Courses

The Art Museum: Typological Trajectories

This seminar provides a critical analysis of the art museum. Rooted in the varied contexts and motives of its programmatic evolution, the course equips students with tools to anticipate the art museum’s typological trajectory amidst socio-economic, cultural, and environmental challenges. At stake is architecture’s prerogative to enable the institution’s relevance.

The art museum has emerged as one of the most significant and prolific typologies of the last century. Its edifice is at once a vessel for our cultural memories and a platform for espousing values, ideas, and knowledge essential to navigating our collective futures. The museum building tethers the objects it houses to the public it hosts. The three – building, object, and public – are constantly in dynamic alignments and tension with one another.

The course is divided into four sections. 

  1. Origins of the Typology: Expands the discourse to include non-Mediterranean/Western antecedents, reflecting our shared urge to collect and display.
  2. The Gallery: Traces the evolution of the gallery – the primary space of display – and the corresponding evolution in art, educational frameworks, and sociocultural practices. The study of gallery types, from the palatial salon to the white box, to burgeoning contemporary strategies, lay bare the didactic relationship between architecture and objects. 
  3. The Non-Gallery: Analyzes the roles of non-gallery programs – spaces of conservation and storage, circulation, infrastructure, retail, food, classrooms and auditoriums, among others – as mechanisms that expand the art museum’s relevance and economic viability, while providing alibis for architectural form.
  4. Future Trajectories: Anticipates new directions relative to contemporary issues such socio-economic inequity, cultural property, and the climate crisis.

The course straddles art and architectural history, design, exhibition, arts programming and operations, infrastructure, climate, economics, landscape, and curatorial practices. Guest speakers, including designers, curators, public officials and museum leaders, will provide diverse perspectives on these matters.