The Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, designed by Foster + Partners, at the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.
Keeping up with the Joneses.
It happens in many settings, from the classroom to the country club, and, perhaps not surprisingly, among cultural organizations, according to a new study that finds that many institutions recently expanded their buildings in part because everyone else had.
Other reasons that organizations will build too much are overambitious trustees, self-interested architects and unrealistic financial projections, according to the study by the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago that is to be released Thursday.
The study, “Set in Stone,” examined the cultural building boom between 1994 and 2008, when museums, performing arts centers and theaters in the United States got swept up in new construction or major renovations.
More than $16 billion was spent by cultural organizations on building projects during that period, some inspired by the hope that construction initiatives could do what a Frank Gehry-designed museum building did for Bilbao, Spain: transform a small city into a major cultural destination.
“This issue between confusing a want with a need is enormous in the sector,” said Carroll Joynes, a founder and senior fellow at the policy center. “There are clear ways to avoid this. You can learn from what other people went through.”
A number of the lessons, the study suggests, could be drawn from its case studies of expansions like that of the Art Institute of Chicago over the past decade.
At first glance the project seemed daunting: a $300 million venture that would boost yearly operating costs by an estimated $4 million and would necessitate another $87 million in fund-raising to expand the endowment.
But with the Italian architect Renzo Piano engaged and several key trustees and the museum’s director gung ho, the expansion gained a kind of inexorable momentum.
Attendance did spike initially when the new wing opened in March 2009, but then it dropped back to normal levels. A precipitous decline in endowment income led to pay cuts, furloughs, a salary freeze and two rounds of layoffs.
“Instead of expanding its budget as expected, the Art Institute was forced to contract instead,” the study said.
The study examines not only what arts organizations got wrong but also what they got right and offers guidance for arts executives, civic leaders, donors and government officials about how to avoid pitfalls and how to grow intelligently and responsibly — or maybe not at all.
“It’s lessons from the front lines,” said Adrian Ellis, an arts consultant who helped conceptualize the study. “The stories aren’t told that often.”
The study was based on interviews with people in more than 500 arts organizations and drew data from more than 700 construction projects that ranged in cost from $4 million to $335 million. The New York region led the country in cultural building ($1.6 billion) after Los Angeles ($950 million) and the Chicago area ($870 million).
In many cases the researchers found that organizations failed to realistically assess the demand for their projects and their capacities to complete them: Do we really need this? Can we afford to build it? Can we support a larger operation going forward?
“All of the work fundamentally says, ‘Don’t build what you can’t sustain,’ ” said Duncan M. Webb, an arts management consultant, who was an adviser on the study.
Architects can also run away with a project, the study reports. “They say the building is for you, but the building is for them,” Mr. Joynes said. “It’s for the pictures and for their careers. From their point of view it’s a real success if it gets built.”
The study found that the most successful projects were driven by a clear artistic mission and demonstrable need; had authoritative and consistent leadership throughout the process; controlled expenses during construction; and generated income after completion.
The report’s other case studies were the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Va.; the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.; and the Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, Tex. — all of which encountered financial hurdles after expansion.
“The Modern Wing was not an impulsive project,” Douglas Druick, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, said. “It was 10 years in the making, and it puts the Art Institute on a solid footing for the future. We expect it to be here for decades, just as we still open the doors of our original 1893 building every morning.”
Additional examples outside the study abound, Mr. Joynes said, like the recent travails of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, which had to close its new flagship building in Midtown and move to its smaller Upper West Side location after almost going out of business. “The Folk Art Museum should not have happened,” Mr. Joynes said. “It was a wonderful museum and they self-destructed. Our whole purpose in this is to say, ‘There are ways to do this that can protect your organization and help you fulfill your mission that won’t cripple you or take you down.’”
The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, Mr. Ellis said, is an example of an organization that failed to build the necessary consensus among public officials and others before embarking on its $265 million complex, which opened in 2001.
“They thought, ‘If we can just get this thing up, everything will fall into place,’ and that simply isn’t the case,” Mr. Ellis said of the Kimmel. “If you haven’t thought about how to operate it, it will come back and bite you.”
Anne C. Ewers, Kimmel’s president and chief executive, acknowledged that she inherited a $30 million building deficit when she came on board in 2007 but said that she retired it the following year and that the institution was in the process of correcting “architectural mistakes” like the acoustics. “The biggest challenge was not having established an endowment dedicated to the maintenance of the facility,” she said.
In part because of these experiences and the economic downturn, the researchers say, the cultural building boom is decidedly over. The trend now is toward adaptive reuse of existing buildings and cultural districts that link various smaller organizations.
“We’re less interested in the idea of palaces of the arts,” Mr. Webb said. “A lot of these communities got in over their heads. I think we’ve learned our lessons.”