The Future of Museum and Gallery Design

Purpose, Process, Perception

Suzanne MacLeod, Tricia Austin, Jonathan Hale, Oscar Ho Hing-Kay, Suzanne MacLeod, Tricia Austin, Jonathan Hale, Oscar Ho Hing-Kay

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351370363
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Architecture
• Categoría: Architecture générale

The Future of Museum and Gallery Design explores new research and practice in museum design. Placing a specific emphasis on social responsibility, in its broadest sense, the book emphasises the need for a greater understanding of the impact of museum design in the experiences of visitors, in the manifestation of the vision and values of museums and galleries, and in the shaping of civic spaces for culture in our shared social world.

The chapters included in the book propose a number of innovative approaches to museum design and museum-design research. Collectively, contributors plead for more open and creative ways of making museums, and ask that museums recognize design as a resource to be harnessed towards a form of museum-making that is culturally located and makes a significant contribution to our personal, social, environmental, and economic sustainability. Such an approach demands new ways of conceptualizing museum and gallery design, new ways of acknowledging the potential of design, and new, experimental, and research-led approaches to the shaping of cultural institutions internationally.

The Future of Museum and Gallery Design should be of great interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of museum studies, gallery studies, and heritage studies, as well as architecture and design, who are interested in understanding more about design as a resource in museums. It should also be of great interest to museum and design practitioners and museum leaders.

Part I

Purpose

Social responsibility, cultural specificity and museum making

Introduction

Part I focuses on the larger Purpose of museum design and draws together a diverse range of chapters from researchers and practitioners in China, Hong Kong, the UK and the United States. All of the chapters in Part I point towards the potential for making museums in ways which respond to their locale and raise related questions of personal, social and environmental sustainability. Importantly, all of the chapters in Part I work to overcome false divisions between the built, physical world and our social experience, recognising that designed forms, design process and a design sensibility have diverse social effects and possibilities, both positive and negative. A number of the chapters concern themselves with how design can be harnessed towards the needs and desires of citizens, rather than the advancement of corporate power. Museums and galleries here are constantly evolving public events, diverse social and civic spaces animated through inhabitation and use as well as sites for social production, not least the creation of empowering forms of cultural experience and citizenship. In this analysis, design is an enabler, directed towards the creation of opportunities for action and transformation.

In Chapter 1, Suzanne MacLeod argues that museums have yet to effectively draw design into their strategies to reposition themselves as socially purposeful institutions. Through a detailed exploration of a research project undertaken with Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) in the UK, she sets forward the case for an ethics of museum design as a route to demanding deep reflection and consideration of design choices. The chapter both illustrates a research-led process which sought to provide HRP with an ethical framework for design and interpretation at the Tower of London, and begins to sketch the characteristics of an emerging ethics of museum design. Design here is an as yet under-utilised resource to be harnessed by museums as a route to new social, civil and spatial forms.

The focus on ethical practices, processes and outcomes is picked up in Chapter 2 in a short and provocative piece of writing from Oscar Ho Hing-Kay, one-time founding director of MOCA Shanghai and now professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Ho questions the usefulness of museums in the context of China and in light of the often heavy-handed use of culture in top-down economic processes. Pointing instead to the lived cultural experiences and objects of Hong Kong residents, and to the spontaneous cultural productions of young protestors during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014, Ho sets forward a challenge to museum makers in Asia to develop far more sophisticated approaches to representing and enabling this lived experience of culture as a route to generating sites of genuine significance and relevance to the lives of local people.

In Chapter 3, Elaine Heumann Gurian continues the focus on relevance, introducing the notion of complexity and setting out a vision for the future of museums which prioritises plurality of political perspectives and supports citizens towards more thoughtful, civil and open-ended discussions of pressing contemporary issues. Driven by the current political climate in the United States and the evident danger of simplified and polarised argument which is coming to characterise political behaviour, Gurian begins to imagine a new form of museum design which rather than prioritising specific narratives and experiences for specified target audiences embraces the challenge of museums for all and the need for complexity in complex democratic societies which aspire to democracy and equality. Museums here are, importantly, intentional, subtle resisters – rather than collaborators – in a world becoming more autocratic.

The next pair of chapters in Part I shifts our focus beyond the institutional space of the museum in order to explore the potential for museum making processes in the city. In Chapter 4, Tricia Austin explores the potential for exhibition making as a social process and takes us through an important review of approaches to exhibition making in the public realm, from high-art interventions to artist-led critiques of museums as institutions, digital projects to which users can contribute content and the ‘illusive practice’ of genuine co-curation. Reviewing the relationships between the genesis of notions of co-curation and co-design and introducing a project undertaken as part of her research and teaching practice, Austin makes a strong case for socially motivated designers to be acknowledged as creative strategists, social mediators, user-centred enablers, inventive storytellers and experts in engaging audiences.

Dave Colangelo picks up Austin’s focus on exhibitionary strategies in the city in Chapter 5 to explore the potential of massive media – large urban digital screens – in offering citizens something more than an endless barrage of products and marketing. Exploring the scope for the participatory practices of museums to impact the urban scale and experience of urban life, and focusing on the potential in massive media to memorialise culture in new ways and experiment with new ways of being social and civic, Colangelo asks how the utopian and emancipatory qualities of the Situationist International, who argued that citizens should be able to reconfigure the infrastructures of the city, might be captured in the curating of massive media and deliver audiences to critical and creative encounters with art, the city and each other. Of particular note here is the potential for massive media to generate new forms of public space, take an active part in creating a shared sense of democratic debate and open up opportunities for the nurturing of perceptual acuity as well as collective and individual intelligences.

In Chapter 6 we return to China, though this time looking back to the first decades of the twentieth century, to explore the introduction of European modes of exhibition and display to Asia. In a chapter which speaks directly to Oscar Ho Hing-Kay’s contribution above as well as Tsong-Zung Chang and Shiming Gao’s chapter in Part III, Pedith Chan considers the ways in which new museological standards introduced to China through the 1935 Shanghai Exhibition changed traditional display conventions and expected viewing practices in China, despite their reinterpretation through key Chinese concepts. Drawing attention to the history of museum making in China, Chan highlights the importance of contemporary discussions about museum design in that context and makes clear the need for museum design researchers to seek far more located, culturally specific approaches to museum making.

The final two chapters in Part I return our focus to contemporary modes of museum making and the need for deep analysis – in order to better understand the physical forms of museums and galleries and the varied roles they seek to play – and, importantly, confident new modes of museum making, if museums and galleries are genuinely to generate new forms of civic and social expression. In Chapter 7, Laura Hourston Hanks explores the strategies used by a series of architects in the representation and manifestation of place in the visitor experience. Recognising that a close focus on place has emerged as a key strategy utilised by museum architects, Hanks explores both the potential and limits of a situated approach to architectural development through a number of recent architectural projects in the UK. The chapter draws our attention to the importance of spirit of place in future museum making whilst simultaneously questioning the specific ways in which this genius loci is harnessed and expressed.

Locality is also of great significance in our final chapter in Part I, though in a very different way. In Chapter 8, Timothy J. McNeil takes us back to 1970s California to reveal the inspirations for and deep thinking involved in generating inclusive design approaches in the building of the new Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis. McNeil takes us through the user-centred design process developed at the museum, revealing how the process of making the new museum was leveraged as an opportunity for community debate and interaction. The project stands as one of a small number of museum architectural projects which have genuinely sought to move beyond the established conventions of architectural development. McNeil captures the learning for museums and for design from this process. The project is an important example of how a clear articulation of intent and desired social impact can lead, in the right hands, not only to a new and vital museum but also to multiple positive impacts in the lives of diverse people.

1

An ethical future for museum and gallery design

Design as a force for good in a diverse cultural sector

Suzanne MacLeod

Abstract

Chapter 1 argues that museums have yet to effectively draw design into their strategies to reposition museums as socially purposeful institutions. As a route towards this, the chapter argues for an ethics of museum design and suggests that museums need to wrest control of design from the political and economic drivers that often shape it. Such an approach recognises the ways in which the processes and built forms of museums are implicated in an unequal and divided social world. Developed through a detailed case study from the Tower of London, the chapter also poses a larger question. Could we, it asks, if led by the values and visions of cultural organisations and their desire to impact our creative lives in diverse ways, shape a more explicitly differentiated cultural landscape of wider relevance to peoples’ everyday experience?

Introduction

In 2010 I undertook a series of interviews with museum professionals, all of whom had been involved in leading capital developments in UK museums, the building of new museums or the expansion and renovation of existing museums. At that time, discussions mainly focused on process. Were design processes making use of the wide range of expertise available from stakeholders, including audiences? Or were architects, designers and institutions being swept through such projects in order to get them completed on time with little opportunity to think deeply about the decisions they were taking and the various social, environmental or economic impacts (positive and negative) those decisions might have? The landscape was mixed as one might have expected, but what emerged from the interviews and a desk-based research process that took place alongside, was the observation that an approach to design which prioritised a deep consideration of sense of place in recognition of the importance of place to belonging and identity; harnessed diverse expertise through stakeholder participation in design as a route to social relevance and use; recognised that capital development is an opportunity for reflection on and building of organisational identity; and utilised new and more sophisticated models for measuring social, environmental and economic sustainability as key factors of success beyond the simple formulation of completion within budget offered potential routes towards socially purposeful ways of making museums (MacLeod 2011).

The research made a claim for ethical museum making; a form of museum design which responded to and prioritised the public-facing missions and ambitions of museums, galleries and heritage sites and which acknowledged that cultural organisations should have a duty to the broader society to set some standards and ambitions for public life and the future of our shared social world. All of this research and discussion was, of course, undertaken in full recognition of the enormity of these projects, the bureaucratic constraints that local governments, funders and institutions placed on such projects and, importantly and unfortunately, the political and economic agendas that would push and pull cultural developments, sometimes to such an extent that they would become unrecognisable to the professionals within.

At the time, and in recognition of the politics of space and the centrality of space to the ongoing transformation of museums and galleries, part of this desire to utilise capital builds to generate a discussion of ethical design in museums and galleries was to seek a route towards the manifestation of the human and social values of cultural organisations physically in our surroundings as a challenge to the commercialism that, in the main, shapes our environments and life experiences and continues to diminish our civic and social lives (Crouch 2011). Increasingly however, we see this same commercialism shaping museums and galleries. They share the same shiny, attention-seeking architecture of shopping centres and bright, produce-laden interiors of department stores. Since then, the ethics of museum design continues to be a minor question in our sector; ethics codes, even of design groups, tend not to relate to the physical thing designed and built, the opportunities to generate empowering encounters built into (or out of) them or the design processes and methodologies used, but rather to ethical business practices and ethical behaviours towards clients (Till 2009: 180). As a result, large amounts of funding continue to be spent on museum developments, but without the fine-grained and open discussion of the ethics of design that the social scale and impact of these spaces deserves.

Since 2010, I have been involved in a number of projects with cultural partners around particular aspects of design, and ethics continues to emerge as a necessary frame within which to think about the potential of museum design, if allowed, to make a significant contribution to the cultural sector’s social ambitions. This chapter draws these ideas and activities together through a discussion of what an ethics of museum design might entail, and why the development of an ethics of museum design could be a game-changing addition to the cultural sector. The discussion is developed through a single project undertaken with Historic Royal Palaces (HRP), the Research Centre for Museum and Galleries in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester (RCMG) and Berlin-based exhibition design studio Duncan McCauley (DMC), as a mechanism for exploring the ways in which an ethics of museum design, as a responsibility, an outlook and a process rather than a specific set of guidelines, might be worked through. The chapter contains a clear challenge to design researchers, design practitioners and cultural organisations to ‘think together’ about the various roles of museums and galleries, the physical, material and embodied nature of all human experience and the urgency of opening up new ways of making vital, valued and socially impactful spaces for culture in an increasingly commercialised, homogenised and divided social world.

‘Design is as moral as a hammer’: from caricatures of museum design to complexity, purpose and ethics

Design is a complex and competitive field. It is also a field in which caricatures – poor, ludicrous imitations of reality – abound. These over-simplifications of design and designed forms complicate the ways in which cultural organisations engage with design and negatively influence expectations of, and approaches to, investment in the physical infrastructure of museums. For example, design in museums continues to be discussed as the object of the designer, a view fuelled not just by the reductive words and images which architects and architectural critics place between us and design in museums (images of people-less gal...