An architect who designs so the art can shine

Hardly a month goes by, it seems, without some city, somewhere in the world, breathlessly proclaiming that it has just commissioned a superstar architect to design an eye-popping museum building that will surely be a work of art and could well rival the Guggenheim Bilbao in its daring form.

You won't find Richard Gluckman's name attached to such projects, even though the New Yorker has worked on more museums and art galleries in the last 30 years than almost any living architect. Many of his best buildings are spartan boxes that might be mistaken for garages or workshops. Maybe that explains why Gluckman is the world's least-famous great museum architect.

Through all the recent style wars, the designer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's new Perelman building has held fast to the notion that a museum's architecture shouldn't upstage its art. And the people who run the art world - the museum directors, gallery owners, and curators - adore him for it.

"Richard has an ability to make a white box feel like permanent architecture. It doesn't overwhelm you with being new," said Michael Govan, who worked with Gluckman at New York's Dia Center for the Arts and recently took charge of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Philadelphia Museum of Art director Anne d'Harnoncourt explained Gluckman's appeal this way: "He makes spaces that seem inevitable."

Name a top-tier white-walled New York art gallery, and Gluckman probably designed it: Gagosian, Mary Boone, Tony Shafrazi. His firm, Gluckman Mayner, created the galleries for the Dia, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., and the Museo Picasso Malaga in Spain. Last month, the Gap's founders tapped Gluckman to design a San Francisco art museum.

Tall, lean and sandy-haired, Gluckman, 60, was wearing a rumpled, sand-colored summer suit and sand-colored eyeglass frames during a recent inspection tour of the Perelman, so that he became a neutral backdrop for the more colorfully dressed people around him. He similarly likes to pare his gallery spaces to a few, carefully chosen elements. The look is no look.

Though Gluckman's super-refined aesthetic is a favorite of museum directors, some Perelman visitors may leave Gluckman's 59,000-square-foot addition scratching their heads and asking, "Where's the architecture?" But others are likely to come away with an appreciation for a magician's power to make architecture disappear, leaving nothing between the viewer and the art.