The Museum as School (of Architecture)

Abstract

The museum as architecture, as the central theme around which this entire monographic issue rotates, derived from a call for papers that also left the field open for 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”, a position that does not displease us: reality over virtuality. The thesis of surplus value of the real museum compared to the virtual museum is corroborated by such definitions as “space of grace” (Clemente), “apparatus of the soul” (Piscella), and “palimpsest of the place” (Lomurno): perceptual characteristics of the real that could not easily be transferred to virtuality as a way of making museums become authentic “acts of resistance” (De Matteis). In this introduction we critically analyse the papers making up the monograph.