Twelfth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Since the second half of the twentieth century, museum architecture has often been associated with urban, social, and cultural renewal. In contrast with the neoclassical museum, conceived as a temple for arts and antiquities, modern architecture proposed new forms of monumentality which materialised a vision of museums as dynamic and inclusive cultural centres, open to the city and to different audiences. Museums have always been a central theme in the work of the Portuguese architect Alcino Soutinho (1930-2013). In the 1950s, while he was still a student at the School of Fine Arts of Porto, Soutinho started a line of research that he would explore over more than five decades, combining frequent trips and visits to museums in various countries with a continuous professional practice, translated into fifteen proposals for exhibition spaces, including several unbuilt projects. Throughout his career, Alcino Soutinho has persistently addressed the concept of museum as an urban and social catalyst. Either when designing new buildings or adapting architectural heritage to museological programmes, he focused on the civic and cultural significance of the museum, envisaging its contribution to the development of the city and the surrounding territory. Drawing on a representative set of architectural projects authored by Alcino Soutinho this paper discusses different approaches to the idea of museum as an inclusive cultural catalyst. How has this topic evolved and how is it being reinterpreted today?