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Indeed Europe and Japan have led the way. Since 1979 Linz, Austria, has hosted the annual Ars Electronica Festival for Art, Technology, and Society. Coinciding with the city's transformation from ailing industrial town to more prosperous business and technology center, the festival's growing importance eventually led to the construction of the Ars Electronica Center, which opened in 1996. At more than 21,000 square feet, the $15 million municipally owned structure signifies the city's efforts to redefine itself. "It was placed in the center of Linz at the head of the central bridge," says artistic director Gerfried Stocker. "This situation, in the city's cultural core, symbolizes its role as an interdisciplinary platform for art, technology, and science. It strongly influences the skyline of Linz and is experienced like a single sign."

Above: Some parts of the Art Center NABi building have become art themselves: earlier this year Young-Ran Kim's Chariot to the Heavens (left and center) turned an elevator into a seemingly infinite space using a video of skies and taped forest sounds. With its plans for Mediatheque (right), the Walker Art Center will incorporate new-media and performance art.
Designed by local architects Klaus Leitner and Walter Michl, the building is meant to serve as an icon for the city's ambitions. It's a self-described "museum of the future" where one receives a coded chip-card for admission at the Login Gateway, uses it to log on to interactive exhibits, and then maybe goes up to the Sky Media Loft for a cup of coffee. But despite these bold pronouncements and euphemistic designations, the structure itself is well-grounded. Basically a cube with bands of glass at the top and street levels, its interior relies primarily on run-of-the-mill right angles, though streaks of light along the stairwell lend a futuristic flair, and the extensive use of "blue-box blue" to color the walls and floors is, according to Leitner, "a reference to the analog media of video and TV, which sets up a contrast with the new media of the digital age." Like Lot/ek's design for the New Museum, the Ars Electronica Center appears to be setting up the future as a condition defined by its opposition with the past.

On the other hand, the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), which opened in 1997 on three floors of a Tokyo high-rise, takes the position that there should be as little design as possible. Speaking for its designer, Brent Saville, who passed away shortly after its completion, colleague Kumiko Nagano explains that "the design concept was 'simplicity.' Brent used to say that interior design should not overstate design, and that a museum space should emphasize the works of art." As with the Beall Center and facilities like Seoul's Art Center NABi--which is only occasionally punctuated by such lively moments as its Chariot to the Heavens elevator--ICC has basically dressed itself as a standard "white box" art venue.

Of course there's nothing neutral about the white box (or the black box, its new-media cousin, necessitated by the advent of video and projection). Among other things, it further rarefies the art within it by virtue of its supposed neutrality. But it retains its supporters among those who find it more sensible not to reinvent the wheel, especially when the road hasn't even been built. "It's somewhat folly for architects to design for the impalpable experience," says Lawrence Rinder, who curated the Whitney Museum of American Art's digital-art exhibition BitStreams. "It's difficult to design for these purposes because the directions are so incredibly varied."

However, we're nearing the end of two centuries during which museum and architect have partnered to create edifices that reflect institutional discourses about the art within, manifested as the temple (the British Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Altes Museum), the civic palace (the Metropolitan Museum of Art), the rule-breaker (either of the freestanding Guggenheims, the Centre Georges Pompidou), and the educational campus (the Getty Center). But when the art inside proposes a subversion of space--and when Web-based projects, virtual museums, and online catalogs threaten to disperse the museum from its central location--is architecture's relevance in this highly prized cultural arena being compromised?

"The borders between what we think of as architecture and other forms of image making and space manipulation are disappearing under the influence of especially projected imagery," says Aaron Betsky, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute. "And artists are exactly those people who try to make all such developments evident."

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