Museum Thresholds

The Design and Media of Arrival

Ross Parry, Ruth Page, Alex Moseley, Ross Parry, Ruth Page, Alex Moseley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367498986
• eBook ISBN: 9781317239093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Museum Thresholds is a progressive, interdisciplinary volume and the first to explore the importance and potential of entrance spaces for visitor experience. Bringing together an international collection of writers from different disciplines, the chapters in this volume offer different theoretical perspectives on the nature of engagement, interaction and immersion in threshold spaces, and the factors which enable and inhibit those immersive possibilities.

Organised into themed sections, the book explores museum thresholds from three different perspectives. Considering them first as a problem space, the contributors then go on to explore thresholds through different media and, finally, draw upon other subjects and professions, including performance, gaming, retail and discourse studies, in order to examine them from an entirely new perspective. Drawing upon examples that span Asia, North America and Europe, the authors set the entrance space in its historical, social and architectural contexts. Together, the essays show how the challenges posed by the threshold can be rethought and reimagined from a variety of perspectives, each of which have much to bring to future thinking and design.

Combining both theory and practice, Museum Thresholds should be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in museum studies, digital heritage, architecture, design studies, retail studies and media studies. It will also be of great interest to museum practitioners working in a wide variety of institutions around the globe.

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1 On a new threshold

Ross Parry, Ruth Page and Alex Moseley

Museums have never really had one threshold. There have always been many ways to find the museum, to start a museum experience, to build a relationship with it. Indeed, theirs is a story of multiplying entry points. From the publication of catalogues and books to the sponsoring of specialist interest groups and societies, to the choreographing of travelling exhibitions and the loaning of objects, up to the programming of outreach services and the atomisation of online provision, watching the museum through its recent history is to see an organisation in motion – continuing to increase the connections, interventions and approaches that it can make with its society. And, as it does so, these varied methods through which collections and expertise have escaped into the world have always been matched by the ever more creative routes that audiences have found into the museum. It means that for many institutions the idea of a single point of entry (one threshold to the museum) is, largely, unrecognisable. Instead, through mobile content, open data, and social media, the museum continues to develop modes through which visitors might (re-)encounter and (re-)enter the museum. Today, rather than time-constrained and event-bound, the museum is always on, and on-demand. Rather than being encompassing and immersive, the museum experience might be fleeting and fragmentary – one of many headlines from a news feed, a single contribution to a page of image search results, one ‘friend’ or ‘tweet’ among many, another pin on an information-rich map. Therefore, with in-transit audiences pulling on museums amidst the everyday, and museums pushing content to the places where users go, institution and visitor have together continued to challenge the idea of a single entry point into the museum.

And yet, despite this multidimensional and distributive threshold, it is the entry into the physical museum that remains as a highly visible and symbolic space. Amidst a revolution of museology and digitality (where the shape, location and capabilities of the museum have been appraised and reappraised), the iconic physical entrance persists. Even when the postdigital museum (Parry, 2013) and ‘museum as platform’ reaches out across multichannels to its connected and networked audience, the physical entrance endures.

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In fact, what endures in these entrances is a cultural trope, belonging to the birth of the museum. It is a trope that we see recurring within, and echoing across, the literature, pageantry and theatre of the early modern European condition from which the museum concept emerged (Von Naredi-Rainer, 2004). The façade of the early museum entrances paralleled the ‘frontispieces’ (specifically the antique architectural forms of emblematic title-pages) used in books of the time (Corbett & Lightbown, 1979, pp. 4–5). The entry point for many Renaissance readers into these literary works was through fantastical representations of portals, archways and gateways. To turn these opening pages – to step into these works – was to notice and acknowledge that the architectural conceit of the front page was more than just a metaphor, but was a metonym of the ordering and harmonising principles of the Renaissance imagination that assumed direct analogues between architectures of thought and built architectures. Similarly, drawing again upon the classical pattern of columns, capitals, pediments and pilasters, it was the same threshold device behind the grand triumphant archways, which marked entry points on days of civic ceremony (Strong, 1984). Europe’s pageantry archways (some permanent features of the cityscape, others the temporary exhibitry and stagecraft of carnival and festival) reflected this similar culture of threshold-making, drawing upon equivalent architectural elements. Likewise, it was this same framing and threshold trope that we see forming the first proscenium arches in European theatre history (Wickham, 1972), demarcating the stage performance as a separate representational space. The formal museum entrance has origins in all of these traditions. The physical museum threshold (like the trope of the literary frontispiece, the triumphal arch, and the theatrical proscenium) is the formal architectural entry to the staging of a cultural act.

Today, museums continue to leverage the power of this threshold tradition. When the British Museum opened its Great Court in 2000, the reshaping of its principal threshold space was conveyed as a signature statement for the future of the institution as a whole. The museum had not just created (in its own words) a new ‘accessible nucleus’, but also ‘a new kind of museum-going experience [. . .] another new beginning, both symbolic and practical’ (Anderson, 2000, pp. 97–100). In the same year, the opening of the new Turbine Hall at Tate Modern became a defining act for the museum, at once both iconic and iconoclastic in its audacity and splendour as the entry space for visitors (Leahy, 2010). Both museums used the making and remodelling of their thresholds as an agent for their organisational reinvention.

However, what these two relatively new iconic thresholds also remind us is that spaces such as these do more than provide symbolic and physical gateways. In terms of the visitor experience, the museum entrance space simultaneously performs multiple complex functions, from way-finding and informational exchange, to rule-setting and ambience-setting. For the visitor, museum thresholds are places where trust and expectations are built, protocols established and affordances noted. The threshold’s function may be ritualistic (Duncan & Wallach, 1978); or it may be the start of a holistically conceived interpretive programme (Lord & Lord, 2002); or it may be a critical opening ‘component’ (Falk & Dierking, 1992) of the visitor’s narrative within the museum (Psarra, 2009; Skolnick, 2005). We might see – as James Clifford (1997) does – the entrance as part of the institution’s ‘contact zone’, or as an example of Viv Golding’s (2009) ‘frontier space’ within the museum. Whether in their physical properties (Royal Ontario Museum, 1999; Peponis & Hedin, 1982), or the modes of thought they represent (Watson, 2010; Bonet, 2006; Bullen, 2006; Dernie, 2006; Gregory, 2004; Liebchen, 2001; Lampugnani & Sachs, 1999), or indeed the sociological behaviour they frame (Tsybulskaya & Camhi, 2009; Macdonald, 1998; Duncan, 1995), it is evident that the entrance to the on-site museum – the physical threshold – remains historically resonant, sociologically complex, interpretatively meaningful, and pivotal to the visit event.

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It seems reasonable to ask, therefore, whether the idea and function of the museum’s physical threshold warrants reconsideration. What, in other words, do museum entrances do today, and what could they be for? Moreover – and perhaps more challengingly – we might also ask if visitors’ experiences of playing, buying, discovering and learning in other parts of their lives, point to alternative means of scaffolding the museum threshold event. Are, for instance, the perennial informational metaphors that museums present to visitors on arrival (such as the classic architectural plan) sensitive to the modern media literacies of today’s visitors? Does a labelled plan of the building still warrant being the most prominent first device to present to a visitor to help frame a museum experience? Might instead contemporary media and digital life actually offer other visual grammars and systems through which a visitor might usefully (perhaps more usefully) imagine their visit? Certainly, we know orientation and thresholds in museums are not always successful. We need only look towards the observational analysis of visitor behaviour by Christina Goulding (2000), to evidence an example of what happens when orientation fails. Likewise, reflecting on the politics of entering the museum, Elaine Heumann Gurian (2005) presents us with the intellectual equipment to question militantly our museum threshold spaces. Perhaps amongst all of the literature on museum entrances and foyers, it is Gurian’s concept of ‘threshold fear’ that resonates most, capturing as it does the profoundly political dimension of entry, just how much is at stake in the design and use of space within the museum foyer, and what a fundamental barrier unsuccessful (unsympathetic) design can be.

This book, therefore, represents a coordinated and collaborative attempt to explore some of these questions around museum entrance design and experience. We have brought together a multidisciplinary network of practitioners, academics as well as commercial and cultural experts, with the shared aim of investigating progressive ways of reconceiving the museum entrance in a postdigital world. All of the authors worked from the principle that museum thresholds could be influenced usefully by other disciplines and sectors that might be seen to offer alternative or more evolved concepts and practices around ‘threshold’, ‘orientation’ and ‘initiation’. And in turn, we feel that this interdisciplinary approach – sharing and learning from other sectors – provides a valuable learning experience, and offers a way forward for rethinking the threshold for the twenty-first century.

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The chapters of this book are organised in three parts. The first part, ‘Locating and Defining the Threshold’, sets out to define and locate the threshold as a rich, varied and multifaceted ‘problem space’. Its three chapters help to articulate the puzzle of the threshold, each from a different intellectual and professional perspective. The first chapter, ‘Hysterical Atria’ by designers Katherine Skellon and Ben Tunstall, situates the museum threshold in an architectural, historical and theoretical context. Skellon and Tunstall paint a bold picture which illustrates the diverse, liminal potential of the threshold. Drawing on an international range of museum thresholds, they question the cultural politics that might govern the design and use of the threshold. In so doing, they explore how thresholds might be used for a variety of purposes, from taking a yoga class to making a purchase before or after a museum visit. Thresholds are not just an entrance space that prepares visitors to enter the gallery spaces. Their interrogation of the design and use of these spaces critically questions how far and in what ways this diversity liberates, authorises, reworks and revises earlier assumptions about the museum and its status within the cultural economy. The transformation of the threshold becomes emblematic of much wider political and social shifts. The second chapter, ‘The Complexity of Welcome: Visitor Experience at the Museum Threshold’, shifts our attention to the visitor experience of the threshold. As a visitor experience consultant, Colin Mulberg draws on a series of illustrative examples, including the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth and the World Rugby Museum in Twickenham, both in the United Kingdom, to explore the complex work visitors engage in as they move towards and through the threshold on their visit to a museum. Mulberg sets out the progressive stages of the ‘visitor offer’ as they commit and prepare for their entrance. He argues that museums can reduce the work for visitors through the resources that they provide in this threshold experience, both before and during the visit itself. The chapter has implications for museum marketing, signage and ticketing procedures, and more generally for better understanding of visitor motivation. The last chapter in this part, ‘Design-driven Innovation for Museum Entrances’ by Marco Mason, focuses on the complex challenges that thresholds pose for designers. As a digital designer, Mason draws on the innovations that have been applied to the threshold experience in the hotel industry. Whilst there are clear differences between a visit to a hotel and a visit to a museum, the need for welcome and orientation is central in both. Mason’s chapter explores the threshold design as a collaborative process. He shows how the transformation of a threshold experience needs to incorporate the aspirations of the institution (whether hotel or museum) and be grounded in the observations of the visitors and their ‘journey’ through the threshold. In this case, the design solution was an interactive multitouch screen. The chapter shows the value of interdisciplinarity, collaboration and the importance of thinking strategically about design of the threshold.

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The second part of the book, ‘Affordances and Potential of the Threshold’, examines a series of specific thresholds and the connections that are made in, through and between the threshold and other aspects of the visitors’ experiences. In the first chapter in Part II, ‘Suspended: Art in the Threshold’, Peter Ride uses the metaphor of the threshold as a window to create insight into the museum. Drawing on an international range of museums, including the Msheireb Museum in Qatar, the Seattle Museum of Industry and History, and the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Ride shows how artworks of different kinds can be used to preface, restate and extend the narratives of the museum’s identity, collections and cultural context. The second chapter in this part, by Angelina Russo and Philip Pond, ‘Curation at the Threshold: Making Museum Meanings through New Interfaces’, considers the ways in which the threshold is experienced as part of the ‘connected museum’. Rather than focusing on the artwork that is curated within the threshold, Russo and Pond show how visitors collect and curate their experiences by taking photographic images of particular thresholds and uploading them to the photo-sharing site, Instagram. Their work shows how the threshold can be extended beyond the visitor’s physical, on-site engagement to incorporate their virtual, online interactions, such as posting, tagging and browsing images within Instagram. The third chapter in Part II, by David Burden, similarly focuses on the ways in which virtual technology can be used to extend the threshold experience. He focuses on the use of 3D game engines and virtual world environments in the design of thresholds for large, architectural projects. Drawing on his experience of working with the staff, consultants and architects who designed the library of Birmingham, Burden documents the place of 3D visualisation in supporting the staff and visitor experience of the new library, even before the doors of the physical library opened to the public. The fourth and final chapter in this part, ‘Difficult Thresholds: Negotiating Shared and Embedded Entrances’ by Steve Kruse, examines a distinctive context, the thresholds that are embedded in entrances that are shared by a museum and another institution. Kruse’s chapter examines three contrasting shared entrances, one in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in the University of Cambridge, the Stained Glass Museum in Ely Cathedral and the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons. These examples illustrate the complex ways in which the design and use of the threshold space can become embedded not only in physical locations, but in the historical development of a building as it has changed over time. The multiple socio-historical, institutional and physical aspects of these embedded thresholds pose particular challenges for the visitors who pass through them and for the practitioners who manage these spaces.

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The final part of the book, ‘The Threshold Rethought’, shifts its focus to practical and experimental examples of changes that have been made to particular thresholds. Each chapter takes a different discipline or area of professional practice as its start point, specifically gaming design, retail studies and applied linguistics. These different approaches focus on the visitor experience and the transformation that takes place at the museum threshold. The first chapter in this part, ‘Games in the Lobby: A Playful Approach’ by Erik Kristiansen and Alex Moseley, shows how a gaming perspective provides a new way of thinking about and working with entrance spaces like the museum lobby. Drawing on classical understanding of games and play, they show how the lobby can be analysed as a boundary through which visitors pass to enter the ‘magic circle’ of the museum. Practically, the chapter shows how playful approaches can support the design of thresholds, using a metagame to help museum practitioners think through the challenges and rewards that visitors might encounter as they pass through threshold spaces such as the lobby, and through a playful installation at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, UK. More specifically, Kristiansen and Moseley set out a typology of games that might support the different communicative functions of the threshold and use playfulness to transform visitor experience in these spaces.

The second chapter in this part, by Tracy Harwood, uses retail perspectives to draw comparisons and contrasts between the thresholds found in shop design and those found in museums. Harwood shows how the use of light, sound, colour and layout are used to construct the ‘servicescape’ in the retail sector. These sensory design cues have much to offer as the means by which the visitor’s attention can also be engaged in the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Museum Thresholds
• Routledge Research in Museum Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 On a New Threshold
• Part I Locating and Defining the Threshold
• Part II Affordances and Potential of the Threshold
• Part III The Threshold Rethought
• Index