Books: Museum Architecture: A New Biography

Future generations will surely regard the turn of the 20th century as a remarkable period for the creation of new museums and art galleries and the modernisation of existing buildings, improving facilities for collections and the public alike.

Around the world we have witnessed a focus on capital projects, some modest, others attracting leading architects. Everyone was in there having a go and the participants began to read like the architects’ cast list during the renaissance of Berlin after the Wall came down.

Global growth

This was not the first museum boom. Between 1800 and 1890 the number of museums in Europe grew from around 12 to 240 but this latest surge in museums has been very much a global phenomenon – and over a far shorter time. Museums seem to have become the must-haves for communities of all sizes, from China to New Zealand, from Brazil to Singapore.

What are these museums going to display? Who are they for? What are they for? Is the single word museum sufficient to describe the vast range of spaces that house an equally large range of collections?

Moreover, despite the dazzling array of stars from the architectural firmament, the results have not always been successful. Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, the Italian architectural theorist, noted that some of these museums were works of art that house other works of art: “Generally the artworks – guests within the walls of the architecture – come off second best.”

It is into this exciting world that Suzanne MacLeod plunges for her Museum Architecture: A New Biography. The potential of MacLeod’s vision, which sweeps from Robert Smirke to Frank Gehry, Pevsner to Soane, cannot be faulted (although is not always delivered) and the detail of her research into the history of Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery is self-evident. Sadly, however, little of the buzz of architectural activity reverberates off the pages.

Museum Architecture began life as a doctoral thesis. As is so often the case of books of this kind, it is not an easy read. The language is dense and sentences can require two or three readings to penetrate their meaning.

I know that Routledge books are not designed as holiday reading but I have to confess I struggled here. Diligently I read the book (much of it twice) and on a hot humid day in July I went back to the Walker where paintings, staff and visitors in the old galleries perspired and those in the “new” basked in cool air.

This is a book of two distinct parts – a detailed analysis of the building and development of the Walker from its foundation in the 1870s to nationalisation in the 1980s and an exploration of the way in which personalities and events can shape the architecture of a museum.

Human agency

It begins with a side-swipe at the new Museum of Liverpool and then moves to a literature review of the existing bibliography. Sprinkled with polemic (there are chapters entitled Museums as an Apparatus of the State: Architecture as Technology), it’s not long before Pierre Bourdieu, that darling of museologists, makes an appearance.

Many of you will have already spotted the homage paid to Bourdieu in the book’s subtitle. From a Bourdieusian perspective, “architecture is rethought as a field of cultural production, a social space within which struggles over various capital and positions take place and through which the field itself is defined”. Perhaps something gets lost in translation.

The book came most alive for me in those moments in the Walker’s history where the gallery was under siege, for example in the clashes surrounding the opening in 1877 or occupation by the Ministry of Food from 1939-1949 with only a symbolic monthly painting placed at the gallery’s entrance as a reminder of the building’s true purpose.

And the little glimpses of society and style – Alderman Weightman’s long filibustering speech in opposition to the proposed new gallery, “completely ignoring lunch”, spluttered the Liverpool Leader. Or the fact that under Hugh Scrutton’s directorship, tea was served every day in his office for the curatorial team.

Maybe it’s these fragments of history that “establish the parameters of social experience” and reach “to our intimate world of self”.

Timothy Mason is a museum consultant