[PDF Download] Museum configurations: an inquiry into the design of spatial syntaxes 1st edition joh
Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://textbookfull.com/product/museum-configurations-an-inquiry-into-the-design-ofspatial-syntaxes-1st-edition-john-peponis/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant download maybe you interests ...
Design Politics An Inquiry Into Passports Camps And Borders Mahmoud Keshavarz
Museum Configurations demonstrates how museum space functions cognitively and communicatively and questions whether it can be designed to provide a rich embodied experience, situating displays and their public in felicitous dialogue.
Including contributions from authors working in the disciplines of architecture, psychology, museum studies, history, and the visual arts, this volume addresses an interdisciplinary audience. The analysis of a wealth of examples shows how the voices of architects, curators, and exhibition designers enter into dialogue and invite visitors to make their own connections between physical, cognitive, and affective space. Considering how the layout of museums facilitates movement and orientation so that visitors may devote their attention to displays, the book questions what kinds of visual attention characterizes museum experiences and how the design of museum space can support them. In the context of an often dematerialized, atomized, and dissipating contemporary culture, the book proposes that museums can function as shared space that supports enjoyment and learning without being overly didactic.
Museum Configurations focuses upon the functions and aims of the design of space. This makes the book particularly interesting to academics and students working in exhibition design and museum architecture, as well as to exhibition designers, curators, and architects.
John Peponis is Professor of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.
MUSEUM CONFIGURATIONS
An Inquiry into the Design of Spatial Syntaxes
Edited by John Peponis
Designed cover image: Artwork by Vincent Tsui
First published 2024 by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge
The right of John Peponis to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark 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
ISBN: 9781032486369 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032486352 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003405825 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003405825
Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK
CONTENTS
List of figures ix
List of contributors xiii
1 Museums as spatial configurations 1
John Peponis
Authorial voices in museum space 1
Syntaxes of seeing 3
Modes of signification and their syntactic correlates 7
The meaningfulness of exhibition space 12
The spatial morphologies of museum visits 16
What is there to be said about the empty museum building? 18
An inquiry into the design of the spatial syntaxes of museums and exhibitions 23
Acknowledgements 28
2 The dialectic of the enlightenment museum: edifice, edification, and dissolution 32
Wilfried Wang
Introduction: the Enlightenment Museum as the paradigm for universal order 32
Case study 1: the British Museum 41
Case study 2: the Altes Museum 49
Conclusions 58
3
Movement, visibility, and states of museum experience 64
Kali Tzortzi
Introduction 64
The traditional museum layout and the instrumental use of space 66
Contemporary experimentation and the expressive use of space 67
Comparative discussion 76
Concluding remarks 77
4 Intelligibility and the structures of freedom 80
Sean Hanna
Introduction 80
Navigation ‘in the head’ versus navigation ‘in the environment’ 81
Why we can’t tell the difference: what makes an environment intelligible? 83
Ways in which predictability and intelligibility break down 84
How do we navigate museums? 88
Freedom versus determinism 93
The experience of the museum 96
5 A stimulating museum space: ‘glancing away’ and engaging working memory in-between exhibits 101
Jakub Krukar
A limited visual system for the visually rich world 101
A stimulating artwork 102
Why ‘glancing away’ from artworks is not a distraction from ‘looking at’ them 104
Different functions of glancing away 106
Glancing away to get a gist of space 107
Glancing away to decide where to go next 108
Glancing away to compare, interpret, and understand 110
Glancing away to interpret the behaviour of other people 113
Glancing away to take a break 114
Peripheral vision instead of glancing away 114
Conclusion 114
Acknowledgements 115
6 Narrative, dramaturgy, and spatial choreography: movement and subjectivity in museum configurations 120
Daniel Koch
Introduction 120
Theoretical framework 127
Path, figure, gesture 133
Rhythm, co-presence, and extended situatedness 139
Learning to dance 150
Museum performativity, embodied subjects of becoming, and choreography as critical and creative concept 153
Acknowledgements 155
7 Spacing collections: Space Syntax and a museum yet to come 160
Yves Abrioux
Introduction: the museum in Space Syntax 160
The genotype of the museum 161
Spatialisation and categorisation in Space Syntax 163
Spatiality is always already encumbered by category 164
Semantic forms 166
From relation to configuration 168
Rooting configurations 169
Rooting versus correlation 170
Configuring the museum 172
Objects and the structuration of space 174
The social logic of sites of display 176
Configuration as politics 178
The museum and the shrine 179
Between desire and obligation 181
Acknowledging objects 182
Conclusion: Space Syntax in the museum 184
8 Navigating museum space: mapping, syntax, and metaphor 188
Kenneth J. Knoespel
Introduction 188
Atlas and knowledge 190
Cartographic galleries 193
Planes and assembly 195
Plot, emplotment, diagram 196
Portolan and chart mapping 198
Museum and knowledge 199
Optical triggers 201
Assembly/reassembly 203
William Kentridge 208
Sarah Sze 210
9 Designing the syntax of museum space in the studio 217
John Peponis
Introduction 217
Space Syntax 219
Space Syntax as mechanics and as a tuning of the imagination 222
“Seeing as”: the semantic investment of syntactic design pre-structures 225
Syntactic conditions 233
Exhibits in space and exhibits as space 240
Designing the syntax of museum space: situational meaningfulness 243
Affordance, logic, and function 245
Research and the dialogue of ends and means in design 252
Space Syntax in the studio 255
Acknowledgements 256
10 Postscript: what more can museum architecture do?
Barbara Maria Stafford
FIGURES
1.1 Views of the Bellissima exhibition, MAXXI, 2015 2
1.2 Views of Veiled Rebekah at the High Museum of Art, 2015 5
1.3 The layout of the Natural History Museum in London, 1881 8
1.4 Views of the sculptures gallery at Castelvecchio 11
1.5 Views and gazes around the Libyan Sibyl, High Museum of Art, 2020 14
2.1 Ducal Palace at Salzdahlum, ca. 1710. Isometric Projection of Park and Palace, T. Querfort after J.G. Baeck
2.2 Design for a complete house for rarities by Leonhard Christoph Sturm, from Des Geöffneten Ritter-Platzes Dritter Theil/worinnen die Ausführung der noch übrigen galanten Wissenschaften/besonders bey Raritäten–und NaturalienKammern/ … zu bemercken vorfället …, Benjamin Schillern, Hamburg 1705, 27
2.3 Plans of the so-called Zwinger in Dresden with the therein contained royal galleries of naturalia and curiosities designed by Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann. Walther, Dresden 1 January 1755
2.5 Hubert Robert, Une Galerie du Musée, 1789, Musée du Louvre, Paris 39
2.6 Giovanni Paolo Panini, Roman Capriccio: The Pantheon and other Monuments, 1735, Indianapolis Museum of Art
40
2.7 The British Museum at Montague House: A layout plan, and elevation of the garden facade. Engraving after J. Roffe after A. Pugin, 1 August 1823, Wellcome Collection 43
2.8 Sir Robert Smirke, General Plan proposed for the Buildings of the Museum and progress of construction in 1836 44
2.12 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museum, Section through the Building, Elevation of a Column and Architrave in the Stoa, ink and pencil on paper, Berlin ca. 1825 52
2.13 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Jupiter und die neue Götterwelt (Jupiter and the new World of the Gods), Berlin 1828, photographer unknown, original lost
2.14 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Perspectival view from the Gallery of the Main Stair of the Museum through the Portico towards the Lustgarten and its Surroundings, ink and pencil on paper, Berlin 1829 54
2.15 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Perspective View of the New Museum in Berlin, from the point of view between the Arsenal and the Schlossbrücke, Plate 37, Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe, Berlin 1825
3.1
3.2 National Archaeological Museum,
3.3 Views of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
3.4 The layout of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
3.5 Views of the Acropolis Museum, Athens
3.6 The layout of the Acropolis Museum, Athens
3.7 Views of the Moesgaard Museum, Aarhus
3.8 The layout of the Moesgaard Museum, Aarhus
4.1 The Tate Gallery (Tate Britain)
4.2 The relationship between intelligibility, global predictability, and exosomatic navigation
4.3 The street network of New York
4.4 Layout of Ikea, Brent
4.5 The intelligibility/predictability relationship can break down in three ways: (left) movement is informed by a mental picture other than spatial cues, like the abstract grid of New York; (centre) the environment is unintelligible and movement is informed by local cues, as for Ikea shoppers; and (right) the environment is unintelligible but known global properties inform movement as for Ikea employees
4.6 The National Gallery in London before (top) and after (bottom) closure of some gallery connections to improve social distancing 89
4.7 A hypothetical Tate layout with two sequences of galleries, A and B, on the two sides of the main axis 91
4.8 A more schematic adjacency graph of the hypothetical Tate, analysed by two global measures 92
4.9 The Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery 93
4.10 Schematic plans of the sculpture (left) and painting (right) galleries in Castelvecchio 96
5.1 Two experimental exhibition conditions from Krukar and Conroy Dalton (2020)
5.2 Visual relationships between exhibition rooms
5.3 Anticipation: something important is awaiting ahead
5.4 Visually explicit grouping of exhibits at separate walls with different backgrounds
5.5 Making many similar artworks visible within a single viewing field: a configuration that affords comparisons and glancing away from a single object 113
6.1 Plans of the museums
6.2 Views of the Asakura Museum of Sculpture
6.3 Views of the Artipelag Museum
6.4 Views of the Kiasma Museum
6.5 Views of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum 126
6.6 View into the courtyard in the Asakura Museum of Sculpture 131
6.7 Views of the Egon Schiele exhibition (above) and of the Anselm Kiefer exhibition Essence-Eksistence (below)
6.8 Architectural gestures qualifying figures of movement by orienting attention
6.9 Complexity of flows
6.10 Hans Op de Beek, The Quiet Parade, at Amos Rex
6.11 Exposure to previously experienced and to forthcoming spatial settings through the museum visit
6.12 Gallery space with a balcony in the Kiasma Museum
8.1 Tycho Brahe’s Uraniborg
8.2 Map of Asia
8.3 Map of Africa
8.4 Map of Russia
8.5 Christopher Columbus’s Map of La Española (detail), circa 1492 198
8.6 Transformations of the second floor of Richard Meier’s High Museum of Art as depicted by Zamani and Peponis (2010) 204
8.7 The stage created by William Kentridge for his ‘Black Box/ Chambre Noire’ exhibition
8.8 Sarah Sze, Twice Twilight, 2020
8.9 Sarah Sze, Untiled (Portable Planetarium), 2009
9.1 Describing space according to elementary syntactic relationships
9.2 A Space Syntax analysis of a sample of museum designs produced in the studio, using Depthmap (Tuner et al., 2001), a freely available tool created at University College London 223
9.3 Alexandra Watson-Lister’s project for a jewellery museum at Chastain Park, Atlanta
9.4 Display strategies in Alexandra Watson-Lister’s project for a jewellery museum at Chastain Park, Atlanta
9.5 Stephen Conschafter’s project for a Museum of Atlanta in downtown Atlanta
9.6 Display strategies in Stephen Conschafter’s project for a Museum of Atlanta in downtown Atlanta
9.7 Carl Dilcher’s project for a museum in the garden, in downtown Atlanta
9.8 Display strategies and varieties of settings in Carl Dilcher’s project for a museum in the garden, in downtown Atlanta 235
9.9 Hafsa Siap’s project for a jewellery museum in Chastain Park, Atlanta
9.10 Tunings of the gaze in Hafsa Siap’s project for a jewellery museum in Chastain Park, Atlanta
9.11 Miguel Arana’s project for a Queer rights museum in downtown Atlanta
9.12 Display strategies in Miguel Arana’s project for a Queer rights museum in downtown Atlanta
9.13 The elementary cell and its transformations
9.14 Spatial syntaxes and affordances of the elementary cell
9.15 Syntactic types of sequentially connected layouts with four rooms 251
CONTRIBUTORS
Yves Abrioux is Professor Emeritus, Université Paris 8 Vincennes—Saint-Denis. His research and publications centre on the interactions of literature, art, and landscaping with science, technology, and philosophy. He has contributed to a large number of contemporary art catalogues and has exhibited in and/or curated exhibitions in France, Italy, and the UK. He has been collaborating since 2006 in a long-term project on the future of the museum. He is an external expert and a reviewer in successive design studios on the museum at the School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020–2022.
Sean Hanna is Professor of Design Computing at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and a member of the Space Syntax Laboratory, UCL. He develops computational methods for dealing with complexity in the design and fabrication of the built environment, often in collaboration with leading architects, engineers, artists, and technology producers. He has been involved in the design of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He is the author of more than 150 scientific publications and his work has been featured in the Architects’ Journal and The Economist
Kenneth J. Knoespel is Professor Emeritus at Georgia Tech in the School of History and Sociology and the School of Literature, Media and Communication. Beyond his publications on the history of science and technology, he participated in building new digital media programmes in the humanities and social sciences and fostered relations with the colleges of computing, design, engineering, and science. He has helped shape programme development at US universities as well as in Sweden, Russia, and France. His collaborative work with architecture has been
motivated by interest in the way different media enter creative work in seemingly unconnected fields of inquiry.
Daniel Koch is a researcher and Docent in architecture at the KTH School of Architecture and a practicing architect at Patchwork Architecture Laboratory. He has been the editor of the Journal of Space Syntax and the Nordic Journal of Architectural Research. His research addresses conceptualization, diagramming, and configuration in design as well as the interaction between architecture and culture based on empirical observation as well as computational modelling. The intersections between space, performativity, social structures, and the subjects are recurrent key themes addressed in his research.
Jakub Krukar is Junior Professor at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster in Germany where he leads the Spatial and Architectural Cognition (SPARC) Lab. He has a master’s degree in psychology, a PhD from a department of architecture, postdoctoral experience in geoinformatics, and was a visiting fellow at Future Cities Lab Singapore. His research focuses on the use of spatial cognition in the domains of architecture and technology design (e.g., navigation systems). The goal is to facilitate better integration of psychological evidence on how people think about, think in, and think with space, into the realm of design.
John Peponis is a professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology whose faculty he joined in 1989. He develops analytical concepts and methods for the description of built space and the measurement of its human affordances. The aim is to support models of the social and cultural functions of architecture. As a researcher and lecturer at the Bartlett/UCL (1978–1988), he was one of the cocreators of Space Syntax. He taught at the National Technical University of Athens, 1992–2005. He contributed to the design of the Benaki Museum – Pireos 138, in Athens, in collaboration with Kokkinou and Kourkoulas Architects.
Barbara Maria Stafford is Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. Her work explores the intersections between the visual arts and the physical and biological sciences from the early modern to the contemporary era. Her current research charts the ways that neurosciences are reshaping our fundamental assumptions about perception, sensation, emotion, mental imagery, and subjectivity. Her books include: Voyage into Substance (1984), Visual Analogy (1999); Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (2007), Ribbon of Darkness (2019).
Kali Tzortzi (PhD Bartlett, UCL) is Assistant Professor in Museology in the Department of Architecture, University of Patras. She directs the module ‘Architectural Design of Museum Space and Museography’ for the MA Museum Studies, University of Athens. She is Principal Investigator on the funded project ‘Understanding Museum Architecture for Digital Experiences’ (Hellenic
List of contributors xv
Foundation for Research and Innovation, 2022–2025). Her publications include contributions to the Blackwell Companion to Museum Studies (2006) and Routledge Museum Studies (2019). Her book Museum Space: Where Architecture Meets Museology (Routledge, 2015) sets out a methodology for the study of museums and a theoretical framework for their interpretation.
Wilfried Wang is co-founder of Hoidn Wang Partner in Berlin, founding co-editor with Nadir Tharani of 9H Magazine (1979–1995), co-director with Ricky Burdett of the 9H Gallery (1986–1995), Director of the German Architecture Museum (1995–2000). Currently he is Professor at Tongji University and taught at the Polytechnic of North London, Bartlett School/University College London, ETH Zürich, Städelschule, Harvard GSD, UT Austin, and the Universidad de Navarra. President of the International Committee of Architectural Critics CICA. His publications include analyses of Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie, Sigurd Lewerentz’s work, and Eileen Gray’s E.1027.
1 MUSEUMS AS SPATIAL CONFIGURATIONS
John Peponis
Authorial voices in museum space
To stage Bellissima, an exhibition of Italian fashion and its multifaceted image between 1945 and 1968, architect Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo built a linear display platform on stilts, which turns, ascends, descends, and crosses over itself like a snake. The image is partly industrial assembly line, suggested by its construction in welded and bolted steel sheets; partly fashion runway, after the mannequins are placed on it; and perhaps partly fun ride, if one allows the eye to glide along its trajectory (Figure 1.1). The snake-platform was installed between December 2014 and May 2015, at the top floor of the MAXXI in Rome, a museum designed by architect Zaha Hadid, the 2004 Pritzker Prize laureate, and opened in 2009. Its sinuous and smoothly finished galleries provide a vivid sense of movement and flow, emphasised by continuous natural and artificial light channels along the ceilings. The stairs, ramps, and passages ascend, cross over, and branch off from the main atrium, to draw visitors into choreographed views from one part of the museum to another, and from interior to exterior spaces. The gallery that hosted Bellissima is at the culmination of the final long ascending ramp and terminates on a large glass screen offering views of the city. The curators, Maria Luisa Frisa, Anna Mattirolo, and Stefano Tonchi wanted the 80 selected outfits, arranged by eight themes, such as ‘arty’, ‘daytime’, ‘gala’, and ‘cinema’, to be viewed in conjunction with photographs, videos, art, and jewellery so as to set fashion design in its resonant cultural context.
Visitors moved around the snake to look at mannequins, some appearing to walk in line, some facing each other as if in conversation, some seated or standing together, some reclining. Mannequins were seen at variable distances and heights, depending on the section of the meandering platform. Each category of fashion
Source:
design would thus be contrasted to others, subject to visitor position and viewing angle. Hats, shoes, or jewels were placed at intervals along the sequence. Screens were embedded into the top surface and the sides of the platform or fixed on it. Photographs, film stills, and art pieces covered parts of the gallery walls to provide
FIGURE 1.1 Views of the Bellissima exhibition, MAXXI, 2015.
Photo Cecilia Milza. Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI.
a changing background to the fashion parade, with the views of the city playing a similar role. Smaller art exhibits were often positioned near the protruding folds of the platform, facing outwards, to catch attention. Other exhibits were placed facing inwards, to be viewed by visitors on the other side of the folding structure. The animation, variation, and sense of flow created to excite visitor interest could be treated as an intensification, within one gallery, of the sense of flow and movement that imbues the architecture of the museum building as a whole. Visitors might feel that they too are being looked at by other visitors and that they partake in a similar celebration of exuberant co-presence as do the impeccably dressed exhibition mannequins.
As indicated by the example of Bellissima, the museum visitor is always addressed by at least three authorial voices: the displays themselves, the arrangement and design of an exhibition, and the architecture of the museum building. The voice of the displays is typically projected as the raison d’être of the museum, whose mission is to preserve them and make them accessible to the public. The voice of the exhibition is curatorial. It stages objects in a particular way, sometimes guiding or tuning perception, sometimes suggesting an interpretative angle, sometimes providing information to place them in a cultural context. The voice of the architecture is institutional. The appearance of the building projects values and ambitions: one can easily recall images of the museum as temple, as cathedral, as forum, as memorable sculptural form, as discrete shelter that blends into a surrounding landscape, or as cloistered oasis that allows you to retreat from noisy surroundings – the list can be expanded. More importantly, the building interior orients and situates the visitor to the promises and expectations associated with a cultural setting. First and foremost, it organises space so as to provide an intelligible environment and invite exploration, contemplation, and wonder. There are perhaps additional voices. In sotto voce, visitors tell stories about their view of the displays, the exhibitions, or the architecture. Through those stories, the displays seen in one museum enter into dialogue with those seen in other museums and other places, or indeed with objects that are part of collective memory or the shared sense of civilisation.
The word configuration, in the title, points, first, to the way in which these voices interact with one another, in balanced polyphony, or in negotiated lead and backing roles. Below, I discuss some of the syntaxes of museum space, and of its inhabitation. These are set in place as the building, the exhibition and the displays address each other and the visitor.
Syntaxes of seeing
In 2012, when David Brenneman was curator for European Art, the statue of the Veiled Rebekah, sculpted by Giovanni Maria Benzoni in 1864, stood on the secondlevel balcony of the High Museum of Art, near the landing of the zigzagging ramp that reaches up from the ground floor tracing the arc of the three-story atrium. In
Genesis 24, we are told that in his old age Abraham sent his trusted servant to the land of his birth to find a wife for his son, Isaac. Having met Rebekah by a well and impressed by her beauty, her fitness, and her kindness, the servant persuaded her kin to allow him to take her back to his master, with her consent. The returning convoy met Isaac in the fields. Rebekah fell from her camel. When the servant told Rebekah that the man greeting them was his master, she covered herself with her veil. Benzoni’s statue shows her with lowered eyes, securing her veil at her throat with one hand even as she opens the other. The Museum interprets the gestures as conveying both demure modesty and welcome, “ideal female attributes of the Victorian era”. A variety of readings of the underlying story have been proposed, however, sometimes stressing divine providence in the process of selection of Isaac’s wife, sometimes comparing the story to traditions and customs of arranged marriages that serve higher political ends (Sasson, 2006), sometimes by allowing for the possibility that Rebekah knew her own mind and left her family home supposing that the servant, that had favourably impressed her at the well, was her future husband (Perry, 2007). Either way, the statue captures a woman at a moment of mixed and perhaps intensely conflicting emotions.
The statue leads the museum visitor to change positions, drawn by her expressions and gestures. On the outward side of the balcony, her right hand is protectively clasped over her breast. On the inward side, her left hand is let down and turned slightly outwards, with palm open. The left leg stands firmly on the ground, the right leg is slightly raised as though about to move. The inward side of her face, cast in shadow, seems sombre; the outward side, bathing in the atrium light, looks as though it is about to break into a smile. The movements suggested by the statue, however, are set within a larger context of movements, generated by her position in the building (Figure 1.2).
The building, opened in 1983, was designed by 1984 Pritzker Prize laureate Richard Meier. Three square exhibition rooms define the three corners of the building, linked by additional galleries. The atrium, shaped as a quarter cylinder, is inserted into their embrace. Exhibition balconies, on the two straight sides of the atrium, mediate its relationship to the galleries. Rebekah position is eccentric relative to the atrium. She stands at a threshold. In front of her, people go in or out of the elevator, coming or leaving her field of vision, a series of encounters that she addresses ambivalently. The ramp approaches towards her guarded side before changing direction. She is brought into prominent view but not quite reached. Gallery visitors casually perambulate by her open arm. Her poise seems to lean towards a column marking the entrance to the main exhibition gallery. In diagonal symmetry about this column, relative to Rebekah, an allegorical depiction of Prudence, which Vittore Carpaccio painted in 1525, hangs on the wall. Prudence is depicted as a woman standing in front of a view of landscape. She holds an outward facing mirror and a wand. There is a dragon behind her that looks restrained by her force. It has been suggested that the viewer would look towards the mirror and imagine seeing Prudence and dragon as alternative states (Cook, 1983). That
Source: Photographs and drawing by the author. Shown with permission from the HMA.
this painting might have been intended for decorating a door (Rutherglen, 2016) further resonates with the overall curatorial effort to underscore, through spatial relationships, the conflicting emotions and thoughts that Rebekah might have experienced the moment she veiled herself. Curatorial imagination cannot recreate the encounter narrated in Genesis, but it can situate the statue in spatial conditions that echo some of its affective dimensions.
FIGURE 1.2 Views of Veiled Rebekah at the High Museum of Art, 2015.
This example illustrates how museum viewing is linked with two different kinds of movement, those emanating from the work, and those emanating from the curatorial placement of the work in its museum setting. Of course, museums and galleries deliberately bring together, for the benefit of their visitors, two of the fundamental meanings of the verb ‘to see’: to perceive with the eyes and to perceive or apprehend with the mind. Implicit in their nature is the further conjunction between seeing and moving: the assumption, over intervals of time, of different points of view, or perspectives, along visitor paths. Displays come into view in unfolding patterns of appearance, occlusion, disappearance, and reappearance, as well as in unfolding patterns of co-visibility, with relationships of foreground and background shifting over path trajectories. If indeed the soul has two faculties, “the faculty of discrimination which is the work of thought and sense, and the faculty of originating local movement” (Aristotle, On the Soul 9, 15: Barnes, 1984), then museums may be seen as a building type where the joint exercise of these two faculties is the primary behavioural purpose.
Museums condition perception by creating spaces of particular character and atmosphere that influence the affective and cognitive predispositions of visitors. The way in which displays are approached, the presence of other art in their vicinity, the scale, texture, or colour of the building elements that surround them are factors that influence perception (Newhouse, 2005). The interplay between the geometry of sight lines and the distribution of light (direct or reflected, diffused, or locally focused) and shadows (self-shadows and cast shadows) is fundamental to the atmosphere. But museums also frame seeing by virtue of spatial layout: they group or separate displays so that they may be viewed severally or concurrently; they order them into sequences; they provide an intelligible pattern of circulation that allows visitors to navigate and explore; they induce visitors into oscillations, swirls, or ebbs and flows, from one viewing point to another, within the same visual horizon; they frame vistas, sometimes to direct attention, sometimes to offer a panorama, sometimes to reveal distinct layers of visual depth, sometimes to link spaces that are not directly accessible from each other.
As a result, visitors become tacitly aware that museums situate seeing into a deliberate syntax, supporting particular ways of seeing. Svetlana Alpers (1991) has pointed out that museums usually recontextualise objects taken outside their original context. This process of recontextualisation, inevitably implies the creation of a new framework of understanding. At the same time, she recognises that the new context also involves the literal creation of a physical setting that conditions viewing. The emphasis on syntaxes of seeing reinforces her argument that presentation must be given at least as much attention in museum studies as interpretation. Whatever else is going on, the objects displayed in museums are contextualised or recontextualised into syntaxes of seeing.
Perception is always ecological (Gibson, 1986), an interaction between the subject and the structure and affordances of environment. What makes museums particularly interesting is the fact that the spatial structure of the environment is
Museums as spatial configurations 7 as much a product of intentional design as the displays and their arrangement. As museum visitors become immersed in particular syntaxes of seeing, so they also gradually come to retrieve descriptions of principles of spatial organisation that cannot directly be seen but have to be inferred from looking at an exhibition over time and over the trajectory of the visit as a whole. Perhaps we can think of this as a dialogue between syntaxes of seeing and syntaxes of signification.
Modes of signification and their syntactic correlates
Museum exhibits are unavoidably ordered in space. Those near the entrance are likely to be seen before those placed further away. Displays placed in the same room lend themselves to comparison more easily than displays in different rooms. Objects situated in focal locations, for example at the convergence of vistas or the culmination of axes, are likely to be noticed more easily than those tucked away around corners. Of course, sequencing, grouping, or bringing forth are ordering principles that naturally become active when a collection of objects is placed in any building. In museums, however, the ordering of exhibits in space assumes different modalities of signification according to the curatorial principles that are brought to bear (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, 2000). Here, I use the word signification to refer to the way in which space partakes in the construction of exhibition meaning.
In 1859, Professor Sir Richard Owen, the advocate for and creator of the Natural History Museum in London, drew a diagrammatic plan of an ideal museum. Placed in the middle is a great entrance hall that would present an elementary collection acting as an index to the contents of the museum as a whole. A series of parallel galleries, placed symmetrically about the hall, would accommodate different classes of exhibits, for example, molluscs, articulates, zoophytes, plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, and fishes. The galleries are accessed by two long halls, running along the front of the building; the one on the left would exhibit birds, the one on the right mammals (Owen, 1894). The actual building, designed by Alfred Waterhouse and opened in 1881 (Girouard, 1981), did not differ significantly from this sketch as far as the layout is concerned, perhaps because the architectural desire for a symmetrical and legible composition matched the curatorial desire for a clear organisation (Figure 1.3). The small alcoves around the cathedral-like central hall provided views of fishes, reptiles, mammals, molluscs, articulates, botanical, geological, and mineral specimens. The arrangement of circulation, in and around the central hall, including main stairs, balconies, and bridges leading to the upper floors, allowed visitors to get a good orientation to the building as a whole. The ground floor galleries on the left were devoted to systematic exhibitions of birds, shells, starfishes, reptiles, insects, and fishes; those on the right were devoted to palaeontology, with a similar classification of fossils. The two end pavilions, at the left and right front edges of the museum, displayed British vertebrates and fossil edentates, marsupials and birds, respectively.
FIGURE 1.3 The layout of the Natural History Museum in London, 1881. Top: Drawing of a future museum of Natural History by Richard Owen, 1859. Reproduced with permission from the Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. Bottom: Plan of the Natural History Museum in 1881, as designed by Alfred Waterhouse. Drawn by the author based on the plans published in The Builder, 19 May 19 1883, and the 1886 General Guide to the British Museum (Natural History).
Owen believed in the importance of classification. Talking about knowledge regarding the works of creation, he stated that “… collections of the several classes of such objects, duly prepared, named, and arranged, so as to give the utmost facility for inspection and comparison, are the instruments in the acquisition and advance of that knowledge” (Owen 1862, pp. 1–2). He argued that the design of the museum should serve to make the principles and scope of classification as transparent to the visitor as possible.
The Galleries should bear relation, in size and form, to the nature or characteristics of classes respectively occupying them. They should be such as to enable the student or intelligent visitor to comprehend the extent of the class, to trace the kind and order of the variations which have been superinduced upon its common or fundamental characters; to see how the Mammalian type is progressively modified and raised from the form of the fish or lizard to that of man, and to study the gradations by which one order merges into another.
(Owen, 1862, p. 41)
The mapping of classifications onto museum space is, therefore, one possible mode of signification (Peponis & Hedin, 1982; Psarra, 2009; Yanni, 2005). Of course, mapping can occur in different ways. For example, in Harnoncourt’s seminal exhibition of Arts of the South Seas at MOMA, in 1946, objects were grouped by room according to the geography and ecology of their origin. The rooms were accessed in linear sequence, by a meandering, not an axial path, with internal openings allowing cross-views from one room into another so that visitors can discover artistic affinities and infer trajectories of cultural influence (Architectural Forum, 1946; Staniszewski, 1998; Elligott, 2018).
Where mapping is the dominant principle, the legibility of the building, the main circulation skeleton, and the spatial relationships between its parts are critical to signification as argued by Wilfried Wang in this volume. If it is easily possible to comprehend the building layout, it becomes easier to think of it as a map of the classification of the contents.
At other times, the control of what can be viewed at any one time and the ordering of visual frames in dictated sequence work to lead visitors through discursive propositions or arguments even as graphics, physical models, specimens, or other displays are deployed, in addition to language. Distinct statements occupy their own areas, and transitions are demarcated by path turns, boundaries, or changes in visual character. In the design of the Human Biology Hall of the Natural History Museum, in 1975, for example, design started from an analysis of visitor requirements and the message to be conveyed; the subject matter was divided into easily manageable units, organised in clear logical sequence, “with this sequence made manifest in the physical form of the exhibition” (Miles & Tout, 1991, p. 544); the hall was divided into independent sections, each dealing with hierarchically related concepts, so as to guide learning (Miles & Tout, 1978). The creation of a
desired sequence of impressions and an uninterrupted flow of traffic have been advocated as means of effective communication for a long time (Bayer, 1961). It is worth noting, however, that the systematic research associated with Natural History Museum in London has revealed that the clarity of discursive arguments and the communicative efficacy of individual displays is no substitute for the visitors’ desire to comprehend the spatial structure of environment in its own right (Miles, 1986), in order to feel comfortable and empowered within the museum.
While the arrangement of exhibition space as an educational medium, aimed to communicate concepts, functional or causal relationships, or laws of nature, is typical in science museums, the use of museum space as narrative medium is more typical in history museums. The National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, designed by Phil Freelon working with HOK (formerly Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum), opened in 2014. The American Civil Rights Movement exhibition therein, designed by George C Wolfe and the Rockwell Group, begins with displays portraying the segregated south in the 1950s, including the black American communities that thrived even under Jim Crow laws; it proceeds to describe the struggles for desegregation after the 1954 supreme court ruling that school segregation is unconstitutional; it gives account of the growth of the civil rights movement and peaceful protests though the 1960s. The story culminates in two rooms devoted to opposing forces: the 28 August 1963 march on Washington and the ‘I have a dream’ Martin Luther King Speech are presented in a brightly lit room arranged amphitheatrically. The acts of violence that followed, including the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the assassination of Martin Luther King on 4 April 1968, in Memphis Tennessee, are commemorated in dark areas, including a room reconstructing parts of the Lorraine Hotel when Martin Luther King was assassinated. The visitor path finally leads to a white room, celebrating the 1964 Civil Rights Act and paying tribute to all those who dedicated their lives to the cause of civil rights.
The modes of signification that work by analogy to a map, a discursive proposition or a narrative govern the ordering of objects in museum space top down, from curatorial knowledge to visitor perception. There are of course fundamental differences. Classification tends to presuppose a legibly ordered layout, while the communication of propositions and narratives tends to allow layout to emerge from the analysis of content. In both cases, the knowledge that the exhibitions are intended to transmit relates the individual object to the collection, the individual display to the theme of the exhibition. Very often, however, the aim is to draw attention to the displays themselves, considered significant, unique, and valued objects in their own right. Thus, in art museums, any overriding ordering principles recede to the background of experience to facilitate orientation rather than compete for attention. What is the signification function of museum space in these cases?
As a first step towards one possible answer, recall the sculpture gallery in Castelvecchio. The architect, Carlo Scarpa, worked to enhance the straight line
FIGURE 1.4 Views of the sculptures gallery at Castelvecchio.
Source: Photos by Václav Šedý. Archivio Carlo Scarpa, Museo di Castelvecchio, Musei Civici di Verona. By permission of the Municipality of Verona.
of movement that runs through five exhibition rooms succeeding one another in linear sequence. However, the statues, originally situated in the basilicas of Verona between the 6th and the 15th centuries, are not positioned facing this obvious traversing axis. Placed on raised platforms, usually near their edges as though about to move, they face in different directions (Murphy, 2017) (Figure 1.4). Unable to view them in the manner of officers inspecting a linear formation of soldiers, visitors are thus induced to slow down and deflect their paths. In order to come face to face with the statues, they must circle around, turn their heads, and inscribe complex trajectories on the floor, which is inserted into the pre-existing building as a carpet of Prun stone. In so doing, they become immersed into a society of reciprocal gazes that covers the space, with no regard to the main axis (Stavroulaki & Peponis, 2003; Benedikt, 2020). As though moving on a theatrical scene, they discover that statues themselves are interrelated according to their expression and the direction in which they face: for example, a standing Virgin is placed beside Jesus on the cross; their gazes meet, one looking up as if in supplication, the other looking down in pain; on the other side of the cross, a distressed Saint John stands looking away; a fainting Virgin is placed near the opposite wall; Saint Bartholomew, standing in calm posture, looks into the space in between, from across the other side of the main axis.
This is an immersive exhibition syntax that works very differently from either the map or the proposition. Here, signification passes through embodied experience, with visitors situated in the exhibition and among the exhibits rather than looking at them from a viewing point that is conceptually external to the displays. Curatorial care is not invested in telling one story; it is rather directed to creating a stage for multiple stories to be built from the bottom up, from the animated way in which visitors and exhibits address themselves.
The foregoing sketch of four modes of signification points to a spectrum of possibilities, rather than to a typology. Additional modes might be identified. Museums may offer modal mixes. The intensity of application of any one model of signification and the power of its impact may vary from case to case.
The meaningfulness of exhibition space
Individual exhibits may be associated with particular stories, as with the example of Rebekah. The relationship of exhibits within an exhibition may also point to stories, as in Castelvecchio. An exhibition as a whole might be organised as a narrative. But do exhibitions in general tell stories? Are visitors who view exhibits in some particular sequence or visitors who discover relationships between one exhibit and another, regardless of viewing sequence, exposed to narrative meaning?
In Spring 2021, the statue of the Libyan Sibyl, sculpted by William Story in 1878, stood in the middle of a room on the third floor of the High Museum of Art, as rearranged by Selldorf Architects in 2018. By Story’s own description, the statue
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
P. H. G. del. et lith.
R, B & R, imp.
Tanagrella ruficollis, Gmel. ♂ and ♀
(p. 236.)
P. H. G. del. et lith.
R, B & R, imp.
Euphonia, Jamaica, Linn. ♂ and ♀
(p. 238.)
(p. 242.)
P. H. G. del. et lith. Reeve, Benham & Reeve, imp.
Coturniculus tixicrus, Gosse.
P. H. G. del. et lith.
R, B & R, imp.
Crithagra Brasiliensis, Spix.
(p. 245.)
P. H. G. del. et lith.
Reeve, Benham & Reeve, imp.
Spermophila anoxantha, Gosse.
P. H. G. del. et lith.
Reeve, Benham & Reeve, imp.
Spermophila bicolor, Linn. (p. 252.)
P. H. G. del. et lith.
R, B & R, imp.
Spermophila adoxa, Gosse.
(p. 253.)
P. H. G. del. et lith. Reeve, Benham & Reeve, imp.
