A provocative new book asks if architects who design art galleries are just 'guys in suits that can't paint', writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor

After years of depending on on all those great 19th century institutions handed to us on a plate by the British, Ireland has seen a profusion of arts centres, galleries and museums in recent years that "re-envision", in one way or another, the idea of space for art.

This is a highly controversial area. Are contemporary art galleries to be "white boxes", just as many contemporary theatres tend to be "black boxes"? Or are they to follow the model of, say, the Guggenheim in Bilbao and make such a stunning architectural statement that the art inside is overwhelmed?

"Does the convention of the gallery de-fang the wild beast within?", asks artist and critic Brian O'Doherty in a newly-published book, Space: Architecture for Art. Have artworks become mere emblems of capital and museum trustees the greatest enemy, "or should we be thinking how to make spaces that make art look good"? Frank Stella, the American minimalist artist and sculptor, once famously dismissed architects who design art galleries as "guys in suits that can't paint". According to him, there are millions of square feet of disused warehouses available for contemporary art that make it look better than any "neutral box".

Critic Gemma Tipton, who edits Contexts magazine, asks "how can a museum be made that will match the work of painters, sculptors, performance artists, those with digital visions, situationists, dadaists, futurists, modernists, postmodernists and all their artistic allies and antagonists?" As she says, the gallery "can be one of the most exciting and creative of architectural spaces, its brief generally more open to and receptive to innovation, and yet architects equally find themselves having to contend with the weight of historical baggage attached to the idea of a museum".

Tipton cites the Guggenheim in New York, whose sponsor told Frank Lloyd Wright that he wanted a museum that would be "unlike any other". Yet even though its design was a radical departure from the past, it still presented visitors with a single prescribed route through the works on display.

"It's like Goldilocks and her porridge; we don't want too old or too new. Too big to dwarf smaller works, or too small to exclude bigger ones. We have been building art spaces at an alarming rate, in Ireland and around the world, and in only a few instances do we seem to be getting it right."

Ruairi Ó Cuiv, former director of the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, says arts organisations too often get buildings that are designed for them rather than with them - sometimes, as in the case of Arthouse in Temple Bar, without an identified end user, which he likens to developing advance factories.

"Without definition of the policy for the space and its function, architects are unfairly abandoned to their own devices", Ó Cuiv writes. "It is not good enough to say 'here's the brief: now work away' " - not least because difficult choices often have to be made as a concept is developed.

The late Aileen MacKeogh, first director of Arthouse, is quoted as saying that she was unable to give Shay Cleary's building her unequivocal endorsement when it opened in 1996. She didn't think it would work for digital art. As it turned out, she was right; it is now occupied by FilmBase.

Clear advice is given by the Northern Ireland Arts Council. It aims for the highest standards of architectural quality, avoiding short-term savings that would compromise "fitness for purpose" while also ensuring that buildings are energy efficient, accessible and environmentally friendly.

One oustanding example of how this can be achieved is the Market Place Theatre and Arts Centre in Armagh, by Glenn Howells Architects. A "brave modernist building", as the Civic Trust hailed it in 2001, it nestles into a hillside beneath the Church of Ireland cathedral and also creates a new civic square.

Another is O'Donnell and Tuomey's Glucksman Gallery - now nominated for the prestigious Stirling prize- in UCC where, as John Tuomey explains, the contextual idea was that visitors walking onto its podium would feel that it was rooted in the limestone escarpment on which the college was built, with the "celestial world" of the gallery elevated above.

Architect Valerie Mulvin, who designed Sligo's Niland Gallery with Niall McCullough, says architects "should compose space in a way very similar to a composer of music". But she is dubious of the notion that space should be just "flexible", as this was "a way of deferring issues, not thinking about them".

Space: Architecture for Art gathers together many of the recent Irish offerings, from small projects like the Courthouse Art Centre in Tinahely, Co Wicklow, to IMMA at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. But though the book's listings include the National Gallery, its Millennium Wing is curiously overlooked.

Benson and Forsyth's extension of the National Gallery into Clare Street, which has proved popular with the public, is mentioned rather disparagingly in the text, with a reference to the "awkward shifts" between old and new, and the first impression being of retail rather than exhibition space.

Des McMahon, who is working on a major extension to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin, comments: "You can look at a gallery as a mixture of a sacred space and a supermarket. You begin in a supermarket, you go through a sacred place, and you come out again through a supermarket".

Gemma Tipton finds the supermarket analogy interesting. "So much work has gone into how supermarkets are designed and laid out, into how people use them, than into galleries. There is an entire science called 'atmospherics' devoted to them". Just think about that next time you're in Tesco's. She defends the omission of the National Gallery on the basis that her book deals with spaces for contemoporary art, places that artists working in the media of today could exhibit. But with so many other national galleries featured, it seems almost invidious to exclude our own.

I M Pei's extension to the National Gallery in Washington DC is here, as is Herzog and deMeuron's Tate Modern in London, Cook and Fournier's Kuntshaus in Graz, Richard Meier's Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona and Santiago Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum, among many others.

According to Tipton, the problem with such buildings is that they have "taught us to expect the 'wow' - the massive atrium, the mind-blowing foyer, the drama of approach and arrival". And she suggests that this kind of architecture is increasingly used to make up for the lack of strength in a museum's collection.

Space: Architecture for Art is published by Circa and may be ordered online at www.recirca.com/space