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Designing for Crowds: Louvre and British Museum

7/29/2014

Venus de Milo, Louvre Museum, Paris

Today's post is inspired by a New York Times article about the booming number of visitors to a few national art museums and the measures the museums are taking in order to accommodate such crowds (and protect the objects). While not specifically discussed in the essay, one of the issues bundled up with this phenomenon relates directly to this blog: How can a museum effectively display its collection for a whopping 9.3 million visitors per year (Louvre), or 6.7 (British Museum), or 5.5 (Vatican)?

One solution is the "Venus de Milo" approach pictured above: a capacious room containing a single blockbuster object, allowing many visitors to stand and circulate throughout the large space. Extra elbow room is especially important when so many visitors are using audio guides that lead them to spend one or more minutes looking at the object.

Another solution is the "Rosetta Stone" setup pictured below. Here the stone is displayed in the center of two intersecting galleries, protected by a glass case. This places the object in relation to the other materials nearby — in this case, other Egyptian works in stone — and therefore nicely contextualizes the piece. A concomitant drawback is the relative lack of space for the many visitors interested in such a famous piece. It's a difficult problem of spatial engineering which, if the predictions in the NYT article can be believed, will only become more pressing.

Rosetta Stone, British Museum, London

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A gem of a display: Carnegie museum of natural history

7/25/2014

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Minerals and gems, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

To balance the last post on diffuse lighting, in this post I want to revel in a gorgeous example of an unusually dark gallery lit with highly precise spotlights. In the Carnegie Museum of Natural History is a spectacular hall of minerals and gems. The shining glass cases, lighting, and black carpeting and walls all help make the objects appear precious, almost hallowed — they have an aura. Encased in glowing octagonal pods, they somehow even seem otherworldly. And while it's true that many of the specimens are themselves sparkly, impossibly pointy, or otherwise eye-catching, it's the display that really contributes to their inexorable pull. Talk about exhibition design amplifying the best qualities of a collection: you can hardly resist approaching the case for a better look at these, well, precious gems! Which leads to the question of keeping this glass free of nose- and fingerprints...

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Diffuse Lighting: Palazzo Massimo

7/22/2014

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Palazzo Massimo, Rome

Inspired by a comment on the last post, I'm devoting today's post to diffuse lighting. Many scholars love the stuff, while many designers these days seem to agree that it is boring. Bring in the spotlights! While very strong, direct, single-source lighting certainly produces a dramatic effect — and can be quite successful (a blog post for another day) — diffuse lighting has its own merits. It allows the viewer to see details that might otherwise be lost in shadow. And in some cases, it better recreates the more even, natural lighting in which an object was likely originally seen.

Palazzo Massimo in Rome, one of my favorite museums of all time, has installed in a few of its galleries a versatile system that produces very diffuse light. It relies on a series of screens mounted to the ceiling, positioned on pivots that allow them to be turned any which way. Bright lights are pointed at the screens rather than the objects. The result is an evenly-lit room ideal for photographing — thanks too to the filtering shades on the windows. Because the photo above hardly does justice to the actual effect, I include another one below of a visitor in this same room admiring the sarcophagi. Aren't those marbles beautiful, bathed in that light. (The potential irony being that if sarcophagi were viewed by candlelight in tombs, the original viewing conditions would be better imitated by spotlights! But to experience that sort of atmosphere, you can just walk down the hall to the room of the Portonaccio Sarcophagus.)

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On the Diagonal: Peabody Museum at Harvard

7/18/2014

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Peabody Museum, Encounters with the Americas

One of my favorite museum galleries on a recent trip to Boston was the atrium-like core of the "Encounters with the Americas" galleries in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. The diagonal arrangement of display cases is a wonderful way to slow down the visitor, to encourage her to pause and look: the lack of a straight axis through the room offering a clear line of sight to the next room hinders the common mode of jetting right through the gallery, hardly glancing to either side along the way. The effect here is of course helped by the quite sizable piece of beautifully carved stone blocking the trajectory. Erecting the smaller stone pillars on the diagonal too adds some movement to these otherwise heavy, static pieces.

Subdivisions in the gallery are achieved in part by large explanatory panels, similarly set on the diagonal, acting like half-walls to guide the visitor into differently-themed spaces. (And hooray for the copious information on those signs!)

A final nice touch is the use of antique wooden display cases outfitted with new blue risers. The risers are almost a sort of minimalist artwork in themselves, and certainly freshen up the older cases without being distracting.

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Designing for Crowds: Louvre and British Museum

A gem of a display: Carnegie museum of natural history

Diffuse Lighting: Palazzo Massimo

On the Diagonal: Peabody Museum at Harvard

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