shared a devotion to scholarship, to contemplation and imagination.

In the middle of the spectrum of buildings for the arts is the museum and gallery. Georges Bataille, the ingenious French mid-twentieth century critic, [5] observed the nature of museums in his age. 'A museum is like the lungs of a city -- every Sunday the crowds flow through the museum like blood, coming Out purified and fresh. The paintings are only dead surfaces, and the play, the flashes, the streams of light described by authorised critics occur within the crowd. On Sunday, at five o'clock, at the exit of the Louvre, it is interesting to admire the streams of visitors, who are visibly animated by the desire to be totally like the heavenly apparitions with which their eyes are still enraptured.' [6]

Virtual what?

Few have been more perceptive than Bataille about relationships between individual and group consciousness, and the importance of institution and edifice in generating our perceptions of the arts. But now, there are many who believe that buildings, and perhaps institutions, are out of date. Christine Boyer in her rapsodic hymn to the virtual world, Cybercities, suggests that the specifics of time, space, and architecture that Siegfried Giedion discussed in the early 1940s have been condensed or eradicated by our instantaneous modes of telecommunications, telemarketing, telepresence and telesurveillance. Here, all our bodily senses get transferred to, plugged into, or downloaded into machines, as our body parts become simple emitters and receivers of informational stimuli in a sensorial feedback loop that links our senses of sight, touch, smell and hearing to information flowing through computer data banks and simulation programs. Reality is increasingly immaterial'. [7] So, apparently, we don't need buildings at all. Just plug in, and all the world's art will be in your head in a trice.

One of the troubles with the arguments of the virtual reality enthusiasts is that their reality is far from what most of us recognise as such. Virtual reality gadgets will undoubtedly become more sophisticated in the future, but we are a very long way indeed from being able to relate electronically the image of a rose and its scent, never mind the velvety texture of its petals or the slippery, prickly feeling of its leaves to tongue and fingers.

Do you suppose that looking at Michelangelo's Pieta on a screen or through virtual reality specs will ever be as moving as the real thing in St Peter's? Of course, not everyone will get to Rome, and even for those of us who have seen the astonishing thing, it is useful and poignant to be able to conjure up some sort of remembrance electronically. Can virtual reality ever create a similar effect to the one that Wagner hoped to achieve with his mystische Abgrund? That 'mystic gull' between audience and action at Bayreuth opera house, where he hoped that 'it makes the spectator imagine the stage is quite far away, though he sees it in all the clearness of its actual proximity; and this in turn gives rise to the illusion that the persons appearing on it are of larger, superhuman nature'. [8] It is easy make actors seem larger than life electronically, but it is impossible to understand how the extremely complex relationship that Wagner hoped to create between individual members of the audience, the audience as a group, the scene and actors can possibly be reproduced electronically.

Provoking thoughts

Real spaces (buildings) and real art works: paintings, sculptures, concerts, even books, are multi-valent, sometimes contradictory. Their physicality and our responses to it, and to each other as members of the same audience, gallery promenade or reading room, continuously change. Some have suggested that the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina (p40) is outdated: a dinosaur, descendant of a great tradition that begins in the nineteenth century with Sydney Smirke and Labrouste's Bibliotheque Nationale, but which has now been outmoded by electronics and the World Wide Web. But such interpretation is crass.

The Internet (cautiously used) can be a marvellous source of facts: paper encyclopedias are indeed outmoded by electronic versions and multiple sources of information. But we need physical libraries and the books they contain because culture is far more complex than acquisition and assembly of facts. It is about thought and sensation. Every page of every book that has ever been published cannot possibly be electronically recorded and made keyboard interrogable. Yet we cannot decide which books, which sets of thoughts, are going to be important in future. So we have to have places in which books can be kept, where they can be consulted, and where readers can be part of a scholarly community.

Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Alexandria library, has said that his institution must be 'a library for the digital age'. [9] But, as he knows very well, his great building will contain aged, fragile manuscripts and drawings, irreplaceable editions, masses of books that no one wants to consult at thc moment, as well as everything that a modern student might want, and much (both electronic and on paper) that cannot be imagined yet. And it must provide a place in which scholarship is fostered, not just functionally, but socially as well.

Snohetta's building is intended to generate such interactions. So must all architecture for the arts: at their best, arts buildings help you think in multifarious ways. That is what they are for.

(1.) Associated now with horrendous seas of gore, but in classical times, there was not such a clear distinction between amusement, religion and the arts. Although the Romans had given up human sacrifice, the Games were considered, even by such apparently decent people as Pliny, to be essential as a means of toughening up a martial people to sights of bloody bravery -- and the Games were held on national holy days, with religious rites at site beginning and end. So in our time, it does not seem entirely bizarre that philistine modern governments should make ministries for both the arts and sports.

(2.) Analysed with clarity in Supercollector, a critique of Charles Saatchi, by Hatton, Rita and John Walker, Ellipsis, London, 2000.

(3.) Hence one of Hitler's most triumphant evenings, when he went to hear Wagner in Garnier's Paris Opera immediately after German victory. He was establishing his posh cultural credentials.

(4.) Quoted in Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man, Faber, London, 1993, p208.

(5.) And pornographer.

(6.) Bataille, Georges, 'Museum', quoted its Rethinking Architecture, ed Neil Leads, Routlege, London, 1907, p22.

(7.) Boyer, Christine, Cybercities, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1996, p11.

(8.) Quoted in Sennett, idem.

(9.) AR August 2001, p18.