Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The nature of the relationship between museum architecture (as a background) and the exhibition (as a middleground) is ambiguous. Although there are some theorists who have stressed the importance of spatial context in design exhibitions, such as Brian O’Doherty in his book “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space” (1986) and Carol Duncan in her book “Civilizing Rituals” (1995), in the practical world it seems that curators are designing the exhibition without paying attention to the powerful components of the museum architecture. This leads to reduction in the value of museum architecture as a primary layer in controlling the visitors’ experience. In the Jewish Museum Berlin, which was designed by a starchitect (Daniel Libeskind) and opened in 2001, the curator of the permanent exhibition did not deal with some architectural elements in a thorough way. For example some of the windows are hidden, which in turn, affects the experience. Based on interviews with some of the museum staff and thirty-six visitors and doing design analysis, the relationship between the museum architecture and the permanent exhibition will be discussed in order to show the strength or weakness in this relationship.