Architecture, musées, tourisme. La guerre des marques

Abstract

An analysis of the role of architecture in strengthening new urban economies based on tourism shows that during the last two decades an architectural typology has emerged as an undeniable urban paradigm, which has become a fundamental piece in the development of strategies oriented towards the tourism development of cities and territories: museum architecture. With the construction of the Guggenheim Museum in (1998) and a spectacular mediatization around it, the international cartography of urban tourism took new directions marked by the so-called Bilbao effect and by increasingly global trends that are analyzed here. To this end, the paper studies some of the most representative cases of international architectural branding oriented toward museum institutions, as well as their relationship with the consolidation of the phenomenon of starchitecture embodied in figures such as Gehry, Nouvel, or Koolhaas. Concepts such as brandscapes or paradigmatic cities, or the phenomena of McDonaldization or anti-Bilbao, which are reproduced in a context of hyper-modernity fuel the abundant existing historiography on the contemporary production of architecture and urbanism that has transcended all functionalist demand.