After Frank Gehry's stunning Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, opened to universal acclaim in 1997, midsized cities around the world raced to build their own architectural tourist attractions. The thinking was simple: As long as a new building is enough of a spectacle, visitors will show up in droves. There are plenty of subtleties in Gehry's design-mostly in terms of how carefully it relates to the streets and city surrounding it-but nobody flew to Bilbao for a lesson in contextualism. They went to be amazed. What is architectural modesty, exactly? Well, it can simply be a rhetorical reaction to oversized, over-exuberant architecture: a spare symbolism of quietude and restraint.
In 1999, Seattle hired Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect, to design its new downtown public library, set to open early in 2004. Koolhaas produced a monolithic, mesh-covered, quasi-Mayan scheme worthy of any city's tourist brochure cover. Denver, Toronto, and Manchester gave post-Bilbao museum commissions to Daniel Libeskind, the now-famous winner of the Ground Zero competition, who delivered a trio of predictably dramatic and photogenic projects. His extension to the Denver Art Museum, shown here, looks like an explosion captured midboom, with sharply canted wings-faced in glass, titanium, and stone-shooting from the center of the building See and read a slide-show essay about the new architecture of modesty here by Christopher Hawthorne of Slate.
