ABSTRACT
Uniquely, the United States has a tax system that supports and encourages generous philanthropy even from those who are of middling wealth, and many institutions benefit from support (even if only supplementary to government funding) that is often built up around an imaginatively framed architectural concept. Some institutions are the result of single benefactions, and these uniformly have high architectural ambition, with Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim (1959) setting the pace for commissions that have benefited Frank Gehry in the Bilbao Guggenheim (1997), Richard Meier at the Getty Centre in Los Angeles (1997) and many others to come. Less single-minded endowments can seem to appoint ‘by committee’ and, as with Yoshio Tanaguchi’s design at MOMA in New York (2006), achieve architecture that has been described as vacuous.11 Even so, the engine of innovation that these institutions provide can be the catalyst for reviving even the most dismally evacuated of downtowns – as the resurrection of downtown Los Angeles demonstrates.
