In recent years that has changed. The mission of the museum has shifted, from collecting, preserving, and protecting, to educating and entertaining the public -- with the line between these two functions often blurred.
The causes of this change are myriad, and include among other things the rise of multiculturalism, the need for new public institutions that provide gathering spaces for communities, the competition for public attention from movies, sports and television. There is also increased demand for new revenue sources to meet the budget requirements of attention-getting blockbuster shows, interactive equipment, enlarged and enhanced facilities, and the rest of the "new museum" paraphernalia.
These changes -- which are essentially about answering the question, how do you keep the public interested? -- require a new way of thinking about museums. Paradigms for the new museum are emerging globally. Here in the Northwest -- this creative nerve center for software, airplanes, alternative rock n' roll -- a new model for the museum is evolving, hand-in-hand with the emergence of new institutions and new buildings for established organizations.
In recent years we have been involved, as architects, exhibit designers and planners with many of the major museums in our region including exhibit installations for the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Asian Art Museum, the Washington State History Museum (with Moore Andersson) and the Experience Music Project, the Paul Allen-funded project that began with the idea of a place to display Jimi Hendrix artifacts but has expanded into an interactive museum dedicated to 20th Century popular music.
Our philosophy of museum design can be described in three words: Maps, Myths, and Places. We will return to these in a moment, but first, to get a sense of how things have changed for the better, let's consider the museum as a positive educational tool.
In contemporary museum education, the visitor experience is usually described as pertaining to one of three components: aesthetics or form, cultural context and process or technology.
The traditional experience of the museum falls into the first category. The visitor looks at the object which offers a self-contained aesthetic experience. In recent decades, as non-Eurocentric value systems grew in importance, curators began to describe objects in the context of the cultures that produced them, and the second category became relevant.
The third category is an emerging new way to experience artifacts. Consider, for example, a forged metal object from an ancient Middle Eastern culture. If the process by which this artifact was made is explained in the exhibit, then it might be possible for an otherwise uninterested engineer or metal worker to engage with it through technology.
By offering these different ways into the artifact, the museum creates broader appeal and also makes possible a museum experience that is potentially multicultural and egalitarian -- one that offers "something for everyone." This revitalizes the institution's relationship with the community and enhances sources of revenue while expanding on the curatorial work that remains a significant part of the mission.
This enlightened approach to the presentation of artifacts is only one part of planning the "new museum." It is a beginning-to-end, top-to-bottom process encompassing exhibitions, architecture, audience surveying, fund-raising, site planning and feasibility. We organize these different elements in terms of maps, myths and places.
Maps
Map-making in the process of museum-planning involves two separate but related activities. The first is the development of a vision -- making a plan for a cultural institution. The second kind of map-making is more literal: establishing a physical plan by finding and shaping the site and the building, then setting up the budget and the schedule.
To illustrate the idea of map making, we turn to the Experience Music Project (EMP), an exercise in museum planning that we have been working on with associates of Microsoft co-founder and Jimi Hendrix aficionado Paul Allen, who decided several years ago that he wanted to put on public display his collection of Hendrix memorabilia.
We were brought in early on to help create a conceptual basis for the project, and our team has worked with EMP planners ever since. We contributed to writing the institutional mission, developing goals, programs and concepts. We helped plan the facility, test sites, and worked on ways to integrate the museum into the city of Seattle.
Our firm has shepherded the concept from its earliest phase, as a storefront display of Hendrix artifacts, through myriad changes into its current incarnation as a multi-million dollar civic institution dedicated to the Pacific Northwest music scene, and the history of American popular music.
As envisioned today the building will be located at Seattle Center and will contain a performance space, a recording studio, a retail store and interactive exhibits, all dedicated to the culture of rock n' roll.
Myths
By isolating and highlighting artifacts, exhibitions intensify their power, making them larger than life -- in other words, mythical. Like myths, artifacts in a well-made exhibition can express the inexpressible; they can move people into higher realms of awareness. In doing so they build respect for the cultures that produce them, and that respect can cut across racial and other divides.
To illustrate one way of expressing myth by design, we turn to another project, the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park. The former home of the Seattle Art Museum was renovated in 1994 in an effort to craft a more harmonious relationship between the building and the collection. The most significant alterations took place in the Garden Court, a somewhat awkwardly-proportioned room located directly behind the building's Art Deco lobby.
To accommodate seismic mounting requirements and lend a sense of scale to the room, we inserted a series of vertical pylons along the walls, where they articulate niches for display shelves and platforms. Horizontal grooves in the pylons match similar grooves in the room's walls, and these lines create a link between the Deco style of the room and the carved stone niches in the South Indian temples that originally housed the statuary and friezes on display. The exhibition is consistent with the building architecture, yet honors and enhances the cultural -- and mythic -- context of the artifacts.
Places
As a place, a museum is more than just a location. It is where the people in a community gather to explore their culture. Architecture and site should make a context for this to happen. At the Burke Museum on the UW campus the sense of place has been problematic. The museum is well respected for research, particularly in the field of environmentalism, and has an excellent collection of Pacific Rim native artifacts as well as a fine natural history collection.
The problem is, the building is nondescript, with little street presence, and the interior lacks gathering spaces and the kinds of interactive exhibits with public appeal. To remedy these problems and lend the Burke a greater sense of place, we teamed up with Academy Studio, an exhibition design and fabrication firm, to plan new exhibits and make architecture that will give the building some, well, sex appeal.
The plan is to carve out a large new lobby gathering space -- there is none now -- that will also set up a circulation sequence which draws in visitors. On the upper level interactive technology will examine nature-related themes. On the lower level, the Peoples of the Pacific exhibition will be organized cross-culturally, concentrating on shared traits rather than examining each culture separately.
This will lend visitors a sense of what these distinct cultures have in common, enhancing community while making an exhibition that is both entertaining and information-rich.
On the outside banners attached to light posts will announce the museum's presence, while views cut through existing plantings will enhance visual accessibility.
Large scale, dramatic exhibits -- totem poles, a wooden whale, and a cast concrete mammoth skeleton -- will be arrayed in front of the building, and these objects, along with an oversized perforated metal sign illustrating the five geographical areas of Washington State, will bring the exhibitions, and the social space of the museum, outside the building. This should enhance the Burke's street presence, and bring this underutilized gem back into the public's consciousness.
The word "museum" in the recent past too often has been used to describe a faded elitist palace where unseen things gather dust, forgotten and retired. In the future museums will have a different image -- as dynamic cultural centers, places of community that educate and serve the public in original and useful ways.
Walter Schacht is a principal at Olson Sundberg Architects.
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