Museum Architecture

A New Biography

Suzanne MacLeod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134053629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of museum building around the world and the subsequent publication of multiple texts dedicated to the subject. Museum Architecture: A new biography focuses on the stories we tell of museum buildings in order to explore the nature of museum architecture and the problems of architectural history when applied to the museum and gallery. Starting from a discussion of the key issues in contemporary museum design, the book explores the role of architectural history in the prioritisation of specific stories of museum building and museum architects and the exclusion of other actors from the history of museum making. These omissions have contemporary relevance and impact directly on the ways in which the physical structures of museums are shaped. Theoretically, the book places a particular emphasis on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebvre in order to establish an understanding of buildings as social relations; the outcome of complex human interactions and relationships.

The book utilises a micro history, an in-depth case study of the 'National Gallery of the North', the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, to expose the myriad ways in which museum architecture is made. Coupled with this detailed exploration is an emphasis on contemporary museum design which utilises the understanding of the social realities of museum making to explore ideas for a socially sustainable museum architecture fit for the twenty-first century.

1

Telling Stories of Museum Architecture

In July 2011, a new museum opened in Liverpool. The Museum of Liverpool has been the subject of much discussion and debate, mainly as a result of its location on the iconic Liverpool waterfront alongside the ‘Three Graces’ – the Royal Liver Building (1908–11), the Cunard Building (1914–16) and the former offices of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board (1903–07).¹ With UNESCO World Heritage Site status and a long and torturous history of negotiations over plans for an iconic, Bilbao-like development on the site, critics have awaited its opening.² The museum eventually built was designed by Danish architects 3XN in collaboration with National Museums Liverpool (NML), a progressive museum service driven by a belief that publicly funded museums should be accessible and meaningful to all and that NML has the potential and responsibility to be an active and positive force in the life of the city (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The architectural project has been disjointed and riddled with disagreements and litigation. In 2007, 3XN were removed from the project and Manchester-based architects AEW were appointed to complete the new Museum. The defining feature of the architectural project has been its pragmatic management by NML.³ With a highly experienced team, NML remained close to the architectural planning process and was, through the setting of a clearly defined vision for the new Museum at the start of the project, empowered to insist that the signature building be completed within budget, which it was.⁴

Figure 1.1 The Museum of Liverpool.With kind permission of NML

Figure 1.2 Liverpool’s ‘Three Graces’ viewed from the Museum of Liverpool.With kind permission of NML

The disconnections that can be sensed in the Museum of Liverpool project – disconnections that seem to characterise the majority of capital projects in museums – have been directly mirrored in the critics’ responses to the new Museum. In August 2011, leaving no one in any doubt about his feelings, architecture critic Oliver Wainwright published a review of the new Museum in Building Design. His opening statements are worth quoting at length as they signal the complexities of museum architecture as well as the shift in territory – and blame – when museum professionals assert themselves in the architectural process. He writes:

It is rare for large public projects to go without a few hiccups along the way. Seldom do they manage to escape being tarnished by scandalised stories of escalating costs or legal disputes, heritage battles or local opposition.

But it is rarer still for a £72 million, seven years in the making, ‘flagship building’ to be so spectacularly botched, so comprehensively fouled up and so completely at odds with its context as the Museum of Liverpool.

. . .

It has been through the statutory planning process, and scoured by the government’s architecture watchdog, Cabe – which bravely remarked that it would ‘provide a striking addition to Liverpool’s waterfront’. It is at the centre of a Unesco World Heritage site, right next door to the listed Three Graces, and has been passed under the scrutinising gaze of English Heritage. So how could it have gone quite so wrong?

. . .

Thinking back to the competitive interviews, it is revealing when Fleming recalls that the two Scandinavian firms were the most attractive “because they were more disposed towards working with what we wanted”. Here, Kim Nielsen’s accommodating, mild mannered approach was clearly his downfall . . .⁵

Wainwright describes the new Museum as ‘a brash gin-palace run aground’ and a ‘contorted assemblage’ and labels David Fleming, the Director of NML, the ‘capricious’ client ultimately to blame for the ruination of the Liverpool project and the historic waterfront. He tells a story that takes us from 3XN’s original concept and vision for the site, to the final building constructed:

‘Our first reaction was that you shouldn’t build here,’ says Kim Nielsen, founding director of 3XN, the Danish architecture practice that beat an all-star cast of Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, and Snøhetta to win the project back in 2004. ‘We wanted to make not so much a building, but more of a structure – a piece of landscape that acts as a nexus, sucking all of the paths together.’

The first ésquisse was a dynamic collision of lines that swoop along the waterfront, switching back to form ramps and steps, folding over to define the building envelope. It was pure Zaha in felt-tip.

...

‘You should be able to pass through the building, get a glimpse and go out, without actually entering the “museum” part,’ says Nielsen, describing a vision of Scandic flexibility. ‘The building doesn’t have a front and a back, but presents completely open sides to the city, to be approached from all directions.’

The reality, squeezed through seven years of cost-cutting, legal battles and replacement architects, whilst subject to the whims of a capricious client, could scarcely be more different.⁶

In a similar vein, Rowan Moore has described the new Museum as ‘a godawful mess’:

Inside there is a big spiral stair conceived as a social heart of the museum, which is nice enough, except that it rises towards cheap suspended ceilings that undermine its splendour. It’s like the ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim installed in a Travelodge . . .

Outside, 3XN has created a dynamic twist of a building, in pale white stone, that rises at its extremities to give panoramic views of the Three Graces in one direction and the Mersey in the other. There is also a forbidding-looking slalom of wheelchair ramps and stairs at each end, with the idea that people can wander up, through and down again, choosing to look into galleries or not as the mood takes them.⁷

Confirming the architectural critics’ desire for a fully resolved object, The Architects’ Journal added, ‘The textured, wave-like, limestone cladding is the best thing about the building. It is the only rigorously-managed architectural element’.⁸

If the architectural critics have dismissed the Museum of Liverpool for its lack of architectural rigour,⁹ the museum world has celebrated the new Museum for its democratic approach to content development – the displays were developed through a large-scale community consultation process – and its immediate popularity. Visitor figures during the Museum’s first year of opening have far exceeded targets and early reports suggest that the displays are provoking engaging experiences and on-going dialogue between the Museum and local people.¹⁰ For Oliver Green, writing in the Museums Journal, ‘The Museum of Liverpool has the feel of a genuine people’s museum, perhaps more so than any other city history museum’ and of the crowds of visitors he notes, ‘I don’t think I have ever seen so many people of all ages enjoying themselves so much in a museum’.¹¹ On the architecture, Green is far more cautious, sticking to the safe territory of function:‘It works well inside and out, and is a beautiful modern building that is practical and functional’.¹²

Such differences of opinion are characteristic of the discourses that circulate around capital projects in museums and can seem, at first sight, impossible to reconcile. If the architectural critics speak only of the shell of the building and seem unwilling to engage with the activities and institution within, the museum critics – and managers – seem happy to leave the architecture of the museum to someone else, focusing, instead, on the displays and the experiences inside.¹³ What seems to cloud the issue here but also offers some common ground, is an underlying understanding of architecture as the work of an architect. This dominant and powerful understanding sits behind many of the debates surrounding museum architecture and is the cause of many of the problems associated with working with architects in museums: the seeming lack of control of the building process on the part of the museum, the inability of the client to communicate the institutional vision to the architects, the fear of interfering with the architectural process and hoisting too many compromises onto the architect, the fear of being perceived as a philistine by questioning a design concept, and so on…

With this in mind, Chapter 1 starts with a discussion of architecture and language and argues that the seeming incompatibility of mission-driven museums and architecture and the perceived lack of shared ground between some architecture and museum professionals, stems from this common assumption that architecture is the work and object of the architect.¹⁴ Drawing across a whole range of texts, Chapter 1 argues that this understanding of museum architecture is then replicated in the representations made of it in history. Here, museum architecture is variously reduced to a lineage of great buildings, a technology of the State, or, in the case of art museums, an outcome (successful or unsuccessful) of the tension between ‘contemplation and civic engagement’ or ‘insight and entertainment’. Starting instead from a description of the architecture profession as a Bourdieusian field of practice, the chapter suggests that such stories work to maintain some of the problems of museum architecture by failing to get close to the realities of museum making – the disruptions and disconnections that clearly characterised the Museum of Liverpool project. Rather, the chapter draws a particular body of architectural theory into the study of museums and argues for new stories of museum buildings that acknowledge the institution and focus on the multiple ways in which architecture is created through use. Biography emerges as one route towards detailed explorations of occupation and use and a deeper understanding of the making of museum architecture.

Architecture and language: systems of difference

So far, I have been using the terms architecture and building interchangeably. However, as Adrian Forty has illustrated and as we can begin to see above, language is integral to the construction of architecture. Indeed, how we talk – and write – about architecture directs ‘the way we think of and live with buildings’.¹⁵ It also affects the way we design them. Understanding some of the meanings attached to particular ways of talking about architecture and whose interests those words serve, then, is crucial to understanding architecture and the things that are written about the history of museum architecture, more broadly.

It is now well established within the field of architectural history and theory that architectural practice doesn’t just produce forms through the ‘mental work of creative invention’,¹⁶ but also discourses – stories about buildings and about architecture – spoken and written. Architecture itself, as a set of practices rather than a finished object, places an abundance of these words and images between buildings and their users, interposing certain meanings into our social experience and working to re-present, retrospectively, the meanings of architecture and architectural forms.¹⁷ The words, spoken or written, might be the words of the architect, the critic or, indeed, the architectural historian. The images are most often glossy architectural photographs of empty buildings, but might equally be scale drawings of a building’s facade, a series of floor plans or the type of sectional drawing that non-architects, like myself, often find very difficult to interpret.¹⁸ Our understanding of architecture is shaped through a complex of inherited knowledge, architecture we see and experience and things we read or are told about architecture through images and texts produced by the architectural profession and within the tightly controlled parameters of their practice. Architecture is, in this sense, a system, just as fashion is to clothing.¹⁹ To use the term architecture to describe any building is to connect into this system and draw out a distinction to building, to the rest. At the most basic level, architecture is positioned as something different to building in the discourse of architecture; different that is, as a result of the actions of an architect.²⁰

One way in which theorists have conceptualised this system of architecture as a fully embodied practice is to describe it in Bourdieusian terms as a ‘field of practice’, inhabited by architects (and a host of other actors necessary to the workings of architecture) in the pursuit of various forms of capital: economic, social, cultural and symbolic. Through Bourdieu, the notion of society is replaced with the relational notion of social space – itself made up of a series of semi-autonomous fields of practice – and professionalisation is recast as a route to defining and allowing (or refusing) entry into and position within specific fields. The field itself is conceived as both a ‘battlefield’ – riddled with tensions, politics, inequalities and symbolic and material struggles, a space of positions and position-taking – and a ‘force field’ – a field of practice which informs the values, beliefs and practices of the individuals and institutions within.²¹

Bourdieu conceptualised the field as comprising both restricted and mass sub-fields.²² The restricted relates to those in the positions of power who have the ability to shape the rules of the game and define what is worth competing for. The mass relates to everyone else; those who occupy dominated positions in the field and have less power to control either the rules of the game or the meanings attached to their works. Here, language and discourse can be recognised as the embodiment of social values and one route to the legitimisation of practice through the production of seemingly natural and universal representations.

Through the concept of habitus, Bourdieu also makes clear that the field is neither a level playing field nor driven by unstructured creative human action. Individuals or agents are born and ‘encultured’ into varying amounts of economic, social and cultural capital. Our habitus, a set of learned dispositions and inclinations, affects our ‘feel for the game’ and our ability to operate successfully within the parameters of a given field.²³ As Hélène Lipstadt writes, ‘The most general thing that can be said about a field is that it is a contest for authority over the field itself; without this struggle, there can be no field’.²⁴

From a Bourdieusian perspective, architecture is re-thought as a field of cultural production, a social space within which struggles over various capitals and positions take place and through which the field itself is defined. Despite recent re-formulations of Bourdieu’s work, the notion of practice as defined and shaped through the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Telling stories of museum architecture
• 2. ‘Hobson’s choice’: art and grog in Liverpool
• 3. ‘It is, of course, very easy to make merry over the Alderman in Art’: the 1930s extension and renovation
• 4. Ration cards, food hordes and art: occupation by friendly forces and the battle for liberation 1939–1951
• 5. Art (and architecture) in a city: ambition, illusion and revolution
• 6. The social architecture of museums
• Notes
• Appendix: Harold Furniss’ Testimony
• Abbreviations
• Primary sources
• Secondary sources
• Index