Información General

• Autores: Josep María Montaner Martorell
• Editores: Barcelona : Editorial Gustavo Gili, S.L.
• Año de publicación: 2003
• País: España
• Idioma: inglés
• ISBN: 9788425219245, 8425219248
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)

Otros catálogos

• Red de Bibliotecas Universitarias (REBIUN)

Índice

• Contents: Introduction The museum as an extraordinary organism The evolution of the box The minimalist object The "museum museum" The self-involved museum The museum as a collage of fragments The anti-museum Forms of dematerialisation Conclusion Bibliography Photographic credits

  
  

Descripción principal

• If since the end of the 18th century and throughout the nineteenth the museum was consolidated as a new public institution, at the beginning of the 21st century the museum has become a place for the massive influx of an active public and has become integrated into consumer culture in its broadest sense. The museum's relationship with the city and society, as a generator of large urban spaces and a magnet for tourists, has also contributed to the total mutation of the museum's traditional building type.

  
  Profusely illustrated with examples of recent museums, this book is organised into eight chapters, each describing one of the eight trends that can be considered the predominant forms of contemporary museums.

Extracto del libro

• Introduction (extract) The aim of this book is to briefly present an overview of and glimpse into current museum architecture. With the 21st century already underway, this text emphasises those prototypes and projects from the 20th century that have transcended the limits of time and continue to be essential points of reference in the 21st century. Today's museums must be viewed within the context of the trend encouraging the creation, expansion and transformation of museums that has been about since the 1980s, when the post-modern culture of leisure and the culture industry were consolidated within post-industrial society. The massive influx of visitors to museums led to the need to expand services to include temporary exhibitions and outlets for consumption, and brought with it growth in the areas of management, education and conservation. Contemporary museums have followed in the trail of the prototypes of the Modern Movement and some models from the 1950s, recovering the values that have been characteristic of museums throughout history; yet they have simultaneously brought with them a complete transformation of the conventional conception of the museum. It is worth noting that despite ongoing crises suffered by the museum since its inception, which have only been aggravated by avant-garde art critics and the destruction resulting from World War II, the museum as an institution is playing an increasingly key role within contemporary societies. Paradoxically, each crisis has ended up reinforcing the museum's power as an institution that is at once a reference point and a synthesis, capable of evolving and providing alternative models, and especially appropriate for spotlighting, describing and transmitting the values and signs of the times. [...] We could posit that the modern idea of what a museum is took shape at the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s in four different models: the idea of a "museum of unlimited growth" as defined in 1939 by Le Corbusier using a coiled rectilinear shape; the Museum for a Small City (1942), designed by Mies van der Rohe as a pure, rational museum with an open floor plan; the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1943-1959), created by Frank Lloyd Wright as a singular organic form inspired by the spiral; and Marcel Duchamp's call for the total dissolution of the museum with his surrealistic objets trouvés and his proposal for a minuscule portable museum, the Boîte en valise (1936-1941), thereby paving the way for new ways of conceiving exhibitions and museums. In the wake of the avant-garde and World War II, the museum as an institution remained lethargic in Europe and did not experience any major changes. New ideas were not formulated until the end of the 1950s, especially in Italy and the northern European countries. The initiative at that time was originating in North American museums. It was not until the beginning of the 1980s that priorities in the areas of housing, schools and infrastructure shifted in developed countries to buildings devoted to culture; this was when talk of a new generation of museums arose. Within the numerous examples of museum architecture that have proliferated since the 1980s and that are continually being added to, there seems to be a broad diversity which is, in fact, only apparent. If we consider the way in which architectural forms are expressed in order to accommodate the growing functional and representational complexity of the contemporary museum, we can detect a series of trends. Each trend displays certain formal mechanisms and strategies, whether found in interventions on already existing buildings, in new urban buildings or in buildings designed within natural surroundings. Each option shows a different conception of the organisation of internal space and the museographic criteria for presenting the collections; of how to confer emblematic and symbolic value on the museum; of the museum's relationship with its urban context or its surrounding landscape; of materials and technologies. Each trend results from the evolution of diverse formal and conceptual models of the museum. In most cases the architectural container constitutes the first hermeneutic element in the museum; in addition to accommodating its functional agenda, its primary mission is to express the museum's contents as a collection and as a public cultural building. This book is organised into eight chapters, each describing the eight trends that can be considered the predominant forms of contemporary museums. As a point of departure we will take the two most clearly opposed and most characteristic typological trends: the museum as an organic and unrepeatable, monumental and specific form; and the museum understood as a container or multifunctional box, neutral, perfectible and repeatable.