Scelsa, J.A.
The museum: An urban threshold (2024) In Gregory Marinic (ed), The Interior Urbanism Theory Reader, Routledge, pp. 108-115.
Abstract
The evolution of the museum is a story of the functional problems of designing spaces for display within a larger framework. The museum has been identified by Michel Foucault as an ‘otherspace,’ a world outside of our own. Foucalt described this condition in ‘the collection museum,’ as an example of heterotopia, a place of reflection on our own society’s preferences and ideals in the arrangement of objects in our own world. The agency of the architect in this sense is to create an identity and outer shell that links these worlds, while simultaneously allowing for their autonomy as rooms nested within a larger whole. This nested reality, coupled with the continuing growth of the museum within the modern city so that it occupies massive territory, encourages us to reconsider the interior of the museum as a city within the city.
Foucault News 