Books | Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects by András Szántó

Architecture is central to how we define and understand museums – at least that is the argument of my 2021 book, The Museum: From its Origins to the 21st Century.

A museum building and the museum as an institution are not synonymous, but the former is fundamental to how the latter operates and presents itself to the world. Insofar as buildings constitute the reification of ideas, impulses and ideologies at particular moments in time, then they offer a unique record of how museums have evolved.

Architecture’s centrality to museums, and the intertwining of these two endeavours, is the starting point for András Szántó’s book of 21 interviews with architects involved in museum building.

In his introduction, Szántó briefly charts the evolution of museum buildings from the hallowed temples of the 19th century to the minimalist spaces of the 20th – the watershed that was the Pompidou Centre (which “declared that we no longer needed a boundary between museum and street”) to the era of the iconic museum building, inaugurated by the Guggenheim in Bilbao (a “work of art in its own right”).

Having moved on, we are now, Szántó suggests, at a pivot point as a result of shifts in museology, the urgency of decolonisation and climate, the effects of the pandemic and the emergence, as he sees it, of a new generation of architects.

This cohort “want to create structures that insist on the vitality of the museum as a uniquely necessary civic institution in the service of art and society, while at the same time accommodate all segments of the public”.

Despite the broad range of ideas and approaches and the contexts and geographies in which they work, there is a significant degree of commonality in what the architects espouse.

Szántó notes several trends: the idea that museums should be permeable with the world outside, with visitors empowered to control the narrative – flexible is the word that he says he heard most in the interviews.

Yet a few things stand out. For all that interest in permeability, architects – rightly in my view – are not generally rejecting museums’ “exceptionalism”, which is that special feeling of entering a museum, where, to use the words of museum-architect veteran David Chipperfield, “your whole performance in relationship to what is around you is different from how you related to the other spaces of your daily life”.

In addition, with so much focus – again rightly – on how museums must adapt to their audiences and the changing contexts in which they operate, the observation by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo that people are becoming less “fearful” of large institutions – “they just go in”, she says – is an intriguing insight.

One of the most interesting interviews is with Chinese architect, Xu Tiantian, whose rural focus challenges the implicit assumption in much of the rest of the book that museums are urban phenomena. In such contexts, museums, she argues, are vital to preserving identities and ways of living that go back thousands of years.

The most radical agenda is from Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Nairobi-based cave_bureau, who point out how “a museum is almost alien to Africa”.

Their idea is to recast the museum as a roaming, de-centred entity that works to highlight issues, from colonisation to climate, that make conventional museums problematic.

As with Szántó’s book of interviews with museum directors that preceded it, this book offers interesting snapshots of the ideas and influences of one set of protagonists shaping the future of museums.

To make it a trilogy, I wonder if Szántó might consider a book of interviews with curators, visitor assistants, learning officers, fundraisers, shop assistants and so on, because, for all the lofty ambitions contained within these two books, it is the collective actions of these groups who are forging the future of museums.

Owen Hopkins is the director of the Farrell Centre in Newcastle upon Tyne