From collecting the world to reflecting the world – what is the purpose of art galleries and museums?

Designed by the celebrated American-Chinese architect, I. M Pei, and built in 2008 on a man-made island approached by a broad walkway edged with palm trees, the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar is visually stunning. A wonderfully cool and airy space, it is an advertisement for the restrained and distinctive beauties of Islamic art. As you walk through the spacious entrance you are seduced by the shadowed light and calm atmosphere. In that sense, the Qatar Museum is of a type with many contemporary art galleries and museums across the world. Exhibition venues for art and artefacts have in our own lifetimes gradually become new kinds of public spaces, ones in which the buildings are as important as their holdings and in which reflecting the world is more important than collecting it.

Thousands of miles away, at the southern end of the Inca trail in the province of Salta in north-west Argentina, red raw earth roads twist and climb alongside broad alluvial river beds. The gloriously empty landscape is interrupted only by isolated villages and the continuing presence of an ancient indigenous culture. Set amongst them is a rare sight in these parts, a gallery building with adobe brick walls melding into the surrounding hills. After an excellent steak lunch in the vineyard restaurant and a sampling of the superb Bodega Colomé wines, a short pathway leads to the art gallery. Here the building is the artwork. There are no exhibits. The American artist James Turrell has been thoroughly indulged by the Hess Family – who own the vineyard – and allowed to use the bespoke building for a set of light installations with a skylight above. Walking through the installations (shaped by carefully placed apertures in the walls and roof) the spectator becomes a participant in the spectrum of light which alters as the day proceeds and as night follows. The James Turrell Museum is the epitome of a contemporary art museum in which the building and its effects are central.

Closer to home, contrast the British Museum with the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The great collection which erupts from the small Bloomsbury streets which surround it was a gathering point for artefacts drawn to it from across the world over two centuries. It was the late seventeenth century physician and naturalist, Hans Sloane, who began the assembling process and the title of a biography of him captures the mission of the museum perfectly: “Collecting the World”. The Centre Pompidou appears shining like a ship beached adjacent to the old fruit and vegetable market of Les Halles. On first visiting it you are shocked by its alien quality, set among the nearby streetscape. Its moving spirit was its architects, Richard Rogers assisted by Renzo Piano and others. The Centre can accommodate hundreds of paintings and other exhibits, but what distinguishes it is the extraordinary inside-out glass building. And that’s what visitors come to see: a gallery building which – quite literally – reflects the world around it.

The Centre Pompidou, completed in 1977, was a seminal part of a new wave of galleries and museums. Creative and often stunning architecture forged exhibition spaces where it would increasingly be the building which would draw the visitors in and do so on a new scale. The “visitor experience” was mediated by the building, the main attraction, with the exhibits within as accompaniments. The Canadian-born architect Frank Gehry rode the new wave with exuberant creations, first in North America and then in Europe and beyond. What attracted the many visitors who started to come to an off-the-beaten-track Bilbao in northern Spain, was Gehry’s 1997 masterpiece of seemingly elasticated metal structures, not what was inside it. Thereafter other cities wanted to induce the same pattern of visitor numbers and local economic impact. The red-brick walls and gleaming steel roofs of the Marta Herford contemporary art museum followed in 2005 in Herford, Germany. Further afield still, Gehry generated in 2013 the higgledy-piggledy set of multi-coloured shapes decked upon each other to form the Biomuseo in Panama.

A pattern in which gallery and museum buildings were becoming the primary draw for visitors influenced the renovation and restoration of old, often industrial, buildings as much as the creation of new ones. Gilbert-Scott’s Bankside Power Station was reconfigured in 2000 by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron as a venue for contemporary art with a Turbine Hall made into a striking central space. Meanwhile over a period of several years the British architect David Chipperfield’s design for the restoration of a mid-19th century building in central Berlin – damaged in the Second World War and neglected by the former GDR – came to glorious completion in 2009. Once more the building was the story and the immediate magnet of attention.

These various new and renovated buildings are but a few of many of course. What they offered gallery and museum curators was a chance to look anew at their holdings and when doing so to reflect actively on their professional roles in a changing world. This reorientation has not been straightforward and not without tensions. Exhibiting certain holdings formed initially in an age of European colonial expansion and acquisition, requires considerable cultural and political sensitivity. The process of reaching out to new partners in formerly colonial countries is not a simple process. The ongoing controversy attending the completion and launch of the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin illustrates some of the pitfalls. But museums and galleries in startling new buildings offer renewed platforms of engagement and possible means of cross-cultural outreach.

Among the building blocks for such future linkages and connections is the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa established in 2017 in Cape Town. Again, the new building is the starting point and – initially at least – the core attraction. The architects, Thomas Heatherwick and his London-based Studio, re-imagined the old grain silos on the Cape Town waterfront into a large set of galleries and educational spaces. It is a huge initiative and a huge building. The Zeitz building is much remarked upon. A growing collection of African art will allow Africa to exhibit its rich artefacts and paintings at a museum gallery in its own continent. If all goes well the new museum could also help provide points of connection and exchange between older African art holdings held in European collections and emerging new collections in Africa.

Notwithstanding the sensitivities, art and artefacts can help form bridges across cultures. They can be a diplomatic tool. The many stunning new galleries and museums springing up globally can help in that process. After all, who would have thought, even thirty years ago, that a new Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar would draw overseas eyes so successfully to itself.