One Smashing Smashup

But it's also possible that, paradoxically, Akron is behind the times just enough to be ahead of the curve when it comes to building serious and challenging buildings. For one thing is certain about Coop Himmelb(l)au: While the firm is doing cutting-edge work, its rhetoric is intellectually mired in the same era that saw the decline of Akron. The 1970s.

Consider its view of architecture, and cities.

"Our architecture is not domesticated," the firm's architects wrote. "It moves around in urban areas like a panther in the jungle."

This was a curious echo of a statement by Le Corbusier (whom Prix cites when discussing aspects of the new building), who once described the wealthy industrialists who commissioned architecture in similar terms: "Our industrial friends seem sheepish and shriveled like tigers in a cage."

The difference, of course, is that Corbusier was going to liberate the client, while Coop Himmelb(l)au imagined the architecture itself as a beast that needed liberating. And the city was its domain and perhaps its prey.

This strangely violent view of architecture, as a panther stalking in the city, is beautifully out of date. Most people who live in cities probably don't think of the urban landscape as a bleak fantasy out of "Blade Runner" or "Batman." Many cities, after years of decline, and despite lots of undistinguished new buildings, are functioning rather well, thank you. As cities grow healthier, it seems very likely that they also grow more conservative about their architecture. Why take chances? Keep the panther in the cage.

Coop Himmelb(l)au has mellowed over the years. Today the rhetoric is mostly aimed against the homogenization of globalization and the ill effects of commercial development. While Prix talks about architecture as "intervention," he also stresses the importance of the new museum's public spaces.

Still, it's tempting to conclude that this new building is on the prowl in Akron in part because the city has yet to enjoy the simultaneous prosperity and protectiveness of a truly reinvigorated urban landscape. It has built a 21st-century building, based on 1970s ideas, because it has not quite experienced the rebirth that other cities enjoyed in the 1990s. Time is a little out of joint, which allowed the beast to creep in. And, strangely enough, Akron is better for it.