Museum
Cultural
My thesis explores the different modes, environments, and forms that might organize a diverse range of exhibitions. Instead of organizing the museum according to principles that cohere around a larger, more singular form of the museum, I propose we think of space and organization in terms of fast and slow space. All museums can, at some level, be thought of as archival storage containers.
The role of curation is to organize its contents to fulfill a curatorial role, usually in the guise of education. More often than not, the contents of an exhibition are organized chronologically or thematically; comparing works deepens their cultural meaning.
In our conception of the museum, we retain the vital role of historical artifacts, displayed one by one, to communicate the diversity and trajectory of cultural history. In this slow space, the organization, like the collection, is composed of an enfilade of galleries, arrayed in a perimeter line that allows one to view into the work and out to the surrounding city, both acting as archives of culture.
A large, more vertical volume occupies the central courtyard space of the museum. A sectional object, where each floor is different, is like a mediatheque for the exhibition of constantly changing work, none of it in the permanent collection. This is characterized by fast space —a place where change is the only constant —and a variety of experiences can be had across the different floor volumes that make up the whole. As one moves along the line of the enfilade, the open space of the central volume allows shortcuts —from one side of the museum to the other, from inside to outside (courtyard and roof garden), and from floor to floor.
This thesis hopes that this juxtaposition of the fast and slow allows for greater curatorial possibilities, along with an acknowledgment that culture is neither uniform nor constituted within singular conceptions of conventional modes of exhibition. Culture is rich and diverse; it moves fast and slow, and everything in between.