\nWith the success of Bilbao\u2019s Guggenheim Museum fresh in the memory, civic planners continue to put their faith in showpiece architecture, with often-variable results<\/p>\n
By Helen Clark
\nColourful and chaotic, a hive of life in the midst of sedate Singapore, Little India has always been regarded as a loose cannon. But as of April 2015, the enclave has a signature civic centrepiece that can hold its own with the shiny architectural marvels elsewhere in the city-state. Coming in at a cool SGD20 million (USD14.24 million), the Indian Heritage Centre certainly stands out from the surrounding faded shophouses, markets and curry restaurants. Designed by acclaimed practice Greg Shand Architects, the building houses art galleries, educational and community spaces and is the first museum of its kind dedicated to the Indian community in Singapore.
\nThe striking structure with its distinctive glazed geometric fa\u00e7ade is an example of how planners continue to use cultural centrepieces to build the brand value of towns, cities and urban areas within them.
\nMuseums, art galleries, and other cultural and civic projects have been used to bolster prestige for millennia. Indeed, the first ever museum popped up in Alexandria in Egypt as far back as the 3rd Century BC. In recent years, however, the desire for new and often eye-wateringly expensive civic architecture has become ever more irresistible. Much of this is down to what is known as the \u201cBilbao effect.\u201d
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\nIn essence, it is the terrific economic effect a showpiece museum like the Guggenheim\u2019s outpost in Bilbao, Spain, can have on a town. According to The Economist, the Spanish town raked in more than USD110 million in its first three years in taxes alone; in 2013 one million people visited.
\nThis has given town planners and tourist boards alike the idea: invest in big-scale projects. But the knock-on benefits may not be as immediate and obvious across the world as hopeful planners think. The idea has been that such places are, fixed cost excepted, always going to be beneficial to the community. These showpieces can drain their surrounds. The push-pull effect of them upon a city and a city upon them is complicated.
\n\u201cFew cities command the accolade \u2018great\u2019 or even \u2018liveable\u2019 without a significant cultural presence. Successful cultural districts are therefore powerful policy tools. But they are difficult to get right, and expensive and politically embarrassing to get wrong,\u201d wrote Adrian Ellis, a global thought leader in international arts and culture, in The Art Newspaper in 2013, a month after the Global Cultural Districts Network, launched at the New Cities Summit in Sao Paulo.
\nAsia has good and great examples of successful civic architecture. In Singapore the new Indian Heritage Centre is the latest in a succession of projects that includes The Esplanade \u2013 Theatres on the Bay, an acclaimed performing arts centre. In Hong Kong, meanwhile, the M+ in Kowloon, a giant museum of visual culture due to open in 2019, is eagerly awaited.
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\nOther initiatives, however, have failed to set pulses racing quite so quickly. China went on such a museum-building spree that it fulfilled its new museum quota three years early but many lay empty of both visitors and artefacts.
\nMeanwhile, both Myanmar and Kazakhstan have built entire cities \u2013 Naypyidaw and Astana \u2013 to exemplify what their rulers see as national ideals, yet both have an odd, empty feel, cluttered with large monuments but little real culture.
\nPossibly Ellis had it right when he wrote: \u201cA successful cultural district is not one that is built, but one that, once built, thrives and animates the city or region that it serves.\u201d
\nAnd with the \u201cBilbao effect\u201d continuing to be a huge factor in thinking, the likelihood of more grandiose projects \u2013 successful or otherwise \u2013 is as set in stone as the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the first purpose-built public museum in the world.
\nThe Good\u2026<\/p>\n
The Esplanade, Singapore
\nSingapore was once an unfortunate butt of many jokes. What do you call the only shopping centre with a seat at the United Nations? Singapore. However, in recent years the city-state has turned itself around becoming a hub for art, design and clever use of urban space. Just look at its airport after all. The Esplanade, Theatres on the Bay is a large performing arts centre and one of the busiest in the world, with some 3,000 shows a year. It is also both not-for-profit and Singapore\u2019s national performing arts centre.
\nPhoto credit: pommepal.wordpress.com
\nMONA, Tasmania \u00a0
\nFender Katsalidis Architects built MONA, with three levels underground, with ceilings that reach up three floors in places, built for some of the more grandiose exhibits. The building and approach to it by boat are almost, if not quite, as famous as David Walsh\u2019s extensive collection. Though essentially a private venture Walsh\u2019s MONA has helped to revitalise Tasmania\u2019s tourism industry and offers free entry to all Tasmanians, also, earning it a few points in the added cultural value stakes.
\nThe Star, part of the Urban Xchange festival, Penang, Malaysia \u00a0<\/p>\n
A recent, purpose-built exhibit made from cables and LEDs in an unfinished building The Star is part of the Urban Xchange festival in Malaysia which aims to \u201cbring Butterworth (the under-loved port on the Malaysian mainland opposite Penang capital Georgetown) back to life and catalyst its industrial charms as an appeal for further artistic development.\u201d The theme of the festival is urban renewal. But in a more creative fashion than simple gentrification. This grassroots collection of artworks and installations is (arguably) almost an anti-Bilbao, more about repurposing and revitalising than a shiny castle on a hill.<\/p>\n
Museum of Islamic Art, Doha
\nAh, Doha\u2026 known to be featureless, hot and flat. Its Museum of Islamic Art, however, is something to behold. Opened in 2008, the New York Times said: \u201cthe museum\u2019s colossal geometric form has an ageless quality, evoking a past when Islamic art and architecture were a nexus of world culture. At the same time it conveys a hope for reconnecting again.\u201d It is far from the flash of much of region and from Gehry\u2019s shiny Guggenheim, too. Its collection, spanning centuries and continents, including Islamic Spain, is as worthy as the building it is housed in.
\nThe Bad\u2026<\/p>\n
Uppatasanti Pagoda, Naypyidaw
\nNaypyidaw is Myanmar\u2019s decade-old capital, conceived then built long before anyone dreamed of a free election in the nation. Empty, multi-lane highways and golf courses, fun parks, a zoo and a manmade beach by a lake all decorate the empty capital. Few wish to live in this strange and isolated showpiece and even foreign aid workers prefer to spend donor money on regular USD350 return flights from Yangon than live here permanently. A quick-reference metaphor for all this is the Uppatasanti pagoda. It is a replica of the feted Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon. Only this one is hollow.<\/p>\n
Khan Shatyr Entertainment Centre, Astana
\nPurpose-built Astana is 18 years old. Strange sights abound and the story goes the place was almost named for the Central Asian nation\u2019s only post-Soviet leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev. The city is certainly a juxtaposition of many things, and can be described as a kind of \u201cSoviet Disneyland.\u201d The Khan Shatyr mall, the world\u2019s biggest tent, is one telling showpiece. The Norman Foster-designed space has an indoor beach (in a country where temperatures get to minus 40 degrees Celsius).
\nPhoto credit: Artistintheworld.com
\nRed Brick Museum, Beijing \u00a0
\nChina may be emblematic of both the notion that great cities must have great culture and that recklessly building up cultural centres like apartment blocks and overpasses is not quite how culture and art work. The new and shiny Red Brick Museum is just one (of several thousand) examples of this. As The Economist wrote in 2013, \u201cIt is like walking into an empty Olympic swimming pool.\u201d It is part of a boom that saw 3,866 museums by 2012 and 451 opened that year alone. That is a lot of new culture in anyone\u2019s parlance, but it will take an especially clever (or amenable) economist to quantify the mass effect it will have upon China\u2019s liveability or prestige.
\nThe Future\u2026
\nAcrylic Fish Tanks, Custom Aquarium, Thailand
\nImage credit: ICM
\n\u201cThink Bilbao Effect, with fish!\u201d Ludicrous at that statement initially sounds International Concept Management (ICM) is opening up shop in Thailand and hoping that as the star of the showpiece museum fades over parts of the west it is still in its ascendancy in Asia, and no more so than in one of the world\u2019s top tourist destinations. They are, it seems, hoping a statement aquarium will attract visitors the way the Guggenheim did, and they have done well before creating one-off and stunning aquariums in Russia and Morocco.
\nPhoto credit: VPANG architects
\nM+, West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong
\nThis ambitious endeavour will open in 2019, two years behind schedule. This is very much at the \u201cStarchitecture\u201d end of the civic space spectrum, with hopes the huge hub will be a worthy Asian rival to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The museum alone is to be 60,000 sqm and the curatorial board for the place is weighty at 21 members.<\/p>\n