Fig.
1 - Guido Canella, Teatro-museo della forma urbis, Aosta,
1988. Archivio Eredi Canella.
Fig.
2-3 - The covers of “Hinterland” nos. 4/1978 and 21-22/1982, dedicated to museums.
Fig.
4 - The cover of “Zodiac” no. 6/1988 dedicated to museums.
After the
monographic issue dedicated to the architect Luigi Vietti (no.
49/2019), this new issue of FAMagazine addresses the theme of the
museum space. Via a call for papers, to which many Italian and
international scholars responded, we present a variegated reflection
whose only structure and limit is contained within the space of the
twelve (which then became eleven) essays making up the issue.
Followers of the magazine will have noticed that compared to the call
for papers, the title of this issue underwent a small but significant
change, imposed by the theoretical positions of the participants and
the reflections that flowed from them. From World Wide Web Museum. The
museum between remembrance and rationalisation of the real
the definitive title has become The
Museum despite the World Wide Web: between remembrance and the
rationalisation of reality. Although the call for papers
left the field open to reflections on virtual museums and on the
dematerialisation of the exhibited object, The theses developed in the
articles that arrived (generally) and in those that were selected
(specifically) confirm the importance of the museum as architecture.
“Presence” won out over
“absence”1, a position that does not displease
us: reality over virtuality. Indeed, in the papers where the problems
of virtuality are taken into consideration they do so in metaphorical,
allegorical, and fantastical terms – as in the case of the
Artaudian double adopted by Lisini and Pireddu for the Stazione
dell’Arte in Sardinia, or the filmic narrative construction
of Peter Greenaway cited by Federica Visconti – as a pretext
for underscoring a still fundamental role of the museum in the
mechanism of conservation and memorisation and to which we can also
add, in all of its effects, the pedagogical, cognitive aspect. On the
other hand, since its genesis the museum has always had a kind of
versatility, in some historical phases even transforming itself into a
workshop in the service of training; an operational site, an analytical
laboratory, and so on.
A comparison with the positions expressed by the proponents of the
virtual museum would, moroever, have been interesting; but as compared
to constructing issues of the magazine designed a priori, the
downside here is that we can only solicit a response via the text of
the call for papers and hope for the widest possible participation,
also including contrary positions such as would make possible a concordia discors.
So to try again, when we are proposing starting points for future
reflections, we could ask ourselves as architects how the positive
aspects of virtuality can characterise the project of the contemporary
museum from the standpoint of integration and not substitution.
But in fact – and some might say that FAMagazine is a journal
that reflects a trend – the position that emerges from this
issue is that the museum as architecture, a bearer of meanings, a space
produced by the reaction between container and content, is more alive
than ever. Those who thought the museum was in crisis and was being
gradually supplanted by other ways of enjoying the different forms of
art (multimedia, augmented reality, virtual visits, etc.) will be
disappointed. Moreover, corroborating the thesis of surplus value of
the real museum compared to the virtual museum, there are definitions
such as “space of grace” (Clemente),
“apparatus of the soul” (Piscella), and
“palimpsest of place” (Lomurno): perceptual
characteristics of the real that could not easily be transferred to
virtuality to make museums become authentic “acts of
resistance” (De Matteis). In practice, if indeed we can talk
about a crisis it is referrable rather to distorted cultural policies,
as Jean Clair wrote in Malaise dans les musées.
The main essay by Ildebrando Clemente, the creator and curator of the
call for papers, is joined by others that deal with museal multiplicity
in some of its possible facets: the extension of the museum to the city
and territory, which also includes the museumisation of archaeological
sites; the museum project traditionally understood; and museum vs.
museum, i.e. the comparison between the museum and its extension.
Museum, City, Territory
The first group of articles offers a reflection on the museum that
departs from the conventional spaces dedicated to it, discussing
“other places” such as those of infrastructure
(transport stations) or the specific places of archaeological finds,
until it merges with the landscape and with art, which itself is
imagined as a device of the museum.
In the first case Filippo Lambertucci – author of both the
essay and the project for the museum display at the San Giovanni
Station on Metro Line C in Rome – highlights
“possible frontiers for museum statutes outside the museum
and the potential of infrastructure as a museum, located outside in the
city as a sort of City Wide Web Museum, thanks to having overcome its
merely decorative role and having involved artistic operations and
archaeological finds “.
If at San Giovanni Station the space of the infrastructure meets the
archaeology by chance (in this specific case, in the excavations)
transforming it opportunistically into a museum, the case of
“building museums on ruins” is different, where the
“in situ” archaeological museumisation avoids the
need to intercept continuous flows of potential visitors, distracted as
they are by the haste of moving, to concentrate on other museum
derivatives as exemplified in the article by Flavia Zelli.
The examples of new museum facilities in the area of archaeology
– the museumisation of the archaeological excavations of the
Domus dell’Ortaglia in Brescia by Tortelli Frassoni
Architetti Associati, the museum of the Punic-Roman necropolis by
Pill’e Matta, in Quartucciu, Peter Zumthor’s
Schutzbau Areal Ackerman at Coirà, in Switzerland
– are no longer containers of artefacts recovered in the
field and taken away, but integral parts of the very place of that
archaeology, generating a series of questions that correlate to
permeability, the concept of exterior/interior, and the perception of
spatial relationships.
The project by ABDR for the Mausoleum of Augustus and Piazza Augusto
Imperatore in Rome, described by Rachele Lomurno, belongs to the same
typology. It finds a new order among the various stratifications
recorded by the monument, making them resurface and become
readable; the archaeological ruin re-acquires a contemporary
meaning, becoming itself a museum of the complex palimpsest of the
place. Thus “a relationship of reciprocal mutuality is
established between the new and the ancient: its layered palimpsest
becomes a source of suggestions for design decisions; in its turn the
project suggests a correct interpretation of the partial ancient
forms”.
The Stazione dell’Arte at Ulassai in Sardinia, described by
Caterina Lisini and Alberto Pireddu as a rearguard experiment in
relation to the current tendency, is an extensive museumisation that
not only exits from the canonical space of the museum but also from the
other spaces of the city, invading the surrounding territory and
constructing a complex relationship with art (in particular with the
work of Maria Lai). “If the traditional typological depiction
in contemporary global museum design is tending to fade, almost to the
point of disappearing in favour of a dominant invention of the
spectacular device of perception, the museum at Ulassai, in its
tenacious conservation of simple types of service that are familiar to
a community and are converted into abstraction, can be the paradigm for
a museum of a particular type in which the architectonic device loses
its dimensional consistency and functional configuration but not its
semantic meaningfulness, branching out into the surrounding territory
and the landscape, blending into it and becoming its
interpreter”.
The museum project
Some of the essays describe traditional museum buildings and how they
are developed within the history, order and rules of architecture, as
in the case of the Museo del Mare in Palermo by Cesare Ajroldi, or that
interpret types or experiences that have become consolidated in the
history of contemporary architecture, as in Renato Capozzi’s
analyses of the Zumthor/Mies example; and in Susanna
Piscella’s descriptions of more wide-ranging experimentations
with the museum typology in a number of projects by Renato Rizzi. In
her first case, the Arsenale in Palermo, she addresses the theme of the
contemporary re-construction of part of an ancient building of high
architectural value. Alongside that basic theme she also discusses the
rules of architecture which, not incorrectly, she considers fundamental
in this present historical moment of abandonment of the fundamentals of
the discipline, particularly in relation to making an
“addition” to an important building and to
designing in the city of stone, the Mediterranean city. The Arsenale
project derives the rules of its constitution from the pre-existing
building and is characterised by the order and quality of the light: a
project constituted as a defence of the authenticity of the
Mediterranean city and its architecture against the instrumentalisation
that certain administrators make of architecture (including museum
architecture).
In her second case she investigates the concept of the museum as it was
developed by Mies – beginning from his project for the German
Pavilion at the Brussels International Exposition of 1935, continuing
with his Museum for a Small City of 1943, and concluding with the 1968
Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin – demonstrating how his
typological and spatial principle has influenced the contemporary
conception of the museum as a free and adaptable “space for
works/space for work”, a place of encounter and communication
as a “workshop/factory of doing” embodied in Peter
Zumthor’s 2013 Werkraum in Andelsbuch, which she defines as
an “admissible variation” of the original
configuration by Mies.
In her third case she analyses a number of museum projects by Renato
Rizzi – the Grand Egyptian Museum for Cairo, the Museum of
Modem Art in Warsaw, and the Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in
Ferrara (plus a fourth project, the Fortunato Depero Museum of Futurism
in Rovereto, the only one to be built) as attempts to regenerate the
original cognitive relationship via the restitution of three
singularities: the work, the person, and the inner landscape, which
incorporates the first two. Thus in her conception the museum becomes
an “apparatus for experience, for the expansion of the
soul”.
Museum vs Museum: museum
extensions
Two of the essays investigate the relationship between the architecture
of an existing museum and that of its extension: between historical
pre-existence and new architecture that is functionally and
figuratively connected to the existing. In the first essay Federico De
Matteis reflects on the concept of extension understood not as
“the mere addition of spaces to a pre-existing building, but
the accommodation of the multiple forms of expression of contemporary
art”, “a widening of the role of the museum as a
building in contemporary society, and secondly the exponential growth
of the aesthetic spectrum during the development of twentieth-century
art”. He bases his essay on two museum extension projects by
Christ & Gantenbein – their new building for the
Basel Art Museum and the new wing of the Zurich National Museum
– in which, despite their different appearance, functional
programme, and size, both buildings interpret these cultural changes in
their architectural structure and in the quality of the exhibition
spaces created.
In the second essay Gennaro Di Costanzo takes as his pretext Luigi
Cosenza’s extension to the National Gallery of Modern Art in
Rome in which, far from monumental ambitions, the conception of a
museum becomes a fertile premise for the realisation of a new idea of a
museum – Cosenza defines it as a museum without a monument
– where typological innovation articulates a spatial sequence
that finds in repetition and variation the formal themes with which to
construct a “temporal figuration”: a
“classic” museum in the sense given to the term by
Cacciari and referred to what is currently not the fashion.
Finally, a reflection by Federica Visconti on what the museum can be
today. Beginning from Kahn’s idea of a museum-as-depository
that he developed in several projects (his two buildings at New Haven
for Yale University and, chronologically between his Yale Art Gallery
and the Yale Center for British Art, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort
Worth, Texas) and that remained incomplete, Visconti uses his
‘interrupted’ idea of the museum as storage/casket
to arrive at a further refinement, offered by the interpretation of
Maurizio Ferraris, of storage as a device for memorising and recording
large quantities of information in digital format, but still going back
to the English meaning of the word, which once again is synonymous with
conservation and memory.
Those who keep track of the magazine will know the commitment and
attention it gives to the teaching of architectural design. In the vast
literature on the architecture of the museum, which is a classic theme
for the learning of design culture because of its wealth of meanings
and the vast number of historical examples, the interpretation of
Giulio Carlo Argan – the Museum as School2 has always seemed to me the most
interesting. So we hope that yet another contribution made by our
magazine, which with this issue reaches the goal of no. 50, may serve
as a stimulus by opening up new experiences and new architectural
experimentations.
.
Note 1
The two terms cited are a reference to a text by Renato Barilli
entitled Tra presenza e
assenza. Due ipotesi per l’età postmoderna
(Bompiani 1974) in which he anticipates many of the characteristics and
contradictions of the present time. 2
Giulio Carlo Argan, Il
Museo come Scuola, in
“Comunità”, no. 3, 1949, pp. 64-66. On the educational function of
museums in Argan’s thought, see Carlo De Carli, Argan: L’arte di
educare, in Rileggere
Argan. L’uomo. Lo storico dell’arte. Il didatta. Il
politico, Moretti & Vitali, Bergamo 2003, pp.
94-110. On the different roles and historical meanings of the museum,
see the monographic issues of the magazines
“Hinterland” (no. 4/1978, Per un museo metropolitano;
no. 21-22/1982, La
diffusione museale) and “Zodiac” (no.
6/1988 dedicated to the museum) in particular the essays by Guido
Canella, Inventio
translatio depositio (Hinterland no. 4, op.cit., pp.
17-29), Memorie di
funzione e frammenti di rappresentazione (Hinterland
21-22, op.cit., pp. 2-3), Su
certe devianze dell’archetipo museale (Zodiac,
op.cit., pp. 4-11).