New Museum Design

Laura Hourston Hanks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429788451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

New Museum Design provides a critical and compelling selective survey of contemporary international museum design since 2010. It provides an accessible and analytic review of the architectural landscape of museum and gallery design in the 2010s.

The book comprises twelve case study museum and gallery projects from across Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Each built example is interrogated through an essay and a series of beautiful supporting illustrations and drawings. Where appropriate architectural analysis is cross-scale, extending from consideration of the artefact's encounter with museum space at the most intimate scale, through detailed architectural readings, to the wider perspective of urban/landscape response. Similarly, the book is not confined in its thematic or architectural 'typological' scope, including museums and art galleries, as well as remodellings, extensions and new build examples.

New Museum Design provides a critical snapshot of contemporary international museum architecture, in order to: better understand reasons for the state of current practice; reveal and explore on-going themes and approaches in the field; and to point towards seminal future design directions. This book is essential reading for any student or professional interested in museum design.

Part 1: Re-Place

Messner Mountain Museum
Turner Contemporary
China Academy of Art's Folk Art Museum

Re-Place: Introduction

In considering the current situation and future direction of museum making around the world, certain issues and opportunities present themselves; notably around the formulation of place.

Significant shifts in the political sphere in recent years may be prompting the reassessment and reassertion of place identities. The hegemony of pervasive globalisation is being challenged by political devolution, economic uncertainty arising from the Global Financial Crisis, a widespread rise in populist nationalism, certain aspects of environmentalism, and the predominantly national and regional –– rather than international –– response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Long-standing international alliances and identities are under pressure, and all these forces appear to have set in motion the entrenchment or reimagining of personal and collective attachments to place. The national and local appear to be gaining ground. Within this altered politico-cultural landscape, place and its depiction may be taking on greater significance. Part 1 suggests the possibility that an increasing exploration and privileging of place may define one future direction in the making of museums and galleries.

The global museum-going public has become used to a paradoxically reassuringly familiar –– whilst inherently placeless –– pan-national white/black box museum model. This startling interior uniformity is a legacy of the historic typological conformity of museums and galleries: the basic enfilade of display spaces, then variously arranged in pavilion, circular, courtyard or hybrid layouts. The relegation or recession of the museum's interior aesthetic, to greater enhance the impact of the artefacts, also contributes to this sense of international similitude. And the relatively small group of practices –– with their named ‘starchitects’ –– which monopolises contemporary high-profile museum making, has further emphasized this architectural homogeneity. In Rykwert's terms, ‘[h]owever locally anchored’, museums have become ‘cult buildings of a global religion’.¹

This familiar model has, however, become increasingly scrutinized in our changing times, with intensified attention to sitedness in museum and exhibition design. As museum design evolves in the twenty-first century and museums and galleries strive to make distinct offers to their visiting publics, audience experience may be increasingly inspired by place. Interpretive designers are being charged with an amplified social responsibility –– to curate and enhance the ‘site’ of the museum in order to create both connections and collisions with visitors’ own personal place identity constructs. Moving forward, the visitor may be more attracted to a distinct experience of place in the museum; and in turn may be more engaged and even challenged by it. ‘Museums and galleries, of course, no longer shun the outside world, the contingencies of its light and life …’.²

In Norberg-Schulz's terms, the role of architecture — and in this case museum architecture — is ‘… to concretise the genius loci’,³ or as Nesbitt contends, ‘to make a site become a place, that is, to uncover the meanings potentially present in the given environment’.⁴ As the three museums in this Part attest, qualities and specificities of place can be hugely affecting and influential for their designers. Kenneth Frampton argued that Critical Regionalism should ‘… [b]e regarded as not a style — ‘a received set of aesthetic preferences’ — but a process, applicable to a range of situations and more or less independently realized in a variety of locations’.⁵ The architects of these three museum buildings revel in this process of uncovering meanings of their respective places, and these meanings are as disparate as the devices deployed to portray them. Such Critical Regionalism is seen by some as: ‘[a] laudable attempt to reverse the trend of placelessness caused by mass culture, and at the same time it resists the simulations, the pseudo-places, of vernacular and historic revivals’.⁶ However Sorkin observed that ‘[a] consequence of the profession's current preoccupation with ‘context’ is a kind of collective confidence about the possibility of adding on. There's an implicit argument that architects, duly skilled and sensitized, should be able to intervene anywhere.’⁷ Such confidence may be liberating, but at times it may also be misplaced. For example Self, in The Architecture of Art Museums: A Decade of Design: 2000–2010, draws attention to the hazard of superficiality that such an approach may engender: ‘… a response to context often has little to do with an intimate comprehension of place. Rather, projects rely conceptually on narrative and metaphor …’.⁸ Such reliance on narrative and metaphor may actually be appropriate to museums though, being themselves examples of storytelling institutions, which ‘… are in fact extended metaphors or allegories, representing the deep beliefs of civilizations and society.’⁹

This projected privileging of place would naturally lead to a greater degree of cultural specificity within the museum, and Part 1 explores current practice of such enhanced situatedness through three contemporary museums: the Messner Mountain Museum in Italy's South Tyrol; Turner Contemporary in the British seaside town of Margate; and China Academy of Art's Folk Art Museum in the city of Hangzhou. At the Messner Mountain Museum, the sublime intervention by Zaha Hadid Architects was intended to, ‘… make architecture more like landscape,’ and in so doing it connects physically and aesthetically not only with the dramatic alpine mountain-scape, but also with the biographical story and experience of the museum's subject, the mountaineer Reinhold Messner. It is of and for its place. In Margate at Turner Contemporary, David Chipperfield Architects take this personal affiliation to place even further, siting the building in the exact location of the guesthouse where Turner stayed during his frequent trips to the town. Here place is everything: a light-washed artistic view; a romantic attachment; an historical landscape; and a resonant memoryscape. Finally, In Hangzhou on a wooded hillside, Kengo Kuma Architects have responded to both natural and cultural aspects of the site, in a way at once both specifically evocative and detached: ‘… both profoundly rooted in its place and yet disintegrated and ethereal.’¹⁰ So all three museums demonstrate the conscious engagement with site propounded, and hint at the possibilities and pitfalls for designers and the museum visiting public of this enhanced situatedness both now and into the future.

A literal ‘re-placement’ is the defining feature of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's The Shed; a cultural centre in Hudson Yards, Manhattan, New York, which opened in 2019. Here, ‘[t]he McCourt, an iconic space for large-scale performances, installations, and events, is formed when The Shed's telescoping outer shell is deployed from over the base building and glides along rails onto the adjoining plaza.’¹¹ The highly engineered animation of the building transforms p...