понедельник, 7 августа 2006 г.

Adaption equals Tradition

The British Museum Great Court is the focus of my precedent study. I chose this space initially because it was such an intriguing project. It was one of the first projects designed in a manner that was neither nor a detached sculpture on a pedestal. My first reactions were overwhelmingly positive.
After some research into the history of the BM, I find the entire museum a real oddity. I don't think there is another cultural institution quite like it. Its origins in the Wunderkammern of the elites, transfer to a large estate in west central London, rehousing in a Greek Revival temple, years of haphazard additions and buildings behind the front facade, and finally, remodeling in 2001 share no common vision. The museuem building are an unplanned collection of chance projects. Lack of funds and further lack of space has always dictated the direction of the built projects. The BM's first trustees could not afford a palatial estate or park setting for the collection being unable to afford to purchase Buckingham Palace's predecesor. The compromised by buying Montagu House on Great Russell Street.
The adaptation of this building in the late 1700s took four years. It continued the still present trend for cultural activities to be housed in buildings that were never intended to be used for such purposes. (MoMA Queens, The Mockbee in Cincinnati, The Louvre, The Hermitage). All of these adaptation projects benifited from the urban precence that was already installed in the building itself. The warehouse already had an identity in the urban fabric. This identity was simply added to by layering a new function inside it. A factory in Queens became both a factory and an art space. A chance to view famous work and a chance to think about place.
Sir Robert Smirke's 1823 plan for the museum masterplan simply adapted the Montagu House's Palladian layout and layered some Greek Revivalist column on the exterior. In this sense, although Smirke's grand building was the first intentionally design exhibition spaces, they are the direct decendent of the previous occupant of the site on Great Russell Street, a very large house.
Cabinet, to House, to Museum - the development of the spaces that we now consider to be so classical and solid in their typology, is really nothing more than a hasty tranfer of one well-understood place - the house, the interior, the cabinet, the self and its relation to interior as womb, center of identity, place to keep all you stuff - into the eleborate constructions that are museums.