The New Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

The new Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University looks at first glance like a campus radical.

Designed by New York architect Rafael Vinoly, the $24 million, 65,000-square-foot museum is a collection of five, bunkerlike concrete enclosures connected to one another by a central court surmounted by a huge glass skylight held in place by thrusting beams of steel.

Nothing could be more different from the soaring neo-Gothic contours of Duke Chapel or the neo-Georgian buildings on the Duke East Campus, which exemplify the historical revival styles popular on U.S. campuses in the 1920s.

But while the Nasher museum's contemporary style differs from the rest of Duke, it is in many ways a fundamentally conservative piece of museum architecture.

It expresses the self-effacing philosophy that the first job of an art museum is to frame the experience of looking at art, not to compete with it.

This makes the Nasher museum part of a growing backlash against architect Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a stunning assemblage of curvaceous forms covered with a shimmering titanium skin.

When it opened in 1997, Gehry's building overnight transformed a dying industrial city in northern Spain into a global tourist attraction.

Since then, art museums in other cities around the world have tried to