Reshaping Museum Space

Suzanne Macleod, Suzanne Macleod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134289974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

Reshaping Museum Space pulls together the views of an international group of museum professionals, architects, designers and academics highlights the complexity, significance and malleability of museum space, and provides reflections upon recent developments in museum architecture and exhibition design.

Various chapters concentrate on the process of architectural and spatial reshaping, and the problems of navigating the often contradictory agendas and aspirations of the broad range of professionals and stakeholders involved in any new project.

Contributors review recent new build, expansion and exhibition projects questioning the types of museum space required at the beginning of the twenty-first century and highlighting a range of possibilities for creative museum design.

Essential reading for anyone involved in creating, designing and project managing the development of museum exhibits, and vital reading for students of the discipline.

Part I

On the nature of museum space

1

Rethinking museum architecture

Towards a site-specific history of production and use

Suzanne MacLeod

Introduction

If you could distil the essence of pure modern architecture, and remove all traces of the usual compromises and cut corners and clumsy details and flash populist moves, then you would get a strange, unsettling, austere, but rather beautiful building. Such absolute purity is of course impossible to achieve. But the New Art Gallery in Walsall comes closer than any new cultural landmark built in Britain for years. It is both extraordinary and extraordinarily good. It repays attention: this is emphatically not a one-liner building.¹

A building for people in which to experience art? Not in my book. This is an architectural indulgence which allows enthusiasts to experience an impressive building but where nowhere near enough thought has been put into how a wider public will use that building. It is a traditional gallery in new clothes. It gets nowhere close to the essential ‘feelgood’ relaxing atmosphere needed to make people love it. Why are there no production facilities, no crafts, no film. There aren’t even areas to sit.²

These two statements were both written about the New Art Gallery, Walsall, on its opening in 2000. They offer just two examples of the kinds of narrative that have circulated around the programme of new museum building and expansion that has taken place on an international scale over the last three decades. Where Hugh Pearman is relieved that, on this occasion, the usual ‘dirtiness’³ of architecture (compromise, populism and economy) has been avoided by the architects, John Stewart-Young speaks only of missed opportunities and partial responses to the making of a new museum. While Pearman sees an architectural masterpiece, Stewart-Young sees an architectural indulgence and castigates the architects of the building for omitting the most obvious of architectural elements necessary in a museum fit for the twenty-first century – places to sit.

Such statements point towards some of the perceived ‘problems’ of museum architecture that have become evident in the wake of the large-scale reshaping of museums. A recurring criticism of many new and renewed museums is that the vision and desire of the architect to create a signature building have ridden roughshod over the needs and aims of the museum. Such buildings may work very well as icons and cultural landmarks without achieving the levels of accessibility, usability and relevance for both visitors and staff, promised during their conception.

These frustrations of museum architecture expose its complexity. Here, personal agendas and goals mix with institutional ambitions and visions, economic development plans, the expectations of funding bodies and the broader social ideals and expectations for the museum’s role in society. Making architecture involves a large number of people from different fields and ‘communities of practice’ who speak different languages and hold different aspirations and priorities, values and beliefs, so much so that the varying judgements on architecture can seem difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile.⁴ There seems to be little shared ground between them. Yet such diversity of perception and priority is not uncommon, often characterizing even the smallest of capital development project teams.

What seems to cloud the issue here, but does also perhaps offer some common ground, is an underlying understanding, or notion, of what architecture is – an assumption that architecture is the aesthetic outcome and activity of the architect. This dominant and powerful understanding, it is argued here, 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 on to the architect, the fear of being perceived as a philistine by questioning a design concept, and so on …

Taking its lead from a body of architectural theory that has emerged in the gap opened up by Henri Lefebvre’s work on the production of space,⁵ this chapter sets out to oppose this underlying and dominant definition of architecture and to argue instead for a fuller reading of museum architecture⁶ as a social and cultural product, continually reproduced through use. Such a broadening of our understanding of what architecture is would enable us to begin to consider the contexts within, and processes through which, museum architecture is continually reproduced. In this way, we might begin to explore the complexity of museum architecture and understand more about how it gets made.

While the key aim of this chapter is to challenge underlying and reductive notions of architecture, it is also concerned with architectural histories of the museum – the stories through which we learn about museum architecture. Architectural histories of the museum tend to be based upon and reinforce the dominant understanding of architecture as the aesthetic outcome or activity of the architect. Such histories can be recognized as legitimizing current practice and contributing to some of the problems associated with museum architecture. With this in mind, the chapter begins from existing architectural histories of the museum and suggests the need for a new type of site-specific museum history – one based on architectural production and use. An understanding of architecture as set forward here begins to set an agenda for that research towards a greater understanding of the ‘multifaceted negotiations’⁷ of architecture.

The ideas set forward in the chapter are explored through my interest in England’s regional museums and galleries. In the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century, a phenomenal number of museums and galleries appeared across the towns and cities of England, particularly in the industrial north and midlands. At the present time, many of these same museums and galleries are undergoing significant architectural and spatial change. In the wake of over two decades of museum building and with the input of significant capital expenditure from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the significance of the large-scale reshaping of these museums and galleries has not gone unnoticed. The changes are hailed as dragging modernist museums based on outdated notions of knowledge and understanding into the twenty-first century, where transparency, collaboration and notions of visitor-centred learning are key. Of course, the specific histories of these sites are far more complex and interesting than such notions of large-scale epistemic change suggest.

Since it was founded in 1877 and a purpose-designed building was erected on Upper William Brown Street, the Walker Art Gallery⁸ in Liverpool has undergone a series of architectural and spatial transformations. In the late nineteenth century, the 1930s, the 1950s, and again recently, the museum has been the subject of significant architectural rearrangement and expansion. Inside, the space of the museum has shifted continuously. Sometimes this change has been slow and imperceptible and, at other times, especially at times of architectural development, change has been dramatic. In this chapter, selected episodes from the Walker’s past will be taken to illustrate the social and cultural character of museum architecture and to begin to explore what an architectural history of the museum based on production and use might include. This brief consideration of the Walker also suggests that important spatial (and hence social) changes are often made according to the beliefs and motives of those who control the space of the museum. The architecture of the museum was, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and continues to be, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a contested site, formed through the contradictory and often conflicting visions and agendas of those directly involved in the architectural and spatial reshaping. Thus, the chapter also touches upon the plays of power involved in the making of museum architecture.

Rethinking museum architecture

The Walker Art Gallery opened to the public in 1877 and, by 1901, the Curator, Charles Dyall, was able to list 43 art galleries, ‘mostly under Municipal control’, which had opened in the provinces and which had, according to Dyall, sought advice from, and precedents in, the Walker.⁹ The dramatic rise in the number of museums and galleries across the towns and cities of England is well documented. As Alma Wittlin suggested in 1949, around 295 museums were built in the UK between 1850 and 1914, taking the total number of museums in Great Britain to over 350.¹⁰ While a good amount of attention has been given to a consideration of the social conditions driving such developments forward, little attention has been given to the architecture of the provincial museums – a fact that can be accounted for, in large part, by the dominant understanding of architecture that continues to shape the ways in which we think about the physical and spatial structure of the museum.

A good number of texts have been written on the history of museum architecture, but none of these core historical texts considers the ongoing history or process of change that has been, and continues to be, the reality in most museums. Existing histories of museum architecture tend to approach buildings as objects and architecture as describing the practice and activities of the architect. Architects, and architects alone, make architecture. Architecture is complete when the final door handle is added and when the snagging list is resolved. It exists, in its idealized architectural state, as a pure object, not yet tainted by the impure communities of use.¹¹

The histories based upon this definition take us on a journey from Durand’s 1803 design for an art museum, to Leo von Klenze’s Glypothek in Munich (1816–30), Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin (1823–30) and John Soane’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (1811–14), each architect adding something new to the museum as a building type. For the majority of architectural historians, these architects established a typology of museum design and formal solutions in lighting and circulation that prevailed until the mid-twentieth century, and that modern architects continue to refer back to.¹² This stress on the progressive development of the museum as a building type consigns the museum buildings of Mies van der Rohe to the category of misguided interruption, properly redirected by Louis Kahn at Kimbell and Yale.¹³ Such readings of the museum welcome the return to historicism in the museum architecture of the late 1970s and 1980s, as it continues the historical narrative so rudely interrupted by the modernist architecture of the 1950s and 1960s. Here the stress is, in the main, placed on the shell of the ‘finished’ museum and on the skills of the canon of star architects.

As the museum has come, in the later decades of the twentieth century, to be consciously recognized as a driver for urban regeneration, so new demands have been placed on architects to create one-off individual pieces of architecture and high profile landmarks. Architectural solution...