Museum Space Where Architecture Meets MuseologyMuseum Space Where Architecture Meets Museology KALI TZORTZI University of Patras, Greece Taylor & Francis Group i Routledge LONDON AND NEW YORKFurst published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OXL1 ARN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Kali Tzortzi 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher, Kali Tzortzi has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, 10 be identified as the author of this work. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ‘The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows Tzorizi, Kali. Museum space : where architecture meets museology / by Kali Tzortzi pages em Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-3901-7 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-3902-4 (ebook) ~ ISBN 978- 1-4724-3903-1 (ePub) 1. Museum architecture. 2. Museum architecture--Case studies. 3. Space (Architecture) 4. Museum buildings. 5. Muscum exhibits. 6. Museums--Social aspects. 7. Museum visitors. I. Title. NA6690.T86 2015 T2T ha-de23 = BIBL. CENT.LE ARCHITETTURA ISBN: 9781472439017 (hbk) POLITECNICO MLLANO BCA, 127.6 ‘TZORK ACA 17587Contents List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgements Introduction L es The Museum as a Kind of Building ‘The Display as Presentation in Space 3 The Museum as Organized Space 4 Anelysing Museum Space 5 Axes and Visual Fields: Space Enhancing Objects and Objects Enhancing Space 6 Hierarchies and Sequences: The Museum as ‘City’ and as ‘Machine’ 7 Order and Choice: Specific Messages and Layered Experiences 8 Theoretical Synthesis: A Way of Thinking about Museum Space Postscript Bibliography Index vii xvii 43 81 103 121 195 225 249 261 281Introduction Maybe the only program that one can make is ... to say how dees one make architecture today rather than how does one make a museum. Peter Eisenman’ The art of exhibiting is a branch of architecture. Philip Johnson? How does architecture affect our experience of museums? How does it relate to the ‘art of exhibiting’ (1931, cited in Johnson, 1979, p.49)? Guided by the belief that the design of space is the common point of reference for architecture and museology and so between the architect and the curator, this book aims to investigate a key issue, theoretical as well as practical, in the design of museums ond galleries: how the layout of space interacts with the layout of exhibits to realize specific effects, express intended messages or simply create a richer spatial experience. To understand this interaction entails answering three critical questions. Does spatial design makes a difference, and if so, what kind of difference? How does architectural design relate to curatorial intent? What dimensions of our experience of museums are affected by the way galleries and objects are organized spatially? The background to these questions is that since the mid-twentieth century, museum architecture has moved away from the recognizable forms established in the nineteenth century and now surprises us with its heterogeneity and innovation, challenging the very idea of the museum as a particular kind of building. Museums can now be conversions of buildings as diverse as train stations, hospitals and power stations, they can be designed by a group of architects, as well as individuals, and even be created by a single artist seeking original expression of the relation of building to art. Faced with this proliferation of new forms, and seeking to understand how innovative and experimental projects have evolved within the context of ideas defined by the history of museum architecture, architectural scholarship has addressed the design of museums extensively (for example: Brawne, 1965; Searing, 1986; 2004; von Moos, 2001; Montener, 2003; von Naredi-Rainer, 2004; Basso Peressut, 1993; 1999; Newhouse, 1998: Giebelhausen, 2006a; 2006b; Magnago Lampugnani, 2001; 2006; Suma, 2007; Greub and Greub, 2008; McClellan, 2008; MacLeod, 2013). 1 Eisenman, 1998, p.39. 2 1931, cited in Johnson, 1979, p.49.Within this historical and theoretical debate, and m tradistinction to the customary emphasis on the exicrior form of museums and their plast idemtity, the book has as starting point the belief that architecture affects museum experience not only through the physical form of the building, but also as a system of spatial relations, that is, through the way in which the building organizes space and constructs connections: between galleries, affecting the way in which we explore and use them; between objects, affecting the way we perceive and read them; and between visitors, creating possibilities of co-presence and encounter. Based on these ideas we will seek to approach key theoretical and practical questions that concern the architecture of museums. Do museums, with all their variations in form and function, share certain spatial themes in common? If they do, what is their relevance to the functioning of the museum, and are they in any sease retained or reinterpreted in experimental designs? Can we develop general theoretical principles to account for them? Through these questions, the aim then is to identify properties of museum space, which are critical not only for the museum as.a kind of building, but also for their implications for the spatial arrangement of displays, and for the way visitors become aware of them, as well as of each other. "The importance of space in museums and its effects on the way in which we approach and perceive displays has been increasingly acknowledged by the art historical and muscum studies literature. Duncan (1978; 1980; 1995) and Krauss (1990) were among the first to integrate the issue of space into the socio-cultural context of the museum. They argued that the organization of space, in relation to the architecture of the museum and the spatial arrangement of objects, were manifestations of ideology and social meaning, and, like a ‘script’, shaped visitors’ experience. The issue has been repeatedly taken up since then, most notably by Staniszewski (2001), Noordegraaf (2004) and Newhouse (2005), all authors who studied particular museums and looked at how transformations in layout principles can reflect changes of aesthetic ideas and cultural views. Similar to the concept of ‘script’ is the influential idea of museums as ‘teat’ (for example, Bal, 1996; Davallon, 1999; Ravelli, 2006) which has also engaged the issue of space. Arguing that the significance of an object is defined by its relations with other objects in the exhibition, authors consider how walking through the museum is ‘a meaning-making event’ (Bal, 1996, p.212). A more direct spatial analogy, the comparison between museums and ‘maps’, is suggested by ‘Whitehead (2009; 2012), By examining in detail how art muscums, through their “spatial nature’ (2012, p23), create a map of knowledge, he shows that they not only embody theories but also construct them. A rich spatial thinking is also found in the recent literature discussing the strategic role of space in creating the experience of visiting (fer example, Falk and Dierking, 1992; 2000; Dierking, 2002; Witcomb, 2003; Macdonald, 2007; Whitehead, 2009; Moser, 2010) and the relation between exhibition layouts and types of leaming (for example, Hein, 1998; Black, 2005; 2012) Falk and Dierking (1992) sce the physicel organization of the muscum as one of the three dimensions ~ together with the personal and the social — that create what they callIntroduction 3 the ‘Interactive Experience Model’ . Witcomb (2003), linking spatial design to the ‘constructivist’ theory, that sces learning as ‘meaningfid experience’ rather than ‘defined content ourcome’ (Hein, 2006, p.348), suggests that exhibition designs which encourage exploration, both spatially and conceptually, allow ‘spatial interactivity’ and meaning-making by visitors. The book draws on this body of literature in seeking to understand how space interacts with museological discourse and how curatorial intent can be expressed. in space. To this end, it focuses not only on the role of architectural space? in museum experience, but also on the analysis of the object display from a spatial point of view, with the aim of identifying design choices which enhance objects and structure experionee. This aim is all the more challenging in the light of the growing curatorial tendency to regularly rearrange permanent collections of museums (see Chapter 6), end the ever-increasing variety and complexity in the presentation of works — from thematic arrangements (as, for instance, in the case of the Galleria Civica d’Arte Modema ¢ Contemporanea, in Turin, since 2009), and the quite unexpected grouping of objects on the basis of the date of their acquisition (as in the case of the Euskal Museoa Bilbao, in 2001), to exhibition experiments that are devoid of didactic intent (see Macdonald and Basu, 2007). It has always been thought that the spatial arrangement of objects can be used to express a conceptual structure in a physical way. Here, in parallel to seeking a more precise understanding of this, we also raise the reverse question: can the arrangement of objects be used to enhance the spatial structure to the advantage of the perceptual organization, and so create what Peter Eisenman calls an ‘architecture of space’ (1998, p.40)? More generally, can the influence of space on the display extend beyond refiecting the organization of knowledge, and contribute independent effects as a message in its own right? The attempt to deal with space in the architectural sense and display in the curatorial sense, in conjunction with the effect of both on visitor patierns, has precedents in exhibition design guides (for example, Royal Ontario Museum, 1976; 1999; Hall, 1987; Dean, 1994; Lord and Lord, 2002; Dernie, 2006; Hughes, 2010). One of the main contributions of this body of work is that it places emphasis on the effects of different design choices on visitors’ behaviour and experience. But rather than secking some set of normative guidelines for successfully designing a museum, as a design guide must, this book works towards developing, on the one hand an analytic theory - ‘a tool of thought’ (Hillier, 1996) — for the spatial interpretation of museums, based on the direct in-depth study of working examples; and on the other, 2 methodology for how museum buildings can be systematically studied and compared with each other. The book seeks in effect to interrogate museum space with the aim of pursuing questions often neglected in However, it should be noted that, though the focus is on the spatial dimension of the display layout, the book will not discuss the contributions of lighting, the effect of material textures, or any other espects of space that could affect the perception of the works, elements that self-evidently concern architects, exhibition designers and curators,4 Museum Space the literature: how does the museum actually function? How do visitors use the layout and interact with it? To what extent can the organization of galleries and the arrangement of objects in space account for the differences in the observable spatial behaviour of visitors‘* With the aim of ensuring methodological consistency, the book draws on the theory and method of space syntax, developed by Hillier et al, at UCL, from the mid 1970s. Space syntax provides the theoretical foundations for analysing museums as configurations of space and so allows precise accounts of the Gifferences between one spatial layout and another. Since no methodology for object layout has been proposed which approaches space syntax in coherence and rigour, syntactic concepts will also provide a spatial framework for the analysis of display strategies and enable us to bridge between the two layers of organization in museums, There is a further advantage to this methodological choice: syntactic methods combined with techniques for the observation of pattems of visiting (particularly visitors’ paths of exploration, their patterns of viewing and stopping points), allow the spatial properties of museum layouts to be systematically related to observed aspects of space use, so linking our knowledge of functioning of museums to their morphology. This intention to develop theory through the first-hand study of museums: requires the comparative analysis of 2 range of real cases. Though theoretically informed by earlier (syntactic) studies, which taken together permit an intensive, rather than extensive, sample, the selection of cases was largely instinctive, leading to cases that it was felt might be rewarding and would help to formulate questions, Museums and gelleries were selected from different time periods (designed between 1938 and 2000), and European countries, but two variables were held constant: they were all art museums that house permanent collections (either arranged permanently or reconfigured on 2 regular basis); and their spatial design was conceived with specific collections in mind (Figure [.1). It was also thought important to focus on museums that illustrate different spatial and display possibilities: museums that provide variety in terms of spatial layout (from grid to sequence systems), variability in the spatial arrangements of objects (from traditional chronological groupings of works to thematic displays and visual arrangements, as well as exhibitions that develop a theoretical argument), and use different strategies in terms of the relationship between architecture and display (from museums where the arrangement of objects is an integral part of the design of space, to those where the two are relatively independent of each other). Each study involved not only detailed description and analysis of spatial and object layouts but also observational studies of visitors’ movement and + That ‘visitors’ responses ... may well be sirongly related to (and regulated by) ‘personal contexts’ (Whitchead, 2004, p.203) is acknowledged. But it will be shown that, for example, by relating detailed tracking paths to museum intent, we enrich their study in ‘way’ that can lead to new insights into visitor behaviour.Introduction 5 Figure 1.1 Views of Castelvecchio Museum (a); Sainsbury Wing (b); Centre Pompidou (c); Tate Modern (d); Louisiana Museum (e); Kréller-Miller Museum (1) Source: K. Tzortzi, courtesy of Castelvecchio Museum (a); Sainsbury Wing (b); Centre Pompidou (c); Tate Modem (d); Louisiana Museum (e); Kréller-Miiller Museum (f). viewing patterns. So in each museum we study three spatial morphologies: the spatial structure of the building itself, the spatial arrangement of displays (including the relation with their conceptual organization) and the spatial behaviour of visitors. The first two are seen as independent, or design, variables in the museum- creating process, and the third, as the dependent, or functional, variable.6 Museum Space ‘The selected museums were analysed in pairs, and this led to the surprising nature of some of the contrasts identified. The logic behind this approach was that each pair allows the in-depth exploration of a spatial theme in a contrasting way. So by examining similar spatial themes in opposing ways, each paired comparison contributes to developing the next stage of the argument, while adding up to the overall spatial hypothesis, that spatial structure is a powerful variable in museum experience. In terms of procedure, we first identify the key differences between the museums, from the point of view of space and display organization, and then show that there are consistent, underlying relations between these differences and the patterns of visitors’ behaviour. The systematic way these observations were carried out allow us to claim some degree of objectivity in describing the functional consequences of layout for visitors to complement the objectivity of the analysis of layout itself. On this more objective foundation, the book then builds an interpretative and critical argument, linking it to more conventional ways of describing experience. < The question we then set is how these regularities between space and the behaviours of visitors arise. In other words, we try to develop a theoretical understanding of the design principles that relate to the functional differences we find between muscums. As we will argue, these principles shape the field of possibility in designing museums and exhibitions, within which architects and curators develop morphological strategies, and invent new ways of designing. This way of secing museums, it is suggested, can give some account of their experiential differences, and explain why each has its own distinctive spatial, intellectual and social character. Structure of the Book Reflecting the sequence of the questions it addresses, the first three chapters of the book look at the three central themes — the building, the display and the spatial organization — from an evolutionary point of view. Chapter 1 traces the evolution of muscums as buildings, and notes how notions of space and spatial organization have evolved with the form of building, from the variety of spaces for display in the sixteenth century, through the establishment of recognizable architectural and spatial types in the nineteenth century, to the heterogeneity and experimentation characteristic of contemporary projects. Focusing on the latter, the last part of the chapter surveys recent developments, through representative cases, some more, others less well-known, seen through key tendencies that characterize them: The Museum as a Unique Building, The Form of the Building as an Expression of its Meaning, The Museum and the City. The chapter ends by proposing three phases in the architectural history of museums: the pre-typological, the typological and the post-typological, and considers how contemporary museum design can be seen as an accumulation rather than a replacement of spatial concepts.Introduction 7 Chapter 2 shifts the emphasis to the evolution of notions of display, with emphasis on the ficld of art, and their implications for space, from the interaction of spaces and collections in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century ‘museums’, to the co-existence of opposing tendencies in the twentieth century and contemporary exhibition designs. Like the building designs, the latter are characterized by diversity and experimentation, in terms of those who create exhibitions (as, for example, the redesign of the gallery spaces of the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art by contemporary artists since 1993), and in terms of display strategies of presentation (as, for example, the unexpected juxtapositions of works of art within a chronological narrative in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, in 2010). The discussion of the current museum reality is complemented by a theoretical exploration of space as a theme in museum studies literature, both through analogies — for example to ‘texts’ — and as an explicit focus. In this we discern a growing awareness of the spatial dimension in the perception of objects and in the construction of exhibition meaning, as well as in the affective experience of the visitor — an awareness that has developed in recent decades, in parallel to the freeing of the building from architectural stereotypes. Chapter 3 turns to the explicit study of museums as ordered space, and examines the architectural discourse on space. It first looks at the comparative basis on which analogies have been made between different spatial layouts. It then focuses on how the architectural literature has addressed the spatial configuration of circulation, and its effects on visitors’ movernent, on the viewing of objects and on the museum’s social functioning, For an approach which links all these different aspects of function in museums to a more consistent analysis of spatial form, the second part of the chapter draws attention to the body of studies of museums using syntactic analysis. These studies, which explore, amongst other themes, the relation between the layout of space and the communication of knowledge, museum space as a symbolic system, and the link between spatial layout and movement, are reviewed as a key foundation of the book, as well as a contribution to the field of museum studies. This contribution becomes more evident in the light of striking parallels suggested at the end of the chapter between the museological ideas of space and eyntactic concepts applied in the studies of museums. Basic syntactic concepts for the analysis of space (such as configuration and depth end techniques (such as the representation of visual experience as lines of sight or fields of vision) are discussed in the first part of Chapter 4, leading to the theoretical and methodological approach of the book which is presented in the second part. On the theoretical approach, the chapter explains how dialectic pairs of syntactic ideas, such as the distinction between the reflective and creative use of space, and between the formal and informal (or in syntactic terms, Jong and short) model, allow the interpretation of architectural layouts and displays in the same terms — for example, the distinction between strongly structured museum layouts or object arrangements and cases where more choices are provided. In terms of methodology, the programme of field work, the reasoning behind the data8 Museum Space collection strategies, the proposed space use variables and the syntactic measures used in the paired case studies, are discussed in turn. The first paired analysis, in Chapter 5, is of the Sainsbury Wing, the extension to the National Gallery, London, by Robert Venturi, and the Castelvecchio Museum, Verona (Italy), the work of the well-known Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. The comparison introduces the central issue for this book: the interaction between architectural design and display layout. Though the two museums accommodate collections that overlap chronologically, they illustrate two contrary layout concepts (with the grid structure of the former in contrast to the sequential form of the latter), and two opposing strategies in relating building design and exhibition set up (one in which the spatial potential is used to support the impact of objects, and another in which the arrangement of objects is used to elaborate space), The analysis shows that, in the former case, attention is focused on promoting the uniqueness of the collection and enhancing the public aspect of the visit, while in the fatter, it shifis to rendering the museum visit a more individual and architectural experience. The second pair, in Chapter 6, consists of two large-scale, ‘urban’ museums of modern art: the National Museum of Moder Art in the Pompidou Centre, Paris, by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, and Tate Modern, London, the conversion of an industrial building by Herzog and de Meuron. In contrast to the two previous spatially opposite cases, Pompidou and Tate Modern seem at first sight to have considerable affinities, such as geometrical regularity, repetitive spatial elements in a tri-partite layout, and long axes to facilitate the orientation of the visitor. However, comparative analysis brings to light fundamental differences, not only in the way they present the art of the twentieth century, but in the way their display layouts shape the morphology of visitors’ movement and affect the way they become aware of each other. This allows us to argue that Pompidou is at the opposite pole of spatial organization to the Tate, and suggests an ‘objective’ justification for the characterization of the ideas behind the two museums by their directors, as ‘a city’ (Hulten, 1974, n.p) in the case of Pompidou, and as ‘a machine for showing works of art’ (Serota, cited in Tate Gallery Archive, 1995a, p.32) in the case of Tate Moder. Chapter 7 focuses, in contrast. on two small-scale museums: the Kréller- Miiller Museum, Otterlo (Netherlands) and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (Denmark). Distant from urban centres and founded by art collectors, the two museums illustrate how the close relation between architectural design and display layout can reflect the ideology of the founder and express a different view of what a museum is. The analysis constitutes in effect a synthesis of contrasts, for example, between the diametrically different ways the two museums deal with their relation to their natural settings: the hermetic character of the Kréller-Miller building inverts the extrovert relation that the Louisiana complex develops with nature. At the same time, the rigid architecture and structure of the Kréller-Milller building is in contrast with the ‘invisible’ architecture and the asymmetrical arrangement of the pavilions of Louisiana, while the display layoutIntroduction 9 of the former, which expresses 2 complex conceptual message, is opposed to the visual arrangement of objects in the latter. Adopting the distinction between two kinds of information proposed by Moles (1966), we argue tha: Kréller-Miller aims at communicating semaniic information, while Louisiana communicates aesthetic information. After a brief recapitulation ofeach case study, with special attention to observed Visitor behaviour, Chapter 8 synthetically reviews the main dimensions of spatial variability in these museums, describing them in terms of key tensions in museum design: between the organization of spaces in a visitable sequence to facilitate viewing and the creation of spaces that bring visitors together; between the informational and the social dimension of museum experience; and between the architecture of space and the object display. It then examines the main dimensions of display strategies, noting a distinction between cases where space is used to enhance the impact of exhibits, and those where exhibits are used to enhance space, as well as cases where space and display retain their autonomy. The final part of the chapter then proposes a tentative theoretical model for the spatial and display layouts, which also links the layout to key dimensions of museum experience, and allows the drawing of a fundamental distinction between museums that intend to convey a pre-given meaning and reproduce information, and museums that create fields of possible meaning and produce a richer spatial structure. The book ends with a Postseript which seeks to open up new questions and additional dimensions of analysis. It takes as starting point the idea which first appears in the Glyptothek, that by moving through space the visitor experiences the evolution of art and so taverses time — a manifestation of the close link between architecture and museology. It then explores a series of museums which express the relation between space and time in different ways, so that this relation becomes part of the individuality of each museum and contributes to its distinctive experience. It argues, for example, that in the new Acropolis Museum, Athens, the spatial design adds a sense of topography to that of chronology, in Laténium, Neuchatel, the spatial and visual links between galleries, in combination with the reverse chronology of the narrative, make visitors experience time as archaeologists, while in the Jewish Museum, Berlin, events spread over time are compressed into single spatial experiences. Finally, Insel Hombroich explores different concepts of space without time, so acting theoretically as amuseum about museums — a meta-museum. These examples complement the main framework of the book and suggest how its approach to the study of museums through space and display configuration can converge with other approaches, and help bring to light both the complexity of individual cases and their theoretical interrelations, with the aim of creatively informing the design of museums.Chapter 1 The Museum as a Kind of Building Museum architecture is not simply a way of housing art works, nor it is a display machine: it is a critical tool that makes art accessible and understandable. Carlo Searpat The word ‘museum’ often brings to mind a picture of a building. Yet the idea of the museum as a building type, whose primary aim is to ‘communicate and exhibit (ICOM, 2009), is not found with consistency and continuity through its long history. In fact at the beginning of the history of museums, the word did not apply to a building but to a collection. It was only towards the end of the eighteenth century when the idea of the museum was established and the first independent, specially designed buildings were built, that an architectural typology was created, one which remained dominant until the beginning of the twentieth century. It is striking that contemporary museum reality is characterized by a return to the idea of the museum as a building that is free from typological references, and constitutes a field of experimentation and application of new ideas, either to new buildings or to existing buildings with a different original function. To understand the museum through the building, that is to see the building as the expression of the idea of the museum, and comprehend its evolution and its discontinuities, we will sketch the history of museum buildings? as physical forms, choosing key moments of particular interest from the point of view of this book so that they establish the scaffolding for its core argument. The buildings will be ' According to Sergio Los (2002, p.82). 2 Thishistoric overview is based on the studies (in chronologies! order) of Bazin, 1967: Peysner, 1976; Searing, 1986; 2004; Molfini, 1992; Schaer, 1993; Alexander, 1996; Huber, 1997; Newhouse, 1998; Basso Peressut, 1999; 2005; Magnago Lampugnani, 2001; 2006: Grunenberg, 1999; Tilden, 2004; von Naredi-Rainer, 2004; Giebelhausen, 2006a; 2006b; Gob and Drouguet, 2006; Hooper-Greenhill, 1992; Camin, 2007; Cataldo and Paraventi, 2007; Fontanel, 2007; MacGregor, 2007; Schnapp, 1996; Suma, 2007; Vercelloni, 2007; Futagawa, 2008; Lotus International, 1987; 2008; McClellan, 2008; Amouroux, 2010; Desvallées and Mairesse, 2011. An alternative reading of museum architecture ‘as a social and cultural production’ (MacLeod, 2013, p.25), continually remade through occupation and use, is proposed by MacLeod (2005; 2007; 2013). Rather than approaching museum buildings as aesthetic objects and architecture as ‘the privileged activity of the architect’ (2005, pp.12-13), she is interested in the site-specific reading of museum buildings and the ‘social significance of their architectural and spatial rearrangement’ (2008, p.22).2 Museum Space seen in terms of both the space they organize, and the display they accommodate, but these two dimensions will be in the background in this chapter and will come to the fore in the next two. Antiquity: Public Spaces for the Collection and Display of Objects Examining the etymology of the word ‘museum’ usually means referring to the sacred place dedicated to the Muses, the protective deities of the arts of classical mythology. In general, in antiquity, the spaces that housed collections of objects with aesthetic, historic or religious significance, were open air public spaces: the ancient Greek sanctuaries, where offerings by devotees were deposited and displayed to the public, objects that were ‘distinguished for their refined technique or their precious materials, by being the work of known artists’ (Schnapp, 1966, p.56), or ‘recalled a particular event, incident or individual” (Schnapp, 2006, p.57). But there were also the small-scale buildings in the form of temples. known as thesauroi (treasure chambers), built in the great sanctuaries, like Delphi, by Greek cities, ‘destined to receive the donations of the citizens’ (Bazin, 1967, p.12) dedicated to the gods. Mention is also made (Pausanias, I, 22,6) of the existence of places specially laid out to receive paintings (pinakes), executed on wood and called pinakothekai. The oldest mention of a pinakotheke is found in the north wing of the Propylaia in the Acropolis of Athens, built in fifth century BC, which, among other artists, housed the works of the great Polygnotos. As the origins of the word ‘muscum’ refer to the cult sites of the Muses, most accounts of the history of museums begin with the Museum (Mouseion) of Alexandria, which was founded by Ptolemy Soter, in the third century BC, when Alexandria was a principal focus for Hellenistic intellectual life. However, this was ‘a university or a philosophical academy — a kind of institute of advanced study’ (Alexander, 1996, p.6; Bazin, 1967, p.16), and so not a museum in anything Jike the modem sense. According to Strabo’s ‘Geography’ (book 17) (cited in Schaer, 1993, p.11), the Museum and the renowned Library constituted together the biggest cultural centre of the Hellenistic world. The Museum is also said to have included a botanical and zoological park, rooms devoted to the study of anatomy, and installations for astronomical observations, though there is no hint of art or material collections (Bazin, 1967, p.16; MacGregor, 2007, p.1; Mairesse, 2011, p.274). Members of the Museum were scholars and savants — mathematicians, astronomers, geographers, poets — who lived there at the expense of the state. So the Museum of Alexandria had more in common with a college of scholars or a philosophical academy, where the search for knowledge was based on the study of texts or the observation of nature, than with the contemporary museum, ‘The places for collecting and displaying painting and sculpture — usually spoils from wars — continued in Roman times to be public spaces, such as fora, gardens, temples, theatres and baths, as well as private spaces, such as the villas of Roman generals and patricians (in this perhaps precursors of the Renaissance palaces ~The Museum as a Kind of Building 13 see below). Similarly, during the Middle Ages, the spaces where objects, such as works of ecclesiastical art, were collected and displayed, remained public places, such as churches, cathedrals and monesteries (Alexander, 1996, p.7). The Renaissance: A Shift from Public to Private Spaces A radical shift from public to private spaces for collecting and displaying occurs in the Renaissance, in the cities and courts of Italy, where wealthy collectors and humanist scholars first emerged (MacGregor, 2007, p.1). At this time, there was a strong interest in antiquity, and archaeological excavations were bringing to light ancient monuments and works, especially sculptures, which became the canon of beauty for the next three centuries. The value of the objects of a collection was no longer related only to the value of the materials or to the fact that they dated from antiquity, but also to their artistic value (Schaer, 1993, pp.18-19). The spaces for the display of the collections were part of the private residence, palace or garden, of the collectors, so they were working at the same time as places of residence and of display, open to select invitees, including scholars and experts, but also to members of other wealthy families or visitors to the city. So the Renaissance marks the shift from the public and collective to the private and individual for collecting and displaying (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, p.69) It is in this period that we find the first special setting for the display of Antique sculptures, perhaps, according to Pevsner (1976, p.111), the first open air museum. The space, the Cortile delle Statue, was designed about 1508 by Donato Bramante, architect of the Pope Julius II, beyond the far end of the Cortile del Belvedere in the Vatican, to display the sculptures of the papal collection, including the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon and his Sons. In the Renaissance period we also find the building in the interior of which the word ‘museum’ first appears: the villa on Lake Como of the humanist Paolo Giovio (created between 1537-43) where he established a collection of several hundred portraits of famous men, so arguably the first history museum (Bazin, 1967, p.57; Fontanel, 2007, p.32). The rooms were named after Roman gods, while one room was dedicated to the Muses and Apollo, and called musaewm. Distinct among the Renaissance palaces that were used for the arrangement and display of collections, is the Palazzo Medici (Riccardi) in Florence (about 1440). It is seen as ‘the first museum of Europe’ (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, pp.23-25, 69-77), as it introduced new practices related to the emergence of the ‘patron/ connoisseurs’, the ‘visitor/viewer/gazer’ and, most importantly, the ‘concept of the expository space, a space specifically designed to display’ (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, pp.69, 72). But the word ‘museum’ was then used (as later in the case of the collection of Giovio), to designate the collection of manuscripts and gems (Museo dei codici e cimeli artistic?) of Lorenzo the Magnificent of the Medici family, and not the building that housed the collection (Bazin, 1967, p.46; Vercclloni, 2007, p.6).14 Museum Space Sixteenth Century: The Emergence of Different Types of Space for Display By the end of the sixteenth century when collections had become commonplace in Europe, the tendency was established to create specific ‘expository space” (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, p.72) in the palaces of rulers, political and religious, but also in the residences of scholars and physicians (Figure 1.la). The overall aim of these collections — the so-called ‘cabinets of curiosity’ — from the sixteenth to about the mid-seventicth century was the same: to represent an entire or partial picture of the world (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, p.78, 80), creating ‘a model of “yniversal nature made private” (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, p.78). These related closely to the historic and ideological context ~ the discovery of the New World and the curiosity and love of learning that characterized this time (Bazin, 1967, pp.55-56). The word ‘cabinet’ was used to describe both the collection as weil as its containers, including room spaces. But a variety of terms was also in use, including Kunstkammer, Wunderkammer, studiolo (see Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, pp.88-89; MacGregor, 2007, p.11).? The prototype for the cabinet emerged in Italy, during the 1570s in the form of the studiolo of Francesco I de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, within the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence: a small room (measuring 8.5%3.5 metres), without windows, and with the collection enclosed in wall-cabinets. The painted decorations on their doors ‘provided a series of visual clues or keys as to the conceptual basis of the installation and to ihe contents and significance of each cabinet’ (MacGregor, 2007, p.13). This space was the opposite of the modern museum: it was private, rather than public, a place for the owner’s contemplation rather than display, a setting with an intellectual, rather than social character. However, the studiolo of Francesco I does not typify all the princely cabinets. Quite the opposite is the Kunstkammer of Albrecht V of Habsburg, Duke of Bavaria, in Munich. If the room of the Italian prince was of an intimate scale and dark, the Kunstkammer in Munich occupied the two upper floors of the four wings of a quadrangle —a structure that will be later established for art museums (Scheer, 1993, p.23) — and was flooded with light from all sides. And while the Italian prince withdrew to his cabinet seeking solitude, the Bavarian duke considered his Kunstkammer a meeting place, a place for social interaction, It is also of interest that between 1569 and 1571, Albrecht V created, on the ground floor of the Residenz in Munich, the Antiquarium, @ specially built chamber (66 metres long), ‘with niches and plinths let into the walls under high windows on either side’ (MacGregor, 2007, p.77), to house his collection of ancient and other sculptures (busts of emperors and other rulers), while the upper floor accommodated the ducal library. The gallery of art developed ‘as a distinctive architectural miliew’ (MacGregor, 2007, p.71) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among the earliest and most significant examples in Italy were: the upper floor of the east wing of the The spatial ordering of the objects is discussed in Chapter 2.The Museum as a Kind of Building 15 Uffizi (originally, in 1560, designed as a complex of offices by Giorgio Vasari), that was converted in 1581 into a gallery for the Medici art collection; the gallery in the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua, built about 1570; and the Galleria degli Antichi in Sabbioneta (more than 90 metres long), built by Vespasiano Gonzaga between 1583-90. The developments in Italy had influence abroad, for example, in France the Grande Galérie was constructed in Fontainebleau (1533-40) by Francois 1. As noted by Pevsner (1976, p.112), ‘so frequently were galleries usedto display statuary that gallery became a synonym of museum, first in France and then in Ttaly’. It was at this time that another type of space emerged, one which constituted a milestone in museum architecture. A few years after the creation of the galleria on the upper floor of the Uffizi, the Tribuna, an octagonal ground plan with light from a cupola in the centre of its vaulted ceiling, was designed in 1591 by Bernardo Buontalenti, to house the rare pieces of the Medici collection, Paintings and sculptures were displayed together in an ‘integrated and harmonious manner’ (MacGregor, 2007, p.92), though until the nineteenth century common practice was to separate them. The Tribuna constituted the fulcrum of the Medici collection and a point of reference for others (see Pevsner, 1976, p.l14). End of the Seventeenth—Eighteenth Century: The Idea of the Public Museum If the Renaissance marks a shift from public to private space, the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century introduces the opposite: the shift of the display function from specially designed private settings to public buildings, such as universities (see below), academies (mainly in Italy — for example, Bergamo, 1780 — and France ~ for example, Dijon and Reims, between 1748-85), churches and monasteries (such as the abbey of Besangon, that became the oldest public museum in France or later, in the French Revolution, the Couvent des Petits Augustins, the future Musée des Monuments Frangais, 1795 — see Chapter 2). Associated with these changes was the notion of the accessibility of the collections to a wider public, since, according to the spirit of the Enlightenment, it was no longer socially acceptable for collectors to keep for themselves what should be open to the public and available as a tool for the communication of knowledge. Indicative of this tendency were the bequests to the Senate of Bologna of the collections of curiosities (with emphasis on natural spocimens) of the scholar Ulisse Aldrovandi, professor of botany and natural history in the University of Bologna, and that of the Marchese Ferdinando Cospi of Bologna, pharmacist, in 1617 and 1667 respectively. The collections were displayed in the Palazzo Publico, where they were made available to the scholarly public. Similarly, in 1662, the City Council of Basel, in collaboration with the university of the city, acquired the whole Amerbach collection (Landolt, 1984, p.32) (Figure 1.1.b-c), and placed it on public display, together with the library that accompanied it, in a building close to the cathedral, so founding, in 1671, the oldest university museum Bazin, 1967, p.144).16 Museum Space Figure 1.1 The ‘museum’ of Ferrante Imperato in Naples. From Ferrante Imperato’s ‘Historia Naturalis’, 1599 (a); the Historisches Museum Basel houses the Amerbach collection: coin cabinet (b); display case with ‘curiosities’ (c) Source: MacGregor, 2007, courtesy of Dr A. MacGregor (a); © Historisches Museum Basel (b-c).The Museum as a Kind of Building 17 More widely known is the case of the Ashmolean Museum in the University of Oxford (1683), one of first museums to be established formally as a public institution (Fontanel, 2007, p.52) (sce also Postscript). To house the collection of curiosities that had been created by John Tradescant the elder, Keeper of the King’s Garden, and his son, John Tradescant the younger, and donated to the University by Elias Ashmole (a lawyer and antiquary to whom the Tradescants transferred the collections by deed of gift), a building had been erected by the University, in accordance with the conditions of the donation, In this building the collection occupied the first floor, and was accompanied by a ‘School of Natural History’ on the ground floor, and a chemical laboratory in the basement (MacGregor, 2007, p.4l; Ashmolean: Britain's First Museum, 2009, p.9). Eighteenth Century: The Museum Building as an Object of Study and Conscious Design The design of buildings with the clear intention to house and display collections was established in the eighteenth century, both through unrealized designs and others that were built, An early example of the former is the plan for an ideal museum by Leonhard Christopher Sturm in 1704 (Figure 1.2a), in which there were separate rooms for the different collections. The rooms on the ground floor were devoted to the collections of antiquities and objects of natural history. One room oa the upper floor housed small paintings, drawings and sculpture. Spatially, the plan took the form of a space at the entrance for setting out from and returning to, and a layout of exhibition spaces into a visitable sequence, so one could walk through the gallery without backtracking or getting lost, themes that were soon to become common in museum layout. Even more influential in the development of an architectural typology of the museum was the creation of purpose-built structures ‘of public character — if not yet, use’ (Basso Peressyt, 1999, p.10) that began to appear in the middle of the eighteenth century to display princely, royal and imperial collections, These had until then been housed in palaces ‘difficult or impossible for access’ (MacGregor, 2007, p.103), but were now to be made accessible to a wider public. Two early examples were the Museum Fridericianum, in Kassel (by Simon Louis Du Ry, 1769-79), and the Museo Pio-Clemetino in the Vatican (by Michelangelo Simonetti and Giuseppe Camporesi, 1773-80). The Museum Fridericianum (Figure 1.3a) was an independent building, combining « museum and a library. While maintaining the general character of a palace, the building integrated elements of a Greek temple. On the axis of symmetry of the fagade, the entrance took the form of a portico of six columns, carrying a pediment and the inscription Museum Fridericianum, suggesting a sacred character for the museum. The spatial layout had a tripartite form, with central spaces separated from those along the side by columns, bringing perhaps to mind the nave and aisle of a church. The building housed a range of collections,18 Museum Space from antique statuary, coins and prints to natural specimens, minerals, and mechanical and musical instruments. On the upper floor there was @ library and the private study of the founder Frederick II, the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. The Museum Fridericianum could perhaps be seen as a continuation of the close relation between museum and library, a distant reminiscence of the Museum of Alexandria — a relation which is preserved through the nineteenth century until our time, with the Centre Pompidou as a prime example (see below). The second purpose-built building, the Museo Pio-Clementino, created as an extension to the Vatican palace, introduced two features that inspired museum architecture across Europe (Giebelhausen, 2006b, p.224): the grand staircase and the domed rotunda (Sala Rotonda). It is of interest that beyond its function as an organizer of movement, the rotunda had also a symbolic function, in that it was dedicated to the statues of the major deities of antiquity. Museum design became an object of architectural study towards the end of the eighteenth century. Between 1778 and the early nineteenth century, the Académie Royale d’ Architecture in Paris several times sot the theme of a museum for the architectural competition known as the Prix de Rome. One of the most significant design proposals was for a colossal ‘temple de la Renommée’ (Temple of Glory) (1783) by Etienne-Louis Boullée, a member of the Académie d’ Architecture. The museum had a square ground plan, with a Greek cross set into it and a rotunda at the crossing, and the basic cross layout was emphasized by the semi-circular portico attached on each side. The rotunda was to be ‘ “wn temple de la Renommée destir @ contenir les statues des grands hommes” — i.e. a national monument in our sense’ (Pevsner, 1976, p.119). In terms of space, it took the form of sequences of rooms departing from and returning to a central space. The museum was intended to include ‘les productions des sciences, des arts libéraux et d'histoire naturelle’ (Pevsner, 1976, p.119), and also house a library, as well as anatomical specimens, stuffed animals and shells. But the design that ‘had immense influence’ (Povsner, 1976, p.122), and became the point of reference for the design of museums in the nineteenth century, was the ideal plan for a museum by the French theorist and architect Jeen-Nicolas-Louis Durand, a pupil of Boullée and professor in the Academie (Figure 1.2b). The plan was included in his principal work Précis des legons d'architecture données é |’Ecole royale polyiechnique (1802-05): four wings of equal length, each with a separate entrance, and arranged in a square, into which a Greek cross and a rotunda in the centre of the cross were inscribed. In this plan we find again the theme of the central space linking the sequences of rooms. The museum was intended to house painting, sculpture, architecture and temporary exhibitions. Its paradigmatic character is perhaps due to the fact that its spatial structure succeeded in combining the exhibition spaces that evolved in Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth century, that is the square room (sala) and the longitudinal space (galleria) as the elements of the exhibition route, and the rotunda as the epicenire of synthesis, the point of reference and the key device of space organization.The Museum as a Kind of Building Rae pe phat dada Figure 1.2 Design foramuseum by L.C. Sturm, 1704 (a): by Durand, 1802-05 (b); layout of the Glyptothek, Munich, 1830 (c); the Altes Museum, Berlin, 1830 (d); the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 1836 (e) Source: © K. Tzorizi (a); Basso Peresssut, 1999, courtesy of Prof. L. Basso Peressut (b-c); © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Antikensammlung (@; © Bayerische Staatsgemildesammbingen (e).20 Museum Space Nineteenth Century: Establishment of an Architectural Typology The emerging architectural typology of museums was consolidated by three major museum buildings of the early nineteenth century, all founded and built for the specific purpose of displaying art: the Glyptothek in Munich (1816-30), the Altes Muscum in Berlin (1823-30) and the Alte Pinakothek in Munich (1826-36). The Glyptothek (Figure 1.3b), designed by Leo von Klenze, was in many respects innovative. It was created to access the collection of ancient sculpture of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, among the most important being the Archaic pediment sculptures from the Aphaia Temple in Aegina. Reflecting the collection, the fagade of the building had a pedimented portico of eight ionic columns. The four-wing plan (Figure 1.2c) that shaped a linear route, was based on, but also modified, Durand’s design, by omitting the inscribed cross and the central rotunda. It is of interest that the interior arrangement and decoration was a source of opposition between, on the one hand, the painter, sculptor and archacologist Johann Martin ‘Wagner, art advisor to Ludwig, who proposed a building without omament, with ‘a strict coincidence with its function’ , in the belief that ‘if you visit a collection of ancient sculpture you go because of the ancient sculpture’ (cited in Pevsner, 1976, p.124), and, on the other, the architect who was in favour of a rich decoration of the exhibition spaces, with the didactic intention of representing the historic context of the exhibits. Klenze argued that a museum is ‘a place in which to show a number of treasures of art to all kinds of visitors in a manner to be worthy of the objects and to create pleasure in them’ (cited in Pevsner, 1976, p.126). It was his view that finally prevailed. This conflict can be seen as an early example of the tension between building and display that we repeatedly find in the history of museums, up to the present day. The Altes Museum, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, could also be seen as a variation of Durand’s ideal museum design (Figure |.2d),* The monumental building sits on a plinth-like podium, and an Tonic colonnade runs along the whole length of its fagade (Figure 1.3c). On the axis of symmetry of the rectangular ground floor plan is the rotunda, framed by two courtyards, and around it, a sequence of galleries, linked to the rotunda. The museum is developed on two floors, one of the key changes to the Durand design introduced by Schinkel. On the ground floor, it housed the collection of ancient sculpture and on the upper floor, paintings. The entrance led the visitor directly to the rotunda, which was aimed to work as a transitional space that prepared visitors psychologically to leave behind the everyday, and contemplate art. Though it is said to derive from the interior of the Pantheon in Rome as well as the museum design of Durand, it is thanks to the Altes Museum, according to Pevsner, that the rotunda ‘became a favourite motif of museums’ (1976, p.127; also, von Naredi-Rainer, 2004, p.22). * Though this relation of the plan of the Altes Museum with Durand’s ideal museum design has also been questioned (see Basso Peressut, 1999, p.12)The Museum as a Kind of Building 21 Innovative from the point of view of space organization, and pethaps ‘the most influential museum building of the nineteenth century architecturally’ (Pevsner, 1976, p.128) was the Alte Pinakothek (Figure 1.34), designed — like the Glyptothek — by Leo von Klenze, for the display of the royal collection of paintings. The two-storeyed elongated He-shape building, housed a library, storerooms and offices on the ground floor, and exhibition spaces on the upper floor. The layout (Figure 1.2) was tri- partite, with the central set of larger rooms lit by skylights, flanked on the north side by small galleries, laterally lit, and on the south, by a corridor that linked the rooms between them, so that they could be accessed directly, thus providing the visitor for the first time with significant choice in selecting routes (see Chapter 2 and 3), Among the museums that followed the plan of the Alte Pinakothek were the Neue Pinakothek, Munich (1846-52), the Gemiilldegalerie, Dresden (1847-55), and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (1872-89) (Figure 1.3e) (Pevsner, 1976, p.130; von Naredi-Rainer, 2004, p.23). These museums in Munich and in Berlin, more than any others, established an architectural typology for the museum, or in Giebelhausen’s words ‘helped to codify the new building type’ (Giebelhausen, 2006b, .230), which had as key characteristics a monumental bids oar Figure 13 Museum Fridericianum, Kassel (a); Glyptothek, Munich (b); Altes Museum, Berlin (c); Alte Pinakothek, Munich (a); Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (¢) Source: Basso Peressut, 1999, courtesy of Prof. L. Basso Peressut (a); K. Tzortzi, with permission hy the Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek Munchen (b); Photograph: Johannes Laurentius © Steatliche Museen zu Berlin, Antikensammlung (¢); K. Tzortzi, courtesy of Bayerische Stastsgemiildesammlungen (d) and of Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (e)..22 Museurn Space entrance with a portico, a long colonnade running the length of the facade, and longitudinel exhibition spaces, perhaps arranged sequentially around a rotunda or a courtyard. Formally, the symbolic language of the architecture could be said to suggest a close relation between container and content, and emphasize the idea of the museum as temple of art, or ‘monument to culture’ (Gicbelhausen, 2006b, p.230). From the 1830s, important museum buildings were created in many major European and American cities (Giebelhausen, 2006a, p.48). Among them, the new building of the British Museum (1823-47) in London, designed by Sir Robert Smirke, to replace the older one, Montagu House, and provide for a growing collection. From an institutional point of view, the creation of the British Museum had historically been a key event, since it was founded (1753) from the beginning as an institution decreed by an Act of Parliament. Architecturally, however, the new building seems not to have contributed significantly to the history of museum architecture, although it has been argued, however, that the long colonnade of the British Museum was designed before — and independently — of that of the ‘Altes Museum (see Pevsner, 1976, p.127; von Naredi-Rainer, 2004, p.24; Searing, 2004, p.19). Second Half of the Nineteenth Century—Beginning of the Twentieth Century: A New Type of Museum Building In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, a new kind of building for display appeared in England, initiated by the International Exhibitions, and radically different from previous ‘temples of art’. The earliest example was the Crystal Palace, a glass and iron structure of prefabricated units, designed by Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition held in London’s Hyde Park in 1851. This ‘alternative tradition’ (Searing, 1986, p.18) added two significant features to museum architecture, ‘impermanence and flexibility’ (Giebelhausen, 2006b, p.232), while the founding, in the following year, of the first museum of applied arts, the South Kensington Museum (later renamed Victoria and Albert Museum), to ‘preserve some of its best exhibits and keep them available as models for manufacturers’, extended the museum’s function to include that of ‘repository of exemplars for study’ (Pevsner, 1976, p.131). The changes in the exterior form of the buildings were accompanied by changes in the organization of the interior space: the layout with simple geometry was replaced by the free plan, organized by removable partitions, leading to new ideas about exhibition design. As Basso Peressut argued (1999, p.18), ‘the centrality of the rotunda of the “temples of art” that expressed homage to the antiquity, is progressively substituted with the centrality of the “hall-basilica”, of iron and glass, which expresses the values of contemporaneity and progress’. The new forms were first applied to museums of science, applied arts and natural history, for example, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, 1855-60, and the Galerie de Zoologie of the MuséumThe Museum as a Kind of Building 23 national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris (1877-89), the plans of which are organized around large glass atria. At the same time, however, many new museums followed the traditional typology. ‘Twentieth Century: The ‘Modern’ Museum and Anti Typological Explorations Building new museums was said to be ‘not a priority in the public domain during the first half of the twentieth century’ (Magnago Lampugnani, 2001, p.11), though it is within this period that key new museums were created, for example the Kréller-Miiller Museum, one of the case studies of this book (see Chapter 7). However, a tendency to revise the established features of museum architecture was beginning to develop in the 1930s, in the form of debates in journals of muscology and architecture, and in conferences (for example, the first International Conference of Museography in 1934). At the end of the 1920s two theoretical projects were published in France: the design for the Musée Moderne (in Mouseion, n.9, 1929) of Auguste Perret and the project for the Musée Mondial by Le Corbusier (in Z’Architecture Vivante, n.20, 1929). The design by Auguste Perret for a museum of fine arts (Musée Moderne) has a symmetrical layout arranged around a central nucleus (C in Figure 1.4a), which represents the ‘Zien de délectation et de foie’ , where the visitor, by making a short walk, could see the key works. Linked to this is a system of parallel galleries, planned for the collections addressed to the specialized audience. At the centre of the composition, the large open space (piazza) links the building to the hypothetical urban context, while on the axis and at the end of this open space, the rotunda, ‘the heart of the building’ according to the architect, houses the rare objects of the collection (Basso Peressut 2005, pp.58-59). The Musée Mondial was proposed by Le Corbusier, as part of a universal cultural city in Geneva, and dedicated to universal knowledge (Figure 1.4b). It took the form ofa monumental pyramid (180 metres wide and 100 metres high), accessed from the top by an exterior staircase’ (Amouroux, 2010, p.58). The route, a single spiralling path, started from the top of the pyramid and ended in 2 small piazza, and constituted a ‘journey of knowledge’ , since for Le Corbusier the ‘real museum is the museum that includes everything, that can provide information about everything from centuries away’ (Basso Peressut, 1999, p.22; 2005, p.99) In the same year (1929), on the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded, though it was not until ten years later, in 1939, that itmovedto its permanent building designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone. Its architecture had the opposite characteristics to those commonly found in nineteenth century museums: the building is vertically * It has been argued that the Musée Mondial, in the form of a continuous spiral, was the inspiration for Frank Lloyd Wright for the Guggenheim Museum (Desvallées and Mairesse, 2011, p.36),24 Museum Space a b Figure 1.4 Musée Moderne, by Auguste Perret, 1929 (a); Musée Mondial, by Le Corbusier, 1929 (b) Source: Basso Peressut, 1999, courtesy of Prof L. Basso Peressut. (rather than horizontally) organized, aligned with the facades of the buildings on West 53rd Street in Manhattan, with an entrance on street level that allows direct access (rather than through a ceremonial staircase), and with the spatial form of an open plan, organized with the use of partitions (rather than a linear sequence of galleries) (Grunenberg, 1999, p.34). At the same time, MoMA was the first museum dedicated exclusively to modern art, displaying not only painting, sculpture, drawings and prints but also architecture, design, photography and film. Italso established a new display aesthetic, the flexible white space, and introduced the idea of the display of works of art by artistic styles. All these innovations render MoMA a landmark in the history of the museums. In total contrast to MoMA was the Guggenheim Museum, also in New York, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and opened in 1959. The Guggenheim introduced, through an ‘architecture that appears plastic’ (Wright 1960, cited in Tilden, 2004, p.86), a new conception of the museum and a new relation between architecture and viewer. In accordance with the intentions of Hilla Rebay, Solomon R. Guggenheim's adviser and the foundation’s first director, who wanted “a temple of the spirit, a monument’ (cited in Basso Peressut, 1999, p.28; also, in Tilden,» m The Museum as a Kind of Building 2004, p.86), the architecture of Wright expresses the idea of the museum as a modern monument in the city. The exhibition space forms a continuous spiralling ramp, replacing the galleries of the traditional museum with a novel interpretation of the galleria, acting as an uninterrupted route from the exterior to the interior, and forming the central theme of the museum. The open ramp encircles the sky- lit central space, which is seen as a distant memory of the rotunda (for example by Scaring, 1986, p.18) and described as ‘my Pantheon’ by the architect (cited in Basso Peressut, 1999, p.28). The two elements together create a new concept of the exhibition space, including the view of the works along the panoramic view of the central space. The innovative aspects of the design triggered opposing views: for its opponents, ‘it is about everything a museum should not be’ (Pevsner, 1976, p.138), not least because of the coercive route that leaves visitors no choice (also Magnago Lampugnani, 2001, p.11). For its supporters, however, it best expresses the ‘sheatrical’ element of the contemporary museum, where ‘the mise en scene of visitors becomes part of the mise en exposition of the works of art’ (Basso Peressut, 1999, p.29), Parallel in terms of chronology, but utterly different in its approach to architecture and space, was the exploration of the theme of the museum by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.° The fundamental issue for Mies was how to plan the museum ‘as a place of artistic enjoyment rather than a piace of isolation of the works of art’ (cited in Basso Peressut, 1999, p.29), an idea first expressed in his design proposal for a ‘Museum for a Small City’, in which he imagined placing Picasso’s Guernica as the central work of a unified exhibition space. The design was developed in 1942, as a reply to the invitation by a group of architects of the Architectural Forum for the study of new architectural typologies for the future city. The ‘Museum for a Small City’ introduces new spatial themes into muscum design, The building is an open space, that provides maximum flexibility, and its transparent walls allow the direct contact of the exterior with the interior, so ‘the resulting architectural space is a space which defines without isolating’ (cited in Basso Peressut, 1999, p.31). Thus, eliminating the walls that act as the neutral background to the display, he makes the view of the landscape the frame of the works of art. ‘For a work like the Guernica by Picasso it is difficult to find aplace in traditional museum’, he argues. ‘Here it can express its essential properties in the best way and act as an element of the spatial quality, since it appears ina changing background’ (cited in Basso Peressut, 1999, p.31). Mies realized his idea in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1962-68), a square layout building, with a flat roof, made of steel and glass, organized on two levels: the upper level dedicated to temporary exhibitions, and the lower to the permanent collection. The transparency of the building, andthe complete openness ° Magnago Lampugnani (2001, pp.11-12) in fact argues thatthe Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin can be paralleled to the Guggenheim, in the sense that they are both a variation on the theme of ‘ihe translation of an architectural vision to which all practical requirements were ruthlessly subordinated’26 Museum Space of the space at ground level, allowed the viewing of ar: with the landscape of the city as background. The often observed (see, for example, Basso Peressut, 1999, p.31; von Naredi-Rainer, 2004, p.199) difficulty of using it as a museum is acknowledged by the architect: the Neue Nationalgaleric ‘is such an immense space that, undoubtedly, it presents great difficulty for the display of works of art. ... It has however sucha potential, that simply I cannot take into account these difficulties’ (cited in Basso Peressut, 1999, p.31). ‘These two museums, the Guggenheim and the Neue Nationalgalerie, both significant milestones in the history of museum architecture, illustrate (Gob and Drouguet, 2006, p.234) the permanent tension between an architecture that constitutes a neutral background to the collections it houses (‘7 my", writes Mies in 1938 [cited in Basso Peressut, 1999, p.31], ‘to make my buildings a neutral background, in which people and works of art can have their own independent life’), and an architecture that moves to centre stage as an expression of the architectural vision of its designer (Magnago Lampugnani, 2001, pp.11-12; Cataldo and Paraventi, 2007, p.35). As Goldberger arguéd (cited in Tilden, 2004, p.86), Wright ‘made it socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense, almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim’. Second Half of the Twentieth Century: Tradition and Innovation After the Second World War, museum architecture regained prominence, and by the end of the 1950s new ideas were being developed, particularly through the museums of the Talian School’ (discussed at greater length in the next chapter), The common intention that distinguishes these museums, created in the 1950s and carly 1960s, is that they propose the idea of the museum as whole work of art (Gesamikunstwerk) bringing together building construction, exhibition design and exhibits in a unified whole. This was seen (Basso Peressut, 1999, p.36; 2005, p.203) as a return to the spatiality of the studioli or the Wunderkammern and as the opposite of the architectural and spatial neutrality of many new contemporary European museums. The integration of architecture and display reflects the Italian realities of this time, in that it was applied to historic buildings with distinctive architectural qualities that were being restored and converted to museums. However, the same features are found in the few new museums built at this period, for example, the Museo del Tesoro di San Lorenzo in Genoa, designed by Franco Albini (1952-56), and the extension of the Giptoteca canoviana in Possagno, by Carlo Scarpa (1956-57). From the point of view of the evolution of the museum as a kind of building, it is of interest that, although from the mid-twentieth century museum architecture moved decisively away from the stereotypes of the nineteenth century, with design seen as free architectural expression, there are, in parallel, some museums that have been seen as ‘exercises on the key themes of the classical museum’The Museum as a Kind of Building 27 Figure 5 — Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (constructed 1969-72). Architect Louis I. Kahn (1901-74). View from the southwest with Henry Moore’s Figure in a shelter (1983) (a); Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut (1977). External view (b); Reference Library (©) Source: Photograph: Robert LaPrelle © Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (a); Richard Caspole © Yale Ceater for British Art (b-<), (Searing, 1986, p.18; Basso Peressut, 1999, p.33: 2005, p.205; Magnego Lampugnani, 2006, p.250). The museums designed by Louis I. Kahn have been cited as examples: the Yale University Art Gallery (1951-53) and most notably his two later works, the Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, Texas (1969-72) (Figure 1.5a) and the Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, Connecticut (1972-77)28 ‘Museum Space (Figure 1.5b-c). The latter, the Yale Center, with its geometrical order, ‘clear articulation of the structure’ (cited in Tilden, 2004, p.181) and two glass-roofed courtyards, reminiscent of the museums of the late nineteenth century, was described as ‘the palace-urban museum’ (Basso Peressut, 1999, p.33; 2005, p.205). The Kimbell Art Museum was described as ‘the villa-suburban museum’ (Basso Peressut, 1999, p.33) and seen as an ‘ideal museum building’ (cited in Tilden, 2004, p.102), both by architects — ‘an ideal model of modern museum architecture’, according to Magnago Lampugnani (2001, p.12) —and artists — ‘the only decent museums that I've seen are the ones by Louis Kahr’, according to Donald Judd (2000, p.51). The succession of vaults in the exterior of the Kimbell, based on a modular plan, form an interior that allows flexibility and creates a careful articulation of open and enclosed spaces, optimally lit with natural lighting transmitted from the ‘narrow slits io the sky’ in the vaults. The museum is located. in a park, expressing Kahn’s view that a museum like the Kimbell ‘needs a park. One can walk in the park and decide whether he will enter or noi. And it is only hy walking in the park that he can understand if it is Worth continuing the visit or leave. In complete freedom’ (cited in Basso Peressut, 1999, p.33). The introverted character of the building in relation to the natural setting, the presence of the interior courtyards and the sky-lit exhibition spaces have been seen as references to the KréllerMiiller Museum, visited by Kahn in 1959. However, it could be argued that the view of Kahn about the museum in its natural setting is better reflected in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (see Chapter 7). Interestingly, in the same yeer (1977) as the Yale Center for British Art was completed, the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou opened in Paris, as a cultural centre for experimentation in all forms of creative activity, including the Musée national d’art modeme, the Centre de création indusirielle, as well as the Bibliotheque publique d’information, and an Institut de Recherche et Coordination Accoustique/Musique. This intention was clearly expressed in the form of the building by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, with its salient characteristics of transparency, openness to the urban setting and flexibility. ‘The fundamental concept of the building eliminates the traditional closed fagade. By “fading away, the envelope helps to realize the prime objective of the Centre, which is 10 disseminate culture’ (Piano and Rogers cited in Banham, 1977, p.288). The entrance space, with its strong collective character, seems an extension of the public square outside, a precursor of the tendency in museum architecture in recent decades to incorporate public spaces inside the museum (see Chapter 3). Likewise, the functional elements (such as ventilation) and the system of circulation (with escalators and lifts) visible on the outside, were intended to act as a ‘very powerful invitation to discovery and initiation’ (Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, cited in Banham, 1977, p.288). The museum of modern art (permanent collections) occupies two of the five identical floors (166~48 metres, 7 metres high) designed initially as open, free spaces, with no fixed vertical interruptions (according to Piano, ‘instead of a building, we designed Pompidou like a machine, knowing that it could change every time this was needed’ —The Museum as a Kind of Building 29 Figure 1.6 Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart: the rotunda (a); the sequence of galleries (b); Kunstaus Graz: known as the ‘friendly alien’ (c); a travelator linking exhibition levels (d) Source: K. Tzortzi, courtesy of © Steatsgalerie Stuttgart (a-b) and of Kunstaus Graz (cd). cited in Blin, 2000). In fact, the gallery spaces came to be designed in a highly innovative way that was intended to echo the structure of the city, with @ mix of strong axes and multiple alternative routes. It was later (1985) tha: they were redesigned, as we will see, as another, perhaps less radical, interpretation of the same theme. So besides having established a new model for co-existence and interaction of the diverse creative activities that characterize the twentieth century, and introduced an innovative approach to architectural design of muscums, the display strategies adopted from its opening to the present well illustrate some of the key changes in exhibition practices throughout that period. In contrast to Pompidou, which makes no obvious reference to historic forms, the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (Figure 1.6a-b), a wing added to the original30 Museum Space building of 1843, designed by James Stirling and Michael Wilford (1977-84), makes clear uses of the architectural typology of the nineteenth century, though perhaps only to subvert it. The building has 2 regular structure, and the central theme is an enfilade of sky-lit galleries enclosing a central rotunda on three sides, a clear reference to the Altes Museum. However, in this case the rotunda is open to the sky and relatively hard to access from inside the galleries. At the same time, it is traversed by a public walkway, linking the two parallel streets that frame the Staatsgaleric, so integrating the rotunda into the surrounding urban grid rather than into the gallery structure. The building also has a complex functional programme, including a'range of public spaces (such as, restaurant, museum shop and lecture-hall), reflecting Stirling’s view that the contemporary museum should be ‘a place for entertainment’ (cited in von Naredi-Rainer, 2004, p.70). All three features — integration into the city, diversity of public spaces and the museum as a place of entertainment — were to become key themes in subsequent museum design. End of the Twentieth Century, Early Twenty-First Century: Common Themes in a Heterogeneity of Forms The Museum as a Unique Building In spite of the reference to historic forms in some buildings, it is clear that by the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, we have arrived at a situation which is virtually the opposite of a typological tradition. Rather than being anew interpretation of a recognizable type, each new museum is a new, often surprising, architectural gesture, a unique object with its own, rather than typological, recognizability. This recognizability can lie in the physical form of the building or its spatial layout; it can be related to the architectural style of a well-known architect or the point of view of an artist, of which the museum is the physical expression; it can also emerge from the way the museum “take/s] the fabric of an existing building and rewanslate|s] it’ (Blazwick, 2009, p.16) For the most part, the uniqueness of contemporary museums lies in the physical form of the building, as in the case of the Kunsthaus Graz (Figure 1.6c), designed by Spacelab Cook-Fournier (2003), and known as the ‘friendly alien’. The name captures the sense that the building, with its organic shape and translucent blue colour, does not resemble any previous building, let alone museum. In the interior, the building uses the notion of the flexible open space, linked across levels by slowly moving travelators which create an alternative, distant view of the display spaces (Figure 1.6d). Similarly, in Munich, a tension is created between the unexpected polychromatic facade of the Brandhorst Museum, designed by Sauerbruch Hutton in 2009 (Figure 1.7a), and the ‘white cube’ aesthetic of its galleries. On the metal skin of the fagade are attached ceramic rods of 23 different pastel colours, arranged in three groups of shades and tonality (from dark to lightThe Museum as a Kind of Building 31 for the upper part), so that the building appears to be organized in three interlocking volumes, For the moving observer the building seems to change colour, depending on the distance from it, and gives an impression of colourful flickering movement (Lepik, 2009, p.43). It is spatial uniqueness, on the other hand, that distinguishes the Museum of Modern Art (MMK) in Frankfur/Mein (1991), by Hans Hollein (Figure 3.1e~-d). The form of the building is shaped by a tight triangular urban site, but spatially, the interior has no obvious governing geometry: it takes the form of a multi-level complex of highly interconnected, differently shaped spaces, rendered intelligible by a pervasive use of exes end visual links through spaces, a spatial device already familiar from traditional layouts, but given here a new and more complex interpretation. In contrast to these cases where uniqueness lies cither in the building or its space, the 21st Century Muscum of Contemporary Art, in the historic centre of Kanazewa, Japan, designed by Sanaa (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, 2004) is characterized by design innovation that covers both the form of the building and its spaces. The circular form of the building eliminates the distinction between the main fagade and the other sides, allowing approach equally from any direction (ET Croquis, 2007, pp.308, 386-435), while the fragmented layout, consisting of gallery spaces ‘embedded into circulation zones’, actively discourages a predetermined route (2007, p.386). Iftypological recognizability is not found today, ithas sometimes been replaced by another kind of recognizability, the distinctive personal style of individual architects, found in the form of the building and its architectural vocabulary — as in the case of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao (1997), preceded by the Vitra Design Museum at Weil am Rhein (1989) and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in the University of Minnesota (1993), all with the architect's idiosyncratic sculptural forms. Likewise, museums designed by Richard Meier, including the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (1983), the Museum of Applied Art in Frankfurt (1985), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) in Barcelona (1995) and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (1997), have common exterior features, such as a transparent fagade, covered with white square panels, but also similar interior elements, such as a continuous ramp which distributes the flow of visitors and links the entrance to the exhibition spaces. Contemporary museum buildings can also be created not only by individual architects (or practices), but by groups of architects or by artists. An illustrative oxample of a collective work ereated by a group of architects and designers is the Groninger Museum (1994) (Figure 1.7b-c). It is a complex of heterogeneous pavilion-like structures appearing, according to Basso Peressut (1999, p.42), as a ‘colourful urban stage’: the central building, a tower designed by Alessandro Mendini, linked through an underground corridor toa square building base, designed by Michele De Lucchi, and its round upper part, designed by Philippe Starck. The two buildings are in contrast to the pavilion in the west, an irregular building inspired by deconstruction and designed by Coop Himmelb()au. Each pavilion has its own function (Groninger Museum, 2002, n.p.), refiecting the diversity of its collections, from archaeological to contemporary art and industrial design.32 Museum Space Figure 1.7 Brandhorst Museum, Munich: the polychromatic facade (a); Groninger Museum: the building as a ‘colourful stage in the city’ (b); entrance space (¢) Source: K. Tzortzi, courtesy of Bayerische Staatsgeméildesammhmgen/Sauerbruch Hutton (a); Ralph Richter © Groninger Museum (b); K. Tzortzi, courtesy of Groninger Museum (). The opposite characteristic — simplicity of physical form — seems to characterize museums designed by artists, with the best-known example being perhaps the Chinati Foundation, in Marfa, Texas (1972-94), created by the minimalist artist Donald Judd. Critical of the wey museums display “contemporary art in anthologies for short duration’ (Serota, 2000, p.54), Judd took a complex of buildings, including small turn-of-the-century houses and abandoned military sheds (Newhouse, 1998, pp.113-114), and converted it to a space for the permanent display of works by himself as well as by other artists. A comparable example, perhaps, is the Insel Hombroich at Neuss (outside Ditsseldorf), founded by the art collector Karl-Heinrich Miller and opened in 1987 (Figure P.5). It consists of a series of small buildings, mainly designed by the sculptor Erwin Heerich, in collaboration with the architect Hermann Muller, and embedded in an attractive natural landscape. Though they differ in shape and dimensions, they have in common a basic geometry and an interplay between the form of the building, the spatial layout and the works displayed, against the background of nature. This exploration of different experiences of the display of art is also marked byThe Musewn as a Kind of Building 33 the surprising juxtapositions of works and, more intriguingly, by the unexpected absence of informative texts — an approach that we will seek to illuminate in the Postscript. Alongside the proliferation of new buildings, there is an increasing tendency to create museums in buildings designed forradically different initial functions, a phenomenon that can perhaps be compared to the earliest days before there were buildings purposefully designed for display. This has resulted in a remarkable array of museums, each unique in how the building and the display are related to cach other. The list includes: the Musée d’ Orsay, Paris (by Gae Aulenti, 1986), a 1900 train station accommodating collections of the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century; the Musco Reina Sofia, Madrid (by José Luis IRiguez de Onzofio and Antonio Vazquez de Castro, and Ian Ritchie, 1990), that has previously been used as a hospital; the Musikmuseum, Basel (by Meinrad Morger and Heinrich Degelo, 2000), a prison, where the layout of small rooms opening onto an axis serves the thematic organization of the collection (Figure 1.8a-b); the museum La Piscine Musée d’art et d’industrie, Roubaix (oy Jean Paul Philippon, 2001), a municipal pool; and the Punta della Dogana, the maritime customs house of the city of Venice, an emblematic building converted by Tadao Ando (2009) to an exhibition space for the presentation of Frangois Pinault’s contemporary art collection — his second in Venice, after the reorganization of the eighteenth century Palazzo Grassi (by Gae Aulenti, 1983 and Tadao Ando, 2005). A variation on this theme is the relation of old and new structures, as in the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art (renovated by Andrea Bruno, in 1979 84) (Figure 1.8c-e), and Kolumba, the art muscum of the Archdiocese of Cologne (designed by Peter Zumthor, 2007) (Figure 1.8f-g). The former, located outside Turin and accommodating the first Italian museum of contemporary art, was created from a complex of buildings with a long history of different uses and dates of construction. The complex, which included a palace in the eighteenth century anda gallery in the seventeenth (Manica Lunga), had remained incomplete, and it was its reuse that gave it continuity and coherence, leading to commissions for site-specific works of art. An entircly different case is Kolumba, a new building created on the remains of the medieval church of St. Kolumba, that was destroyed during the Second World War. The remains are integrated in the museum and define its layout, and, as we will see in the next chapter, this close relation of the museum and the monument is further-articulated by the presentation of the collection (Figure 2.4d). Since the beginning of the 1990s there has been a wave of conversions of industrial buildings (Gob and Drouguet. 2006, p.243), with contrasting architectural approaches. Often noted is the Centrale Montermatini in Rome (Figure 1.9a-b), a thermoelectric power plant of the beginning of the twenticth century, that now houses part of the sculpture collection of the Musei Capitolini, initially in the form of temporary exhibitions, but then permanently (1997). The unexpected juxtaposition of the ancient sculptures, the gods of antiquity, with