Understanding the Holocaust through The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum attracted significant attention in both the popular and the architectural press. This attention and the continuing large numbers of visitors to the Holocaust Museum raise significant questions involving both the paradoxes inherent in the museum as a building type and the particular difficulties in creating a museum specific to the Holocaust. This article addresses a single question: How do visitors come to understand the reality of the Holocaust as they pass through the museum? The focus is primarily on the exhibit sequence, although the building is also discussed. In particular, this article focuses on the question of the “distance” in time and context between the museum's visitors and those who were participants in the Holocaust. I argue that the psychological phenomenon described as “identification” is critical in overcoming this distance in the Holocaust Museum experience.     

The mystery of the “spinning statue” at Manchester Museum

Abstract

This paper discusses the emergence, and impact, of public perceptions of Ancient Egypt and diverse ideas of “magic” at the Manchester Museum, following the huge response to the episode of the “spinning statuette.” In June 2013, a video of an Egyptian statuette spinning of its own accord in its case in the Egypt Gallery of the Manchester Museum went viral. During the media storm that followed the publication of the video, many hinted at a “magic event,” which could be related to popular perceptions of Ancient Egypt: ideas from movies and popular culture were widely used to explain and comment, often ironically, on the episode. At the same time, in the museum galleries people were jostling to see the statuette and questioning the museum staff. Therefore, this paper will observe how media and museum audiences have used the concept of “magic” in relation to the spinning statuette: what beliefs and attitudes towards “magic” emerge from these comments? Why was the museum criticized for suggesting a “magic” connection? And what have been the outcomes of the episode for the museum and for our understanding of public perceptions of Ancient Egypt?     

Relics,liṅgas,and other auspicious material remains in south asian religions

ABSTRACT

This article reconsiders sites, practices, and ideas about the physical remains of the special dead in South Asian religions. Questioning the common notion of “relics” as a point of distinction between “Buddhism” and “Hinduism,” it explores the constellation of ideas and practices surrounding the remains of gods, demons, people, and animals in South Asian religions. Archaeological and literary evidence for li?gas, stūpas, and related sites and structures are used to explore shared discourses and practices among Buddhists and ?aivas in particular. Through such test cases, it shows how bones and other physical remains of the special dead could become areas of engagement, especially when linked to sacred landscape. Attention to these contact zones reveals sharing, borrowing, and competition among ancient and medieval groups that modern scholarship has studied primarily in terms of assumed differences between “Hinduism” and “Buddhism.”     

布罗德当代艺术博物馆(洛杉矶州立艺术博物馆扩建工程一期),洛杉矶,美国

洛杉矶州立艺术博物馆的(LACMA)一期改造工程持续多年,统一并扩展了博物馆园区,改造后便于参观者经由美术馆和广场轻松横穿8hm2(20英亩)的园区,观看博物馆百科全书般的藏品,当然也包括布罗德当代艺术博物馆(BCAM)。布罗德当代艺术博物馆画廊的增建提升了洛杉矶州立艺术博物馆的策略,它将现代艺术融入展览和公共项目之中,并探索我们时代的艺术与过去艺术之间的相互关联。此外,由于布罗德当代艺术博物馆的存在,在划出大规模空间用于当代艺术的展示而非用于其他百科全书式的博览方面,洛杉矶州立艺术博物馆是领先的。     

主题博物馆环境的营造--谈杭州·中国茶叶博物馆环境整合工程

杭州·中国茶叶博物馆环境整合工程在营造适合博物馆主题的环境方面进行了一系列有益的探索与尝试.论述了博物馆环境整合设计是以茶为主题,借景自然,寄情山水,缅怀历史,营造以人为本的博物馆环境.整合后重新定位为:既是以茶为主题的特色博物馆,又是传承茶文化的宣传阵地、国际茶文化交流场所,还是具有自助旅游休闲功能,生态自然、充满独特东方园林风格的博物馆.     

Material religion,education, and museums: introduction

ABSTRACT

Introducing the themes and contexts for this special issue of the journal, this editorial reflects particularly on the experience of museums and museum and heritage educators in the UK and Asia in interpreting religions and religious art. It looks at successful examples of specialist museum programs and exhibits on religions; and distance learning resources that include faiths in suggesting new approaches to citizenship education through cultural learning. It looks more broadly at new approaches to religious education that encompass sacred spaces.     

视觉与展示博物馆光环境设计

博物馆是对光与照明有特殊要求的一类建筑，视看与展示是人与空间的基本关系，文中主要对人的视觉、展示特征与空间光环境的关系作了分析，特别是对展示照明最新的设计方法做了详细介绍。最后对我国博物馆目前的光环境现状做了调研分析并对工程建设提出了一些思路。     

A Tale of Two Façades: Archaeology and the Secularization of an Islamic Past

Abstract

This article examines how certain forms of preservation work to recast the past in rigid terms of secular and religious. Focusing on a series of early Islamic period sites in the Levant, collectively known as the Umayyad qusūr (sometimes referred to as “desert palaces”), this essay traces the ways in which scholars signal the realms of the secular through interpretation of architectonics and iconography. This process of secularization is then further advanced through practices of preservation and display within colonial and nationalist museum contexts on a grand scale. At stake are ethical claims about the value of religion, specifically Islam, in larger discourses of culture and civilization. The paper explores the role played by these approaches to the material past of the early Islamic world for how they perform and police the boundaries of religious and secular materiality.     

Seeing syncretism as visual blasphemy: critical eyes on caodai religious architecture

ABSTRACT

The exuberant, eclectic architecture of the Caodai Holy See in French Indochina was described as a “grotesque combination” of European and Asian elements by several famous writers and this sense of horror served to construct a notion of “visual blasphemy” which merged aesthetic and ethical elements. Architecture is always read and misread though a cultural lens. It has been argued that the colonial “world as staged” (Mitchell 1999) produced its own “reality-effects,” so I argue that an anti-colonial counter project of large public works tied to an innovative Asian synthesis of world religions served not only to bolster the morale of a once downtrodden people but also to convince them of the historical inevitability of their triumph. Caodaism was a new religious movement followed by 3 million people in French Indochina and its daring and “presumptuous” architecture was a visual act of insurrection, an iconographic revolution designed to precede and prepare the way for the political revolution to follow.     

从展示设计的角度分析南通城市博物馆

本文拟从展示设计的视角出发,分析南通城市博物馆在室内展示环境、概念手法与空间基本功能以及各种基本功能所需的空间特性。通过个案了解现今博物馆建筑本身特有的空间形态构成的内在组构逻辑,探讨配合实地参观者参观行为加以验证博物馆建筑空间配置形态的合理性,尝试于展示各项要素的间建立起一个分析的架构,供室内/展示专业者参考。     

The Heromartyrs of Cyprus: National Museums as Greek Orthodox Hagiographical Media

ABSTRACT

In 1961, a “Museum of the Struggle” was created to remember and glorify the heroes of the Greek Cypriot anticolonial war (1955–1959). The museum functions, this article argues, as an apparatus of hagiographical mediation, rendering for local and international publics an aura of sanctification around the war’s fallen fighters. Such an impression is generated by the museum’s spatial mise-en-scène, its progressive orientation of visitors who move through its halls, its ways of curating belongings and images of the dead, its narrative construction of the life and conduct of the fighters, and its subtle evocation of traditional saintly patronage associated with the island’s communities. Drawing on original fieldwork in Cyprus between 2012 and 2018, the article treats the musealization of the Greek-Cypriot national struggle as a tight lens through which to consider the diversity of processes by which modern Orthodox Christians in (post)colonial situations construe, commemorate, and maintain relationships with holiness. In particular, it finds that the celebration of the dead anticolonial fighters as “heromartyrs” (ērōomartyres) serves to constitute a distinctive category of Christian martyrdom that infuses a post-Byzantine martyriological identity with the imagination of ancient Greek heroic virtue and epic violence.     

动静之间——梅赛德斯奔驰博物馆室内设计

展览空间是联系参观者与其行为的媒介,它会对参观者体验展品的感官造成直观影响,为展品的展示营造出最佳的解决方案。梅赛德斯-奔驰博物馆因其独特的室内空间设计,巧妙的配合了“汽车”这一特殊的展陈主题,吸引了无数慕名前来参观的人们,并深受各方参观者们的喜爱。本文将以梅赛德斯-奔驰博物馆为案例对展览空间的室内设计做详细的分析,探讨以展品为主导的室内设计方法。     

传统地域文化的现代演绎——广西崇左壮族博物馆设计

现代博物馆建筑不仅仅是展览场所,还充当文化传播中心为人们提供学习、工作和社会交往的场所。本文结合广西崇左壮族博物馆的创作经验,从创作理念、设计策略等方面,探讨博物馆建筑设计要点及其地域化表达。     

The script of viscosity: the phenomenal experience in Steven Holl's museum architecture

While some architects have adopted complex free-flowing forms as a response to the universalisation of modernism, the American architect Steven Holl has taken a different approach that concentrates on a phenomenology of architecture. His museum designs focus on constructing a phenomenal experience from multiple perspectives for visitors to engage in a body-subject experience. To explore the notion of spatial viscosity in Holl's architecture, the space syntax method of justified graphs (j-graphs) is used to examine three museums: the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and the Knut Hamsun Centre in Hamarøy. The analysis discovers that despite the vast differences in scale and layout among the museums, they exhibit remarkable similarities in terms of spatial configuration and strategy in the formation of the continuously unfolding spatial sequence.     

浅析美秀美术馆建筑的环境-行为模式

美术馆和博物馆一样,是以展陈艺术品为主的博览型公共建筑。由于其自身特有的对艺术方面的要求,使得美术馆建筑本身就与艺术品划上了等号。在设计美术馆的建筑空间以及对场所、环境的营造时,设计者会充分考虑环境与参观者行为之间的相互关系。该文从人与环境的相互作用入手,对美秀美术馆的建筑设计手法进行了环境-行为的分析。     

澳大利亚墨尔本博物馆

当澳洲人还浸渍在2000年奥运会的成功带给他们的喜悦的时候,南半球最大的博物馆-维多利亚州立博物馆,墨尔本博物馆正式对公众开放了,它独特的构思,干净简洁的设计以及高科技的应用,使来自世界各地的游客耳目一新,大家在体验维州众多的收藏与文化的同时,也感受到了一个好的建筑设计带给人们的从未有过的空间感受。     

Religious displays: an observational study with a focus on the horniman museum

ABSTRACT

Religious displays can help foster cross-cultural understanding. However, the extent to which they can achieve this aim is wholly dependent on the museum's displays, community involvement, background fieldwork research, and the educational and public programming provided around the exhibition, among other factors. Well-crafted displays can encourage greater understanding of a community's religious practices, customs, and cultural differences. If crafted badly, however, such displays can have either no effect or, indeed, the reverse, and actually aid in cementing prejudices. The extent to which either of these extremes applies depends on the factors listed above. This article is an observational study of how best to display objects of religious significance in the museum context, based on a detailed analysis of the key factors which contribute to a successful display. It concentrates on the Horniman Museum in south London, critically analyzing its three permanent exhibition galleries: the African Worlds Gallery, the Centenary Gallery, and the Music Gallery. In so doing, it also makes reference to other relevant religious displays. More fundamentally, this study sets out to explore the different forms of displaying religious objects within museums and consider which of these are the most successful in helping visitors understand the significance of those objects, as well as the people and communities from which they originate.     

Habitat Dioramas and the Issue of Nativeness

Habitat dioramas are museum exhibits of stuffed animals set in an imitation of their natural environment. Below the surface of the diorama's illusionistic naturalness, socio-political agendas can be identified. The focus of this article is on the Biological Museum in Stockholm, with its spectacular array of Nordic landscape reconstructions, and I argue that it constituted an archetypal example of the instrumentalization of the diorama exhibit for nationalistic purposes. Exclusively shown were landscapes of territories to which Sweden laid hegemonic claims, and the exhibited animals were turned into Swedish species, making them part of a common cultural and national tradition. Museums in other European countries also constructed dioramas that imparted to the museum visitors the unspoken message that animals are not merely distributed according to zoogeographical provinces, but can be thought of as naturally belonging to national territories. Thus the notion of biological nativeness became invested with political meaning.     

Integrated daylighting simulation into the architectural design process for museums

Museums require a stable lighting environment suitable for exhibits as well as visitors throughout the exhibition areas. This paper suggests a lighting design method for exhibition spaces in museums that modulates the shape of toplights, affecting the balance of natural light within the space. Both scale model tests and simulations using the RADIANCE software were performed and their datasets were compared, in a complementary manner, to confirm the validity of this method. The results were then applied to an existing museum—the Seoul Museum of Art in the Republic of Korea—to confirm the performance of the method in modeling an actual environment. By modulating and controlling the parameters, the appropriate dimensions of the monitor-shaped toplight for the museum were determined. The experimental results of this study suggest that the daylighting simulation method, if properly modulated, can become an integral part of the architectural design that can produce a predictable lighting environment for a museum     

博物馆功能与观众

世界博物馆事业的丰富实践,使得博物馆的方法、价值和观念不断的更新变化。观众和博物馆的关系也在不断演进,越来越多的博物馆已认识到观众既是博物馆的服务对象,又是博物馆赖以生存的社会基础,是博物馆不可缺少的基本因素。观众研究已成为现代博物馆工作的重要课题。着重从博物馆观众的行为心理和认知心理研究了在观众因素的影响下博物馆功能的发展。