Architecture in and of the Museum

In the last twenty-five years the historical study of museums has ballooned into a veritable separate discipline known as museum studies, which deals with the history of collections, the ideology of the museum as a public institution, and the politics of exhibitions. It is not the intention of this seminar to present an overview of this vast literature but rather to posit a set of questions proper to architectural history that intersect with both the history and historiography of the museum since the mid-18th century, with an overwhelming emphasis on the art (as opposed to the natural history, science, technology, history, or literary) museum.  The seminar intertwines two themes at vastly different scales: the inclusive one of the architectural history of the art museum as a building – including all aspects of interior disposition, display strategies and technologies, lighting, exterior form, and urban spatial disposition – and the more highly specialized one of architecture as a subject matter for collecting and display in the museum context.   Within art history the focus has been largely on the development of both the architectural and institutional structure of the art museum; but the fact that architecture overlaps issues of aesthetics, of history, and of science and technology, invites us to consider both the question of the architecture of the museum and architecture in the museum from a more comprehensive view of the museum type.  In both a set of questions recur: the idea of de-contextualization, of aesthetic experience divorced from use and daily environment, of classification and display, of education and/or vs. entertainment, or cultural hegemony and colonialism.