Building the museum: Knowledge, conflict, and the power of place

ISIS

Volumn 96, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 572-585

  Forgan, Sophie ^a  

^a TEESSIDE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33751184209     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/498594     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. Alfred Russel Wallace, "Museums for the People," Macmillian's Magazine, 1869, 19:249;
2. "Man, Know Thyself," Descriptive Catalogue of the Liverpool Museum of Anatomy, n.d. [ca. 1871], copy in author's possession;
3. and "Foster and Partners, American Air Museum in Britain, Duxford," in Contemporary Museums: Architectural Design Profile, 1997, 130:63-61, on p. 63. Throughout this essay I use the term "museum" to refer to scientific museums or museums with a substantial scientific component, unless stated otherwise.
4. J. Pedro Lorente, Cathedrals of Urban Modernity: The First Museums of Contemporary Art, 1800-1930 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998);
5. Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London/New York: Routledge, 1995);
6. Daniel J. Sherman, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989);
7. Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Colonial Natural History Museums during the Late Nineteenth Century (Kingston/Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1988);
8. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London/New York: Routledge, 1995);
9. and Michaela Giebelhausen, ed., The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts (Manchester/New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 2003).
10. E.g., the Smithsonian Institution, started in 1847 and added to fairly continuously ever since, housed several different museums (artistic, historical, and scientific), a library, laboratories, and lecture theaters, as well as the International Exchange Office and, of course, private apartments for the director. See Cynthia R. Field, Richard E. Stamm, and Heather P. Ewing, The Castle: An Illustrated History of the Smithsonian Building (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993).
11. For the relationship of the field and the laboratory to the museum see Dorinda Outram, "New Spaces in Natural History," in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 249-265.
12. Peter Galison has emphasized how diversely science was sited; see Galison, "Buildings and the Subject of Science," in The Architecture of Science, ed. Galison and Emily Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 1 -25. This volume includes studies of a number of museums.
13. This is nicely brought out in Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, "Patrons and Publics: Museums as Historical Artefacts," History and Technology, 1993, 10:1-3.
14. There is a perceptual difficulty in viewing a worked-up perspective presented for approval and then seeing it translated into an actual building. The use of painterly presentation drawings became a normal part of the design and approval process from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and was occasionally used earlier. For a useful introduction see Jill Lever and Margaret Richardson, The Art of the Architect (London: Trefoil, 1984).
15. Henry Cole's preferred designers and builders for the South Kensington Museum were army engineers. From the later nineteenth century relations were at times further complicated by architects' adoption of scientific practices, theories, materials, and even values, which did not necessarily make communication easier. Several of the essays in Galison and Thompson, eds., Architecture of Science (cit. n. 3), tackle these questions, particularly those in Sect. 4.
16. Architectural competitions have been exhaustively analyzed in the case of certain iconic buildings, such as the Oxford University Museum, but not for many other lesser museums. For Britain there is an excellent (though not completely comprehensive) source in Roger H. Harper, Victorian Architectural Competitions: An Index to British and Irish Architectural Competitions in "The Builder," 1843-1900 (London: Mansell, 1983). For the United States an index of competitions is available on the Web site of the Society of Architectural Historians, www.sah.org., which is being added to continuously. The Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal has extensive collections, including more recent competition papers.
17. This may be exemplified in David Watkin, The Rise of Architectural History (London: Architectural Press, 1980),
18. which charted the development of architectural history from 1700 and viewed with some skepticism Marxist theories that there was any necessary relation between social and economic conditions and architectural forms. Since that time, a number of different theoretical approaches have radically changed architectural writing; a selection is usefully set out in Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1997).
19. For this aspect of Waterhouse's design see J. Mordaunt Crook, The Dilemma of Style (London: Murray, 1989), pp. 143-144.
20. Alfred Waterhouse was also unusually good at handling difficult clients and interpreting their desires; for his work and practice generally see Colin Cunningham and Prudence Waterhouse, Alfred Waterhouse, 1830-1905: Biography of a Practice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992).
21. Historians should be cautious about referring to the Natural History Museum, for example, as "Gothic revival," which was not how a contemporary architect would have described it; a "temple of science" it certainly was, in the eyes of its visitors and many in the scientific community. The distinction may seem trivial, but stylistic labels had expressive meanings attached to them that otherwise may be misread. Furthermore, such buildings were often treated in a thoroughly irreverent fashion by their visitors (mothers breast-feeding, children racing round the galleries). There is evidence both for and against a reverential attitude, though first-time visitors were more likely to be awestruck; see David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 38-39.
22. Caria Yanni, Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display (London: Athlone, 1999), provides an excellent account, her chapter on the Natural History Museum being titled "Nature in Conflict."
23. A comparative example may be found in Mary P. Winsor, Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1991).
24. The disputes are somewhat downplayed in the official history of the building, which provides a useful architectural history: Field et al., The Castle (cit. n. 3).
25. See also Kenneth Hafertepe, America's Castle: The Evolution of the Smithsonian Building, 1840-1878 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984).
26. The battle between Joseph Henry and Charles Coffin Jewett over the shape of the Smithsonian ended in Jewett's being sacked; see Joel J. Orosz, Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740-1870 (Tuscaloosa: Univ. Alabama Press, 1990), p. 206. Orosz argues that Joseph Henry and George Brown Goode of the Smithsonian laid the foundation for a dismissive history of pre-1870 U.S museums as not properly professional, hence reinforcing a historiography that effectively sharply divided pre- from post-Smithsonian museums. Goode's influence on museum historiography is more fully examined by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt in her essay in this Focus section.
27. Jenny Beckman, "Nature's Palace: Constructing the Swedish Museum of Natural History," History of Science, 2004, 42:85-111. The author argues that conflicts arose from a redefinition of its role as an educational institution, its banishment from central Stockholm to a suburb, problematic interactions between academics, and the continuing involvement of amateurs in different ways in botany as opposed to zoology.
28. On the Museum of Practical Geology see Sophie Forgan, "Bricks and Bones: Architecture and Science in Victorian Britain," in Architecture of Science, ed. Galison and Thompson (cit. n. 3), pp. 181-208.
29. For Oxford see Yanni, Nature's Museums (cit. n. 10), Ch. 3.
30. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1994), esp. Ch. 3.
31. See, e.g., Andrew Burnett and John Reeve, Behind the Scenes at the British Museum (London: British Museum Press, 2001).
32. The theatrical metaphor "behind the scenes" is strikingly appropriate for an institution devoted to display and relates to a history in nineteenth-century London where crossovers in genre and techniques between the theater, the lecture hall, and the museum were not infrequent. See Iwan Morus, '"More the Aspect of Magic Than Anything Natural': The Philosophy of Demonstration in Victorian Popular Science," and Bernard Lightman, "Sites of Amusement and Instruction: Popular Lecturing in the Economy of Science": papers presented at the conference "Popular Science: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences," York University, Toronto, 2004. Another variant is the division between "upstairs" and "downstairs," which was used to encode a hierarchy of world cultures into the fabric of the building housing the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; see Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 87-98.
33. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992),
34. remains a classic Foucauldian analysis, which was partially modified but also reinforced, particularly with regard to surveillance and self-policing, by Bennett, Birth of the Museum (cit. n. 2).
35. See also Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building types (London: Routledge, 1993).
36. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place (cit. n. 9).
37. See Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar, Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge (Basingstoke/London: Macmillan, 1998), for an examination of "spaces" as opposed to "sites," which is more often used by historians of science at present and carries perhaps a lesser freight of theorization.
38. Bennett, Birth of the Museum (cit. n. 2), has emphasized both aspects.
39. On the latter see Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1994);
40. and Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds., Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture, and the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998).
41. Exploitation of colonial objects was not entirely one-way, however, as shown by Ruth Barton, "Haast and the Moa: Reversing the Tyranny of Distance," Paciflc Science, 2000, 54(3):251-263.
42. On museums as sites of civic status and reputation see, most recently, Kate Hill, Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
43. On nineteenth-century urban culture more generally see Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City, 1840-1914 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2000).
44. A recent investigation of the work of some small local societies is Diarmid A. Finnegan, "Natural History Societies in Late Victorian Scotland and the Pursuit of Local Civic Science," British Journal for the History of Science, 2005, 58:53-72; he also explores the various ways in which women were allowed to be involved.
45. Not all museums managed to obtain, or retain, central sites in good positions. Some were encouraged to build in marginal areas in the hope that development there would be stimulated - e.g., the Museum of Natural History in Boston (1864) in Back Bay, a fill-in project, or the American Museum of Natural History in New York (1877), on the outskirts of the new Central Park. The timing of urban development in such cases was clearly crucial. For a survey of American natural history museums, which includes this suggestion and much useful material on their architecture and organization, see Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Paul Brinkman, "Framing Nature: The Formative Years of Natural History Museum Development in the United States," Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, 2004, 55(Suppl. 1, no. 2):7-33
46. (this article was part of a special issue, entitled Museums and Other Institutions of Natural History: Past, Present, and Future, edited by Alan E. Leviton and Michele L. Aldrich).
47. This was the view of one Austrian commentator: 'Today, decentralisation no longer means simply the actual regionalisation of arts policy, but is an expression of the equal standing of developed cultural-historical landscapes in a large-scale supra-national European context. The Europe of the future will also be a Europe of regions." Wolfdieter Dreibholtz, Museums-Positionen/ Museum Positions (Salzburg: Residenz, 1992), p. 226.
48. Frankfurt in the 1980s sought to redefine itself through the creation of a number of new museums. However, science and technology were not among the subjects covered, which says much about the place of science in contemporary urban public culture. On Frankfurt see Michaela Giebelhausen, "Symbolic Capital: The Frankfurt Museum Boom of the 1980s," in Architecture of the Museum, ed. Giebelhausen (cit. n. 2), pp. 75-107.
49. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2000).
50. A close focus of the sort I have in mind may be seen in the emphasis on "science in the city as local practice" by the editors and in several of the essays in Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, Science and the City, Osiris, 2003, 78.
51. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: Architectural Press, 1946), p. 31 (first published in France in 1923).
52. Wonder is today recognized as having been an integral part of museum display through to the nineteenth and even the twentieth century. The extensive scholarship on spectacle and the emphasis on showmanship is part of this historiography, from Richard D. Altick's monumental The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1978)
53. to, e.g., Iwan Rhys Morus, When Physics Became King (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2005), esp. Ch. 4: "The Science of Showmanship,"
54. and Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2001), which covers the period from the seventeenth century to the 1820s.
55. Michael Brawne, The New Museum: Architecture and Display (New York: Praeger, 1965), p. 203.
56. More generally, see Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995). There has also been renewed interest in recent years in the work of sociologists such as Norbert Elias on ritual and behavior as a force in the "civilizing process."
57. E.g., Sam Alberti argues that while a sense of wonder might be induced, at the same time the imagination was stimulated by feelings of horrid fear or disgust: Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, "The Museum Affect: Visiting Collections of Anatomy and Natural History in Victorian Britain," paper presented at the conference "Popular Science: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences," York University, Toronto, 2004.
58. Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, eds., Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1998).
59. The introduction provides a survey of the relevant literature on the self, the body, and society and how historians have responded to these philosophical and sociocultural theories. The authors in the recent Isis Focus section on "Scientific Readers" also emphasized the role of the body: Isis, 2004, 95:420-448.
60. A new sensitivity to this sort of approach by historians of urban history is summed up in their current call for papers on "Lived Time in the City" for a conference to be held in 2006. A relevant direction too is the attention paid by some architectural historians to phenomenology, with arguments for a greater openness to the realm of the sensory as revealing a potentially deeper truth; see, e.g., Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).
61. Phenomenology, however, is not so widely studied or regarded in the Anglophone world as in Europe, though see the remarks of Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, "Introduction," in Science Incarnate, ed. Lawrence and Shapin (cit. n. 27), p. 6.
62. [Frederick Knight Hunt], 'The Hunterian Museum," Household Words, 14 Dec. 1850, pp. 277-282, on p. 279.
63. Hunt was a medical journalist; see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), Vol. 28, p. 838.
64. This may not seem so surprising when one remembers that the modern museum designer increasingly employs devices to touch all the senses - canned music, noises, silence, space, touchy-feely exhibits, touch screens, responsive exhibits, talking heads, smells, and so on. Barbara J. Black's study On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottesville: Univ. Virginia Press, 2000) examines links with the inner world of the imagination, looking chiefly at the literary representation of the museum.
65. John Physick, The Victoria and Albert Museum: The History of Its Building (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1980), pp. 30-31,109-110. There were first-class and second-class rooms, with different menus, thus i ensuring that appropriate sensory satisfaction was linked to social norms.
66. Such museums commemorate, e.g., Darwin, Newton, Freud, Jenner, Faraday, the Herschels, and many others. In some cases the location provides intriguing insights - e.g., the museum erected to honor that expatriate Scot, Alexander Graham Bell, near his holiday home at Baddeck, Cape Breton Island, which includes the contents of his workshop.
67. Janet Browne entitled the second volume of her magisterial study Charles Danvin: The Power of Place (London: Cape, 2002). I am indebted to her for allowing me to borrow the phrase as part of the title of this essay.
68. On Down House as a shrine see also Sophie Forgan, "Darwin and the Museum," in Thinking Path, ed. Shirley Chubb (Shrewsbury: Shrewsbury Museums Service, 2004), pp. 37-41.
69. On atomic museums see Arthur "Molella. "Exhibiting Oak Ridge," Hist. Technol. 2003, 79(3):211-226.
70. These rivals include shopping centers, science centers, television, and the Web. The response of museum designers in architectural and display terms is studied in Luca Basso Peressut, Museit per la scienza/Science Museums (Milan: Lybra Immagine, 1998) (text in Italian and English), which includes a worldwide discussion of traditional museums, discovery centers, themed museums, and the "scattered science museum" or large-scale ex-industrial site. With regard to the appropriation of techniques, note the crossover between entertainment and science in the London Science Museum's 2005 exhibition on the film of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which includes a button for the Improbability Drive!
71. The architecture may in some cases overshadow the exhibits, and there has been some criticism of superb buildings that contain collections of only marginal interest. See, e.g., Keith Stewart Thomson, "Museums: Dilemmas and Paradoxes," American Scientist, 1998, 86(6):520.