Dynamic Design of Museums

Dynamic Design of Museums
Museum architecture used to be a quiet, neutral background for the display of art. But ever since Frank Lloyd Wright shaped New York's Guggenheim Museum into a giant corkscrew, architects have been treating exhibition spaces as attention-grabbing artworks in their own right.

The current master of this approach is Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry, who has been shaking up the staid museum world for the past two decades. Like Mr. Wright, Mr. Gehry earned international fame for his own inventively curvaceous Guggenheim. In Bilbao, Spain, the titanium-clad offspring of the New York museum opened in 1997 and quickly turned the declining industrial city into a major tourist destination.

That success has prompted other institutions to commission their own Gehry creations in hopes of repeating the "Bilbao effect" and boosting their public profile and visitor attendance. One of them is the Corcoran Museum of Art. Five years ago, the Corcoran selected Mr. Gehry to expand its exhibition and educational spaces with a major addition along New York Avenue, due to break ground in 2006.

Enclosed by rippling metal walls and roof, the edgy expansion has left some wondering why Washington's oldest museum would choose to build a contemporary design so at odds with its stately beaux-arts galleries.

To put its selection in perspective, t