If they build it, you will come

It started in previously ignored Bilbao. then last year, more than five million people thronged London's Tate Modern. Now Rem Koolhaas has designed a Guggenheim in Vegas. It's called 'architourism' and it's the hottest trend in travel, writes James Culham

Architecture and tourism are more connected than ever now that museum directors and mayors the world over are trying to redraw the globe's cultural map, commissioning spectacular contemporary architecture by the Michelangelos and Leonardos of our time.

The World Trade Center, built in 1973, was one of the earliest examples of contemporary architecture as tourist attraction, a trend which only gained significant momentum in the late 1990s. The skyscraper, like jazz music, is an American form and its best examples exist there. As one of New York City's most popular tourist attractions, thetwin towers were powerful expressions of American contemporary culture.

Rather than visiting only monuments from earlier eras - the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Central Park - tourists were drawn to the towers. They were the buildings that local architecture critics loved to hate, but to many tourists they spoke eloquently of their time and place. Although the future plans for the site are unclear, it will undoubtedly be of tremendous interest as a reflection of the ideals and values of a post-September 11th New York City.

The connection between architecture and tourism is nothing new. Since the Grand Tours of the 17th through 19th centuries, travellers have acquainted themselves with the great art and architecture of Europe. Affluent North Americans and Europeans toured Paris, Florence, Rome, Venice, London, Athens and other grand capitals of European civilization seeking inspiration, sophistication and education.

Today, however, a new kind of grand tour is taking place. In place of such sublime cathedrals and grand public buildings as St. Peter's in Rome and the pre-pyramid Loubre in Paris, travellers are now celebrating contemporary culture, seeking out the most interesting new buildings by living architects. Think Norman Fster's modernist British Museum, not Ye Olde London.

After years of neglect, Berlin is rebuilding with vigour and success. Nondescript American cities such as Milwaukee and Oakland are investing hue amounts of money and effort in architecture, hoping to generate some attention among travellers. And Tokyo, long-neglected by the world travelling public, has commissioned Canadian Bruce Mau and a host of other "starchitects" to create the Mori Arts Centre, which will be the country's largest and grandest arts and culture museum.

The impetus and most significant building in the trend, of course, is Frank O. Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, built in 1997. Arguably, never before had a bulding possessed such alchemical powers, transforming a provincial mining town in the Basque region of northern Spain into a major player on the world art and culture circuit. Like Frank Lloyd Wright's New York Guggenheim before it, Bilbao was an extraordinary event in the history of architecture.

Bilbao's success can be measured by the heretofore unheard of art and architecture tour packages to the town and the throngs of tourists that have had tremendous impact on the local economy.

But, ironically, the "Bilbao effect," as the phenomenon has come to be known, is as much a product of press coverage of a strikingly photogenic bulding and its iconoclastic creator, as it is about actually visiting the building.

Although it has been tremendously successful at attracting people, physically, to the region, it has been even more influential at drawing the eyes of the world to an otherwise remote and obscure location.

There is a dark side to this attention, however. Like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Guggenheim in Bilbao is as much a symbol as it is a building and has often been subject to bomb threats from Basque nationalists.

London has never had a problem attracting attention. The original Tate Museum recognized it would need a spectacular new building in addition to the current space if it was going to compete for visitors in the museum-rich metropolis. In an international competition that included many of the biggest names in architecture today, Swiss firm Herzog & de Mueron was chosen. Opening in the spring of 2000, the Tate Modern museum's expectations of approximately 1.5 million visitors in the first year were exceeded by over five million people. The dramatic response is widely, and accurately, attributed to Herzog & de Mueron's striking achievement.

The firm was subsequently awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Architecture in May.

The phenomenal success of these and other recent projects have also been duly noted by mayors and museum directors around the world, keen to catapult their cities and museums into the big leagues via this now tried and tested method. Indeed, in the United States alone, there are currently 40 museums in various stages of new construction or building additions, most with "label" architects. Milwaukee and Oakland, Calif., in particular are attempting to attract world attention with an iconic addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum and Oakland's Christ the Light Cathedra, both by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, creator of the Galleria at Toronto's BCE Place.

Calatrava has recently completed the largest cultural project in Europe, Spain's City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia and an elegant new airport in Bilbao, Spain, which some say eclipses Gehry's nearby Guggenheim in importance.

Reunified Berlin, currently reasserting its position as a major capital of Europe, is perhaps the one city that embodies this trend more than any other. Like Hollywood moview, current Berlin architecture projects are best described by the names attached to them: Norman Foster's redesigned Reichstag, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas's Netherlands Embassy, Frank Gehry's DG Bank headquarters, Santiago Calatrava's Kronprizen bridge and Italian Renzo Piano's multifaceted, multiarchitect new Potsdamer Platz are among the more notable.

Avant-garde Polish architect Daniel Libeskind, who is also the designer of the controversial proposed extension to London's staid Victoria & Albert museum, has created the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Because of initial difficulties with museum programming, the institution decided to open without an exhibit at all - nothing aside from Libeskind's architecture. The public response to this mute, powerful space has been so positive that the museum diretors considered continuing without exhibits at all. Since the beginning of 1999, 350,000 visitors have experienced the architecture and the museum, which was officially opened in September, featuring a collection of 4,000 artifacts.

In an even more explicit use of design to define a city, the newly envisioned Mori Arts Centre in Tokyo, which is to be the largest contemporary art/culture museum in Japan, has assembled an A-list of international design talent to bring its ambitious urban planning, development and cultural ambitions to fruition. American architect Richard Gluckman, British design guru Sir Terence conran, Japanese designer Fumihiko Maki and corporate architects Kohn Pederson Fox have been joined by Toronto designer Bruce Mau.

Mau understands his role is, in part, to communicate Tokyo's contemporary culture to the wider world, while at the same time encouraging local residents to consider their won city in a new way; partly a record of what exists, but also a manifesto for what the city might become. "If yo ulook at how Tokyo compares, for instance, in tourism, the numbers are just staggeringly low compared to places like Paris or London or New York," Mau explains.

"They just simply don't attract, they have hardly any infrastructure of pleasure in that touristic sense. So building something like the Mori Art Centre is actually part of re-thinking the infrastructure of the city."

Meanwhile, back in Las Vegas, the Guggenheim is further blurring the lines between high architecture and mass tourism with a new museum in the Venetian Hotel by Rem Koolhaas, which opened Oct. 7.

The audacity of a venerated art institution like the Guggenheim joining its fate with a casino hotel designed to look like Venice's Doges Palace is beyond kitsch. The art elite of New York and London are collectively holding their heads, and noses, waiting to see how this experiment in architecture as spectacle pans out.

Koolhaas however, who has recently been appointed to the Conde Nast publishers' editorial directors board, is nothing if not media savvy. In all likelihood, the Las Vegas Guggenheim will garner reams of column inches, magazine covers and hordes of curious holiday makers. Vegas odds suggest this will be seen as a new high or low water mark, depending on your perspective, in not high or low brow, but actually no-brow culture.

Here in Canada, the Royal Ontario Museum has begun the process of selecting an architect for a proposed $200 million renovation and addition. The Art Gallery of Ontario has also long been rumoured to be courting former Torontonian Frank Gehry for an addition.

All signs also seem to indicate that the public appetite for a connection between architecture and tourism will only increase. There is yet to be an example of a museum that has not benefited by an architectural face-lift.

Next summer's architecture grand tour promises to be especially rewarding, with a number of dramatic new buildings slated for the world expo held in four regions of Switzerland at the same time as the Venice Architecture Biennale, a mere four hours away by train.

top four photos - Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin

bottom photo - Libeskind's design proposal for London's Victoria & Albert Museum