Museum-Making: Behind and Beyond Architecture

Museum-making: Behind and Beyond Architecture

Jean-Gabriel Leturcq

Museum expert

PhD researcher - CEDEJ (Cairo)

Museum-making and Museology

Exhibition-design

Museum-design

Museology

Exhibition designers

Architects

Museum experts

Curators

Politics,Culture,

Economics

Institutional Management

Scenario and

organization of space

Museum-Making, a reflexive process:

• How do architects and museum curators collaborate in making a museum?

• How to define priorities of an exhibition scenario?

• How can joint expertise contribute to the success of an exhibition?

Museum-making analysis:

• 1. Institutional process

• 2. Making the scenario of a Museum exhibition

The example of Department of Islamic Arts, Musée du Louvre, Paris

1993: Current exhibition 2009: Planned exhibtion

How to make a new museum with an old institution?

Behind the Architecture: Institutional Process

• Is there is a need for a new museum?

• Why to make a new museum ?

A history of the exhibition

1925: An encyclopedic Bazaar, sets of the materials

A history of the exhibition

1993: A Geo-chronological approach

A convincing approach?!?

Institutional process (2)

• Which collection might be exhibited?

• Who is going to fund the new museum?

The Exhibition Design process:

• How can exhibition design serve the objects?

• How to translate concepts in the architectural space?

• How the exhibition design enables the communication between artifacts and visitors?

The new exhibition space1993

exhibition: 1300

artifacts on 1 100 m²

2009: 5000 artifacts on

4 000 m²

More space, more objects: is the exhibition better?

The Louvre Project Rudy Ricciotti (France) + Mario Bellini (Italy)

‘Iridescent Cloud’

…

…

‘luminescent covering’

…

The scenario: design as mediation

Ground floor Underground floor

‘An art of the light’

Ground level exhibition

…

Underground level exhibition

Conclusions

• Architectural design is a mediator between the artefacts and the visitors

• Museum design must respond to artefacts and to an elaborated conceptual program.

• Architecture must serve the visitor.

leturcq@cedej.org.eg

Thanks!

leturcq@cedej.org.eg