Within months of its opening in 1997, Fr­ank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao had given the language a new term and the world a new way of looking at culture. The “Bilbao effect,” many ca­me to believe, was the answer to what ailed cities ev­erywhere — it was a way to lure tourists and economic development — and a potential boon to cultural institutions.

Municipal governments and arts groups were soon pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into larger, flashier exhibition spaces and performance halls.

Now the economic do­wn­turn has reined in a lot of these big dreams and has also led to questions about whether ambitious building projects from Buffalo to Ber­keley ever made sense to be­gin with.

Organisations were “blin­d­ed by the excitement of what it would be like to have this great new facility,” said D Carroll Joynes, a senior fellow at the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center. The recession, he said he believed, is not solely to blame for a recent wave of projects that have been delayed (like additions to the St. Louis Art Museum and the Cincinnati Art Museum); scaled back (like the new building of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY); put into question (the new Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center and the renovation of the New York Public Library’s main Fifth Avenue branch); or abandoned altogether (the expansion of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo).

In Joynes’s view, “The recession is exposing the we­akness of a lot of institutions that were seriously overstretched” before it began.

“It’s exposing poor management and poor planning,” said Joynes, who is collaborating on a study of 50 cultural building projects completed from 1994 to 2008 and their planning processes.