Models of work – Museums and models in contemporary architecture
2nd International Architectural Model Festival, Kunsthalle, 12-16 November 2010
MúzeumCafé 21.
Museums play a central role in architecture. (For simplicity’s sake, ‘museums’ here includes all cultural institutions dealing with exhibitions, contemporary art galleries, as well as national and other archives). That role is demonstrably increasing in the development models based on the creative and cultural sectors of European cities as they are gradually deindustrialised. The infrastructure of contemporary museums and their role in urban development are increasingly reaching beyond traditional projects and playing a part in other systems keeping cities alive. Building museums has become a similar activity to infrastructure development, whereby the outstanding symbolic assets of architectural space, the content, the related events and openness generate interest. This change was manifest in the great variety of architectural typology displayed in the exhibited projects at the Model Festival. Museums using ‘trademark’ names, such as the iconic are tourist attractions, which beyond their own exhibitions provide a stage for big-name architects, thus forging rivalry between cities as well as transforming the image of their own locations. Visitors to the exhibition were presented with almost 80 models with similar subject matter, providing the opportunity for comparisons between such institutions which otherwise contend with quite different fundamentals in their respective cultural spheres. The majority of European museums have joined continent-wide processes such as the European Cultural Capital project. The still unbuilt Grand Exhibition Hall in Pécs or the Gallery of Arts in Maribor are rather regional museums, while in contrast Turku’s floating pavilion on the river transformed a local infrastructure project with architectural content as well the mission of the gallery itself. Similarly in Slovenia where, construction of a linking wing of the National Gallery in Ljubljana went through the difficulties experienced with expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. Although there the disputed new contemporary urban space lacked national allusions, it significantly renewed the space and was appropriate for the reception of changes in the museum’s profile. One of the explicit elements of the MoMA project in Warsaw, even at the time of the tender, involved opposition to the Socialist Realist architectural inheritance, though the new institute started to function well before the building was completed using various post-war urban locations to create its own programme and promote its active contact with the public. At the same time the Silesia Museum planned for Katowice explicitly accepted the post-war architecture of its industrial quarters and made a basis of its project an evaluation of the already built environment along with public involvement. The provocative installation work of Nowoffice, commissioned by the Finnish National Gallery, using maximum possibilities of the genre was the highlight of the three-day festival – the model of the huge museum assigned the whole of Finnish art history by genres and chronology to wings and floors of the building, marking the extent of each period by the size of its projected space.