When it was built, MACBA was what IMMA was not, that is, a blank slate. It should by now be a showcase institution, a spectacular building and one of the defining cultural landmarks of Barcelona, a place you have to go to when you visit the city. But that has not happened, it has not attained that kind of status. Outside and inside it is a typical Meier building, with its references to the cool, white, pristine modernism of Le Corbusier, yet it is oddly abstract and uninvolving. It's not so much that it doesn't sit comfortably into the architectural fabric around it, as that it seems to have missed its historical moment; it already comes across as a bit of an anachronism (in a way that the Bilbao Guggenheim or for that matter the Tate Modern do not).

There is a nod to the Pompidou's escalator in Meier's elaborate, massive concrete ramp which dominates the front of the building (though located inside and, in contrast with the brazen Pompidou, all done in the best possible taste). Presumably this should create a series of beautiful or engaging interior spaces and views, but it does not. The building is easy of access and incorporates a useful diversity of spaces, but it is not particularly pleasant to be in, it lacks atmosphere and, when it comes to the exhibition spaces it is uninventive and uneven in terms of patterns of circulation. However elegant formally, Meier's architectural language of planes, volumes and voids comes across as being curiously perfunctory and empty, and typifies what MACBA lacks as an institution: that is, any feeling of natural, organic development. There is a forced, arbitrary quality to it all.

To be fair to the people who run it, this is not for want of trying. MACBA's current temporary show is a timely exploration of art as protest, and among the issues it tackles is globalisation. Though user-friendly, it is predominantly a documentary exhibition, a fairly pedagogic exercise. And when it comes to the presentation of its permanent collection, the museum runs into problems. There has been criticism of the permanent collection, which is large and diverse, on qualitative grounds. On the evidence of what is currently on view, it includes many fine as well as many disappointing works but somehow the lacklustre whole is less than the sum of the best parts. Energy ebbs away as you work you way around rather than building up, as it should.

Perhaps the root of MACBA's problems is that it falls between stools. The lesson would seem to be that if you're going to showcase great, perhaps canonical works of art in a building that makes an architectural statement, there is no room for half-measures. Building and artworks have to deliver the goods. MACBA looks as if it sort of had that in mind, but didn't quite follow through. Instead it ended up with a so-so building, tasteful but entirely unexciting, and a patchy collection.


Aidan Dunne