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This volume is not perfect. As noted above, there is no bibliography included in the print version of the book. And, although there are footnotes, many ‘facts’ are actually the opinions of other authors who are not always identified. Koplos and Metcalf admit in the foreword that they have drawn heavily on the research of others, but are inconsistent in crediting their ideas. Research notes for each chapter, in which Koplos and Metcalf outlined their sources would have been very welcome. Despite these shortcomings, the book is a good start, and provides enough raw mater-ial for instructors and students to grow their interests beyond the printed page. The hope is that craft and craft history will become standard subjects in fine arts, art history and American history classes, expanding the definition of art and knowledge of a wide range of objects that help us examine and understand the human experience.

doi:10.1093/jdh/eps041Advance Access publication 17 October 2012

Ellen Paul DenkerIndependent Scholar and Exhibition CuratorBurnsville, NC, USAE-mail: ellen.denker@verizon.net

In addition, the password-protected instructor section of the complementary website helps educators develop classroom discussion and learning activities to enhance interpretation of Makers, including many of the book’s images in PowerPoint format. For each chapter, the web-site lists learning objectives, quiz questions, essay ques-tions, discussion topics, writing topics and activities. These resources can be downloaded as Word or PDF files. The website is being tested in instructional situations and updated as a result. According to CCCD staff, more videos will be added in the future.

Fig 1. Mary Walker Phillips, Knitted Wall Hanging, 1965. (© Mary Walker Phillips Estate. Photograph courtesy of Patricia Abrahamian.) From Makers: A History of American Studio Craft by Janet Koplos and Bruce Metcalf. Copyright © 2010 by The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design, Inc. Used with permission from the University of North Carolina Press (www.uncpress.unc.edu)

American Art Museum Architecture: Documents and Design

Eric M. Wolf, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. 272 pp., 77 b&w and 46 col. illus., cloth, $75.00. ISBN: 9780393732801

American Art Museum Architecture is a sumptu-ously illustrated history of the buildings of six different American museums. The buildings range in age from nearly 150 years old to unbuilt as of publication, and they house institutions ranging from a single-artist exhibition and research centre to an ever-expanding encyclopae-dic collection. The book is ambitious in scope, seeking to expose the ‘relationship between design, function, and mission in the building type of the museum’ (p. viii) by tracing design decisions made by architect and cli-ent, decisions informed by museum functions and con-strained by institutional documents such as founding wills and mission statements. Eric Wolf’s thesis is that these documents ‘elucidate the original (and often changing) institutional goals that underlie the design decisions that inform the actual buildings that house the collections

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and programming’ (p. xi) and thus influence the ultimate design of the building. The best example is that of the home built by Henry Frick, whose will declared that it and the collections would become a public museum upon the death of his wife; subsequent additions have scrupu-lously maintained the original character of the building.

Wolf begins with an overview of the history of museum buildings, in two sections: western museums from antiquity to the eighteenth century, and American muse-ums from the Gilded Age through today. No small task, but Wolf makes it simpler by devoting only two pages to each era, necessitating a brief gloss rather than an in-depth history. He ends with a discussion of the role of the building in the museum experience. An institution with three inter-related functions—‘the collection, the pres-ervation, and the exhibition of artworks’ (p.  202)—the museum holds a particular challenge for finding an ideal style for the building, which must not only support those functions but also express the museum identity, make an aesthetic statement, and not compete with the art. The book concludes with a chapter on the impossibility of finalizing once and for all what is the best way to design a museum—as functions and collections change, so must the buildings that house them.

In between these broader chapters lies the meat of the book, an in-depth look at six museums and the buildings that house them. He addresses the Frick Museum, the Menil Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art,

the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Chicago Institute of Art. For each, Wolf describes the history of the building or build-ings that the museum occupies, as well as describing buildings no longer occupied and buildings that were never built but whose designs exist in the archives. He primarily uses institutional documents, including photo-graphs, designs, and floor plans, founding charters or wills, mission statements, vision statements, and publi-city materials, sometimes quoting from them at length, as when he block-quotes ten full paragraphs from a press release and statement about the opening of the Menil Collection, from 1981 (pp. 49–50). The assumption that the founding ideals and mission statements impact indi-vidual museum design underlies and restricts the choice of documents, focusing the archival work. Thus, the choice of documents was defined by the author’s thesis. The choice of museums, however, was partly intellectual, with ‘each selected as an example of a different type of institution, to present a broad cross-section of American art museums’ (p. xii), and partly a matter of convenience, based on ‘the availability of archival material and the relative ease of access to it’ (p. xii). For two-thirds of the cases, he also interviews sitting museum directors, for an understanding of their vision of the future of the organ-ization and its buildings. His sources are primary and very narrowly defined, and provide a window into the evolu-tion of the buildings as they are today.

Thus, in the best chapters, Wolf opens the black box of the built environment, to understand not just what the buildings look like, but some of the reasons they look like they do; by investigating the unbuilt and the built-then-razed alternatives—abandoned designs or abandoned buildings—he is writing a history of contingencies. The contingencies he focuses on are those of the museum mission, collection, and occasionally the personalities of individual directors, claiming that stated functions impact ultimate building design. In doing so, Wolf helps look below the surface of design history.

However, he does not disturb the smooth surface of design history nearly enough. He makes ripples, but no splash: Wolf does not trace causality or agency or broader societal issues enough to help us understand all the workings of design decisions. For example, when discuss-ing the design of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe [1], Wolf makes no mention of city-wide require-ments for buildings to match a version of Pueblo Style to enhance tourism. Instead, he says, ‘Georgia O’Keeffe’s homes and studios in New Mexico, at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, were traditional New Mexico adobe buildings.

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So it was logical for the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to be designed along similar lines, although on a scale and with a program consistent with its purpose as a public art gal-lery’ (p. 120). More discussion of the regulatory climate could have helped readers understand all of the restric-tions that the architect, Richard Gluckman, was working within, while engaging larger issues of tourism, city plan-ning, and economic realities. In this instance, the design of the building was formed by more than just the mission and vision of the museum.

Furthermore, Wolf talks about the designs that never were or might have been, but gives us few reasons why the design changed. When discussing an unbuilt, block-size Michael Graves design for a 1980 Whitney expansion, he speaks dismissively about the ‘predictable NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) response’ (p. 105), without discussing any fur-ther details of the neighbours’ objections to the postmod-ern giant of a design. Wolf credits that NIMBY response, combined with ‘the thought that this addition was disres-pectful to Marcel Breuer’s building and the very modernist philosophy underlying it’ (p. 105), for the Whitney’s aban-donment of the proposed expansion. Similarly, he makes only passing reference to larger changes in architectural theory and style, choosing to stay focused on his agenda of matching design decisions with institutional documents. He relates some of the design decisions to larger archi-tectural movements, but lightly: when he says of Marcel Breuer’s deign for the Whitney Museum, ‘Breuer’s use of richer materials would differentiate the Whitney from the “brutalism” that was becoming more and more domin-ant in the modern architecture of the time, though the general massing and use of projecting higher floors like

inverted steps would be themes explored by that move-ment’ (pp. 96–7), Wolf assumes a familiarity with modern architecture on the part of his readers.

Although there is a body of scholarship available on the social functions of museum designs, Wolf does not engage with it. A classic example is Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, London, 1995), where he explores c. 1900 museum architecture as one tool for regulating behaviour and for instilling ideas of racial and class superiority. Similarly, Carol Duncan argues in Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (Routledge, London, 1995) that even recently-built art museums are sites of ritual, a stage where the public comes to enact scripted performances in homage to ideas about citizenship, class, and the ideal citizen, and that museum design helps support that behaviour. Both of those authors intertwine the study of architectural features with relevant social issues, with Duncan spend-ing a chapter investigating the complications that arise when a donor who gives a significant collection speci-fies how it is to be displayed, sometimes in conflict with good conservation and display practices. In spite of the ample opportunity to address issues such as that—half of the museums he studies were established in wills—Wolf sticks close to his mission of illuminating museum build-ing design in light of the formal mission of each museum.

In focusing on what the documents say about the mission of each museum, Wolf trusts the founders and direct-ors to honestly and fully articulate vision and goals. But museums, and the buildings that house them, often have a purpose beyond what is ordained by founders. For the museum institution, this can include garnering donations of art and of money, improving its own standing in the museum community, and getting visitors in the door. For the museum building, raising funds can be an unstated goal, since often it must serve as its own fundraising mechanism. Furthermore, in the era of the Bilbao Effect, museum buildings are often invested with a city’s hopes of revitalization for neighbourhoods bereft in the wake of de-industrialization. Thus, museum buildings must do more than simply house art; they must also attract visitors to the museum and tourists to the city, rejuvenate waterfronts and downtowns, attract donors, and estab-lish the reputation of the museums they house. These are functions that Wolf touches on only lightly, and never in the case of a particular museum. The documents may be silent on this because they are beyond the narrow scope of the museum’s mission; that Wolf is silent on this means that his readers miss an important aspect of what drives museum design.

Fig 1. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, from Eric M. Wolf, American Art Museum Architecture: Documents and Design, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York & London, p. 113

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In spite of that lacuna, American Art Museum Architecture is as gorgeous as a coffee table book. The illustrations are mostly photographs and are abundant and beautiful—if short on floor plans for the more architecturally sophisti-cated readers—and help to give the reader a good sense of how the museums looked in any era. The thesis of the book helps focus and frame the documents and designs examined, and I  hope that museum scholarship con-tinues this pursuit of how ideological dictates—includ-ing the mission of the museum and how the founders wanted the collection displayed—impact upon aesthetic decisions. Wolf offers another avenue for understand-ing design decisions, beyond referencing worldwide style changes or an individual architect’s aesthetic. By defining his thesis narrowly, focusing on official documents about each museum’s mission and purpose, Wolf produces a good place to start for a scholar wanting to understand museum design beyond the individual decisions of each architect.

doi:10.1093/jdh/eps037Advance Access publication 17 October 2012

Georgia LindsayDepartment of ArchitectureUniversity of California, Berkeley, USAE-mail: georgia.lindsay@gmail.com

Global Design History

Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello & Sarah Teasley (eds), Routledge, 2011. 225 pp., 23 b&w illus., cloth, £80.00. ISBN: 9780415572859; paper, £21.99. ISBN: 9780415572873

This book starts from the premise that ‘global design history is not a topic but a methodology’ (p. 3), distinct from ‘transnational’ and ‘world’ histories of design. Unlike the latter, which have aimed to expand the geographical reach of design history through a better representation of ‘other nations’ in research, global design history is meant to focus on the globally inter-connected and multiple ways in which design is prac-tised. For this purpose, this book brings together a large variety of case studies, which cover a wide geographical, historical and disciplinary range.

The editors’ introduction sets out to sketch a method-ology for global design history, and describes two models: the ‘connections’ model, which studies network relations and flows of goods and information across geographical boundaries; and the ‘comparative’ model, which aims to

reveal national and regional difference and discontinu-ities. Whilst the introduction could have benefited from more theoretical specificity, it skilfully sets the scene for the diverse studies presented thereafter. The book further pro-motes diversity in approach by coupling each essay with a ‘response’. This strategy is immensely successful, since the responses not only facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue and highlight key themes, but also often suggest further global connectivity, pointing towards a larger set of global rela-tions than considered in the studies to which they respond.

Among papers that can be associated with the ‘con-nections’ model, three concentrate on the early mod-ern period, challenging the commonplace view of globalization as a twentieth- and twenty-first century phenomenon. In ‘The Global Renaissance’, Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Luca Molà demonstrate the dizzying movement of raw materials, dyes, and finished and semi-finished goods in that period as evidence of the global interconnections that underlay Renaissance material cul-ture. Anne Gerritsen’s piece focuses on one such com-modity, the blue-and-white porcelain from Jingdezhen, in order to describe the global dynamics of production, trade and consumption that converge on that one site.

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