Arts' powers: buildings for the arts have hit the headlines in recent years. True artistic integrity is stultified by the deathly embrace of marketing. Imagination and inspiration are needed.

Once upon a time, culture was unified. None of the participants in the great annual Panathenaic procession, who followed the way up the Acropolis through the Propylaea, past the temple of Nike Apteros to wind their way round the Parthenon, had much notion of the differences we now see between art and science, sacred and profane, political and poetic. The Parthenon was in itself simultaneously a celebration of extraordinary engineering and entrepreneurial skills, political prowess and martial will, religious conviction and astonishing artistic ability.

Since the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, we have managed to carve civilization into separate compartments, each inward turned and often indifferent or even hostile to the contents of its neighbours. This fragmentation of culture into bits almost unlinked by intellect and emotion has been immensely successful economically. In the last two centuries, societies that have pursued the culture of the production line, with its separation and specialization of parts, have proved immensely more successful economically than ones that have followed more traditional and holistic paths.

But, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are beginning to see that the systems that have provided so much affluence for many are ultimately unsustainable, and, by progressive destruction of the planet, must lead to continual erosion of all to the condition of most of humanity--poverty and domination by scoundrels--the tyrannies and tortures of the Dark Ages reinforced with modern technology.

The fragmentation of culture naturally led to the production of buildings for separate functions. Nowhere has this been more extreme than in those for the arts. Instead of the Parthenon, Hagia Sophia or St Peter's, in which all aspects of human consciousness and physical celebration are focused, we now have separate places in which we are allowed to look at paintings, films, drama, sculpture and opera.

Milestones

Such buildings have often been splendid. Think of the wonderful range of the theatre as a building type from Palladio and Scamozzi's Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza (in which the scene is always set) to the Total Theater project of Walter Gropius, perhaps the first where relationships of the cast, the audience and the plot could be totally transformed by the imagination of the director. Or think of the ways in which public museums as a type have produced so many fine buildings from Robert Smirke's formal British treasure house to Piano and Rogers' Pompidou Centre, a celebration of the ever-changing nature of visual culture, intended at first to be much more flickering and dynamic than the building we have now. Or, looking at galleries, think of the differences between the elegant and sensuously austere (though firmly disciplinarian) early nineteenth-century Neo-Classical Glyptothek by von Klenze in Munich and Louis Kahn's luminous and fluid Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth.

Clearly, all these buildings are key milestones in the development of modern culture. On the whole, the differences between the earlier and the later ones show how the arts have become more and more generally accessible, and the buildings that house them more flexible. Galleries and museums for instance have moved from being more or less private royal and aristocratic institutions to places that are open to everyone (often free in civilized countries). Theatres are now available to a far wider range of people than they were when they were first enclosed (though the partly enclosed theatres of Shakespeare's time seem to have been every bit as popular as sport is today). The democratization of the arts has engendered some of the greatest buildings of the last century and a half.

On the other hand, film, the democratic art of the twentieth century, has left little impact on architecture and the built environment; almost all the great picture palaces of the '20s and '30s are gone now, their plaster halls demolished or transmuted into utilitarian warrens of small-screen darkened burrows. Cinemas have been eroded by television--by far the most popular cultural medium. They have been forced either to close or to offer much more choice than they had in their great period.

Analogously, the power of television has perhaps caused other buildings for the arts to change and, in some cases, the nature of art itself. It is hard to imagine for instance that without television, we would have the simplistic charms of Jeff Koons or absurdities of BritArt: Tracey Emin's unmade bed or the Chapman brothers' facile transformations of shop-window mannequins into monsters. Television has simultaneously engendered a desire for instant sensation, celebration of the banal and constant change. The arts have responded and so, to some extent, have the buildings that house them, some of which adopt similar strategies of surprise, shock and superficiality.

Televisual spaces

One of these is Libeskind's museum in Berlin (AR April 1999), where the building undoubtedly dominates its contents, shock and surprise are included in the events of the route through the building. They are intended to evoke the terrible horrors and tragedies that overwhelmed the city's Jews between 1933 and 1945, but their effects are strangely muted and less than aweinspiring because the architect was (then) inexperienced in manipulating space. The much-vaunted jagged pattern of fenestration must remain merely superficial (and annoyingly glare-creating internally) to almost everyone. For all the architect's explanations of its being an abstraction of Berlin Jewish life in space and time, no one but Libeskind can explain how the plan diagrams he evolved relate to the places they relate now that they are elevated.

In contrast, some of the other iconic arts buildings from the tailend of last century, for instance, Gehry's Bilbao gallery (AR December 1997), and his Concert Hall in Los Angeles (AR March 2004) really relate to their cities and to the arts they serve, though they too are concerned with surprise and even shock. The Guggenheim is carefully moulded to be a crucial visual focus of a rather drab city; its spaces are appropriate to the exhibits they contain. The Disney Hall brings new dimensions to the notoriously anti-urbane LA downtown. Besides being a landmark in what is almost an urban wilderness, it provides an external promenade and green open spaces for flaneurs (a rare breed in Los Angeles). Internally, a series of public spaces (with strong echoes of Scharoun's Philharmonie) provides a variety of routes and gathering places. Going to the opera in LA can be as dramatic a social event as going to a concert in Berlin.

Expect more

Such socialization of buildings for the arts is proper and natural in democracies, where funding for them comes largely from the state, either in the form of tax concessions (in the USA) or grants (in Europe and elsewhere). So we have a right to expect that they should offer discernible public good. But we should expect more. In places that are by definition the foci of creative activity and imagination, there should surely be interaction between the often increasingly subjective works of individual artists and humanity's greatest challenge; the environmental crisis. Though there are indications that some artists, and certainly some architects, are aware of the great need to face the issue. But, so far, little is to be seen in terms of buildings for the arts, yet in many ways, these have more licence to experiment than any other building types. They should be showing the way towards unifying culture again.