IMAGINING THE FUTURE MUSEUM

Excerpt of one Dialogue out of 21 taken from »Imagining the Future Museum«
by András Szántó

Archaeology of the Future

Lina Ghotmeh - Architecture, Paris

THIS PLACE IS ESSENTIAL TO FORMING A HUMAN BEING

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So with that multinodal network in mind, how would you define a museum?

For me, the museum has to be taken off the pedestal of high culture and put on the pedestal of everyday culture. It is the cultural community center of any agglomeration of human beings—their forum, their reception room, and their public room.

Let’s talk about this new “public room.” To move in this direction, what does the museum need to unlearn?

We have made the museum feel as though it is the teacher of culture for us. At the heart of that process is a flawed relationship. We have somehow given up our ability to understand that culture is made in the community. The relationship between the community and its archive needs to be realigned. The museum is a depository, but also a place of active imagination. It is a place that allows us to remember lost histories and to bring them back to us, to go as far back as we can go. And one that allows us to imagine a possible future.

I remember a Studio Museum exhibition you organized in 2007 about public spaces. What can museums learn from other public venues you have designed, like churches and libraries? Those typologies are also undergoing massive reinvention. The three together are the archetypal triptych of the city—the church, the library, and the museum—and all three are rethinking their conditions. The library, in its purest form, was about access to hidden knowledge. The elite library—the monastery library, the private castle library—has evolved into the public library and democratized itself. The church used to be about priests presiding over the congregation, and this too has shifted to a more collective ambience, where the call-and-response of the citizenry actively manifests a chamber in which a certain equality of performer and receiver prevails. In other words, auditoriums and theaters in the round have taken over. All institutions are contending with the repercussions of the internet age, which has completely challenged the singularity of authority, and correspondingly forced architecture to rethink how the stage is set for a believable engagement between experts and citizens.

Many museums aspire now to shift toward this less hierarchical model. But an architect must turn it into reality. How can I tell when a museum is meeting this standard?

You can’t do it with the old architecture. In libraries, you find moms and teenagers and pensioners in one corner and academics at the top. When you have that mix, you know you have created an irreplicable relationship with your community. It has to be a multigenerational relationship. The museum has to crack that code. From the elderly to the toddlers, there must be a symbiotic sense that this place is essential to forming a human being. The architecture has to show that. An architecture structured to see the world a certain way, that refuses to allow multiple viewpoints or to engage with dissolving the hierarchy, smells like a rat to citizens. There will be a mistrust, no matter how much you repaper the veneer of the program. We believe in things because of space. Architecture makes people believe things—that is one of its most profound powers.

Let me dig into your image of a multigenerational utopia. What are the specific tools, materials, spatial configurations, that can get you there? I’m waiting for that little book of rules.

A rule book would set up a dangerous precedent of laziness. The answer is the endpoint. Any architect worth the name should understand how to analyze those moments and construct a relational, spatial condition to create that transmission. For me, the skill is having the ability to understand how to allow people to evolve and be more responsive. Much of this is about how space is apportioned in the museum.

How do you view the relationship between public space and exhibition space?

It is about desacralizing and making the relationship horizontal. The idea that there is a sacred temple, and then there is this profane space of debate and discussion, is fundamentally problematic. Only very few objects in a museum require a sacred moment—the lost object, the last one. Everywhere else you try to create relational proximity to all the objects. The objects have to somehow operate as information. The unique power of the museum is that it offers another way into human intelligence, one that is beyond language—a landscape of surface texture, duration, and spatial sequence that generates a neural uplift and understanding that we can thrive on.

The new public room must engage the society around it, yet to some extent it should also offer shelter from it. Some people want the museum to be a platform for political debates. Others feel it should be a sanctuary, a refuge. Where do you land?

Both positions are romantic. Neither one is what the public room is about. If you understand the public room as the archive, as the relational engagement with different forms of communication, understanding, ability, then you realize that you are entering an arena that is oscillating between information that is happening in the world, while being processed into a certain condition, distillation, and concretization to communicate certain essential ideas. It cannot be just a sanctuary, or a place where you go to make a political rally. That is simply not what it is set up to do. In the future, if we build hundreds of these archives, some might be spaces where we can make a political statement, and some may not.

I want to ask about the future—and don’t say you don’t deal with the future, because every architect is a futurologist.

We all are. If you don’t believe that, then you’re not an architect. You must be a futurologist.

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Header: Lina Ghotmeh, Courtesy of © Aliki Christoforou for Paris+ par Art Basel