Reshaping museum space architecture design exhibitions ebook

The Manual of Museum Planning. An essential resource for all museum professionals as well as trustees, architects, designers, and government agencies involved with the dynamic world of museums and galleries. The Museum as a Space of Social Care. This book examines the practice of community engagement in museums through the notion of care.

It focuses on building an understanding of the logic of care that underpins this practice, with a view to outlining new roles for museums within community health and social care. This book engages with the. A Companion to Museum Studies. A Companion to Museum Studies captures the multidisciplinary approach to the study of the development, roles, and significance of museums in contemporary society.

This fact leads us to the question: why are some areas segregated? According to Sophia Psarra «in the contemporary buildings segregation results from an architectural device based on layered stratification that mediates the relationship between different parts of the layout.

Figure 3. Light tones show high levels of integration. In order to answer to this question, we may consider also the average number of people observed in each space. Studies on the Kelvingrove and the Burrell Museums lead us to the fact that seventy per cent of the variance in the route of people is determined by the structure of the layout.

The result of this study is extremely important to understand how to construct the visitor experience. Museums are communicating environments in which complex meanings are negotiated. They are consumed in a multitude of different ways by visitors.

The main tools used by the designers, in order to translate the characteristics of each natural ecosystem, are lights, sounds, colors and distribution of specimens, with few written pieces. The aim was to create a multisensory atmosphere where the feeling is of being immersed in a world full of mysteries. The important conclusion of this project depends on satisfaction level of the public. Commenting on the overall visit, the satisfaction rating of the visitors, concerning the aesthetic quality and the collections come before those concerning the scientific contents.

Zavala, edited by, Routledge, Oxfodrshire , p. Figure 4. Figure 5. What exhibition? Before we try to understand the correct policy that should be apply, I would like to highlight that a museum is a social space as well as an educational, due to the fact that visitors come from all over the world, with different backgrounds and cultures.

These displays must be easy to change and capable to tell a story. A story display can be formed both from a single significant painting and a small group of paintings representing a particular style or movement.

We can take for example the Kelvingrove Art Gallery that we mentioned also in the second section , where in order to provide flexibility, the displays were designed as some standardized modules that «could be arranged in different 1 L Fitzgerald, Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions, in S. Figure 6. The second problem concerns the way in which some artists, who are still alive, choose di restage their studio — as a material and metaphorical environment for a way of working and thinking — in the gallery.

Figure 7. An interesting aspect of his strategy is that he took himself out of the picture and «try to make directed installations that privilege the experience of the visitor with the stuff at hand, rather than with him, the artist»4.

Richard Venlet proposed a reproduction of his work at the 25th Biennale of San Paolo in Here the artist, his work, the space and the visitors enter into a real interaction. A museum visit can be interpreted in plenty of meanings, due the fact that the visitors themselves have different socio-cultural backgrounds. This simple introduction leads us to the next question: «If individual visitors are understood to generate their own highly personalized and variable meaning from the same exhibition encounter, what rule, if any, might museums play in constructing spatial forms which communicate notions of equality and enable meaning that combat, rather than enhance, prejudice?

Historically, the museum has always been related to an idea of exclusion, division and oppression. Richard Sandell suggests that there are three principal spatial manifestations associated to the exclusion and the othering sensations.

The first one is characterized by the «creation and, sometimes, the relative positioning of discrete, differentiated spaces that […] separate, demarcate and distinguish between different groups»7.

I think that he intends that usually the American and the European art traditions are located in the central galleries, while the «others» are more hidden. As an example we can assume an exhibit about the colonial period, where in the same room the colonial society usually European is represented as more civilized and powerful than the conquered society. The last spatial manifestation concerns «the marked absence of certain forms of difference from museum spaces»9.

Richard Sandell means that non- representing certain groups in an exhibitions can hurt their feelings, and leave them unseen. Due to the last considerations, today there are several spatial strategies that can obviate the exclusion problem.

Here below are indicated the three principal strategies: - Compensatory — initiatives that are usually in a small-scale, sometimes as temporary installations alongside long-term displays that have been perceived as excluding or discriminatory. The vital museum The first changes, or may we say developments, in the museum structure and space came with the modern movement which cut the tight relationship between the space and the objects to be exhibited, so that the art became autonomous within the museum.

In the last years, especially in the transition between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, the raise of the superstar architects such as Frank O. Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and so on has resulted in the architecture overpowering the art inside. Such museums, as we see for maybe the first time at the Centre Pompidou, designed by the architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, encouraged the evolution of the museum as a container.

The museums today are multipurpose, multifunctional, where art is only one of a variety of activities to choose. The continues evolution of the society implicates the continues renewing of the museum.

As Stephen Greenberg says «there has never been a more challenging and a more exciting time in which to be devising creative spaces. These spaces are inevitably becoming more dynamic and experiential, changing and theatrical, rather than monumental and static»1.

The presence of the new technologies in the static architectural spaces leads towards dynamic performance spaces. According to Stephen Greenberg, the first tools used in a new exhibition design and masterplanning project should be the same that are used of film and TV programme making. Narratives and scripts should be the heart of the project. The script structures the story for all the members of the creative team, in order to check that the experience is working before we start with the architectural project.

I would like to conclude this part by saying that «the challenge is to make an installation that traverses the macro and the micro and integrates the building as well»2. These words lead me to my first conclusion about the new museum design: the importance of creating a public image.

People need signs, mark places, to be identified with, to be attracted by. Already in , Georges Perec said it even better: «I would like to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted, places that might be point of reference, of departure, of origin»2.

These places are defined both by the container, the outside — aesthetic aspect, and the content, the inner spaces. The second point that I would like to highlight is the perhaps now, more than ever before, the visitor — the consuming visitor — has become increasingly important in the process of gallery and exhibition creation. Ponzini, M. The visitor is encoded in the texts of the museum in a way that can scarcely have been the case in earlier years.

Maybe the current preoccupation, in the literature, with the receivers of mass media the audiences, viewers, readers of their various texts is part of the same ideological shift. He has worked in museum in York, Leeds, Hull and Newcastle. Since its opening in she has been in charge of temporary exhibitions. Elaine Heumann Gurian is a consultant to a number of museum and visitor centers that are beginning, building or reinventing themselves.

Gurian has held many elected offices in museum associations, has written and lectured widely and enjoys teaching in museum studies programmes. She has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Warwick, UK, and combines research in philosophy and museum theory with practical museum and heritage planning.

Christopher R. His research interests range from contemporary museology and display to a parallel specialization in Neapolitan Baroque patronage, collecting and the art market. His research considers the ways memory institutions have used and have been shaped by technologies of information management and display.

She has collaborated with leading institutions and museum organizations to provide evaluation of layouts and support of building facilities and to improve spatial and social performance. His research is focused on the social role of museums and, in particular, their potential to combat prejudice.

Andrew Sawyer is a specialist in the development of digital, interactive learning publications for the museum and education sectors. Lee H. Skolnick is the founding principal of a unique architecture and design firm whose award-winning projects range from museum masterplans, through architectural design, to exhibitions, environmental graphics and educational programming.

He completed his PhD in Museum Studies at Leicester University in and has been a programme evaluator and public policy consultant for over twenty years. He is an Associate Lecturer at Leeds University. Related Papers. By Paola La Scala. Hard-branding the cultural city - from Prado to Prada. By Graeme Evans.