Structure
and Randomness in Museum Architecture
"Snow quickly becomes marble in the predestinate
hands."-Jean Cocteau
"Whenever everything is possible nothing is
possible where men can focus?"-Serge
Chermayeff
"At every stage of the life cycle there are more
alternative possible actions available and better methods for selecting the
appropriate one. In other
words in higher organisms more
information passes through the system ...the greater
complexity...enables their life to be carried on under conditions that would
have been impossible for the simple ancestors." -J.
Z. Young
I will try to
search for the forces that influence the museum architecture, considering it
not as an individual building isolated from its environment but as an
interdepending component of the man-made habitat.
What happens or should
happen
in the museum depends very much on how and what happens outside it.
This
relation of the museum to the man-made environment I am refer- ring to is not
visual or climatic. It is its interdependence as an organism, the way it grows
within it, the way, as a small environment, it handles
information.
The
notion of process of information is basic not only in the definition
of the interdependence of the museum
component to its environment but also in the definition of evolution of
culture.
The
more information the environment offers, the more choices are available,
reducing the undesirable unpredictability and increasing the freedom of the
individual.
Evolution
is the increase of freedom coinciding with desirable unpredictability.
Structure
is the limitation of choice. Form is the relation between the limitation of
choice and desirable unpredictability – randomness.
The
process of growth of form is a complex interaction between structure and randomness.
As our
culture grows it assimilates and 'shuffles' pieces of simpler organization of
information into organizations of higher order.
Growth can be
observed over the destruction of pieces of information of the present, but this
destruction is a waste only when, within this pro- cess, pieces still alive are
carried away with the pieces that are obsolescing.
The work of
art has this great value that as an organization of information it offers
innumerable ways it can be 'reshuffled' and combined into complex ones. The
'built in' desirable unpredictability, its randomness, is its basic
characteristic. For that reason it possesses this long range function through
time.
As
this nature of the work of art became comprehensible museums started evolving
as public institutions out of the private realm of the palace or the house.
Obviously the
museum is not similar to a monument-a place or an object where it is honored,
an image of gratitude to cultural heroes.
It
is a container of information resources still not exhausted which cannot be
duplicated as in the case of a book. It is the field where the continuity of a
certain kind of cultural genes is preserved for the new coming breeding, the
unexpected unpredictable mutations.
Monuments
for heroes are necessary to generate the collective con- science of humanity.
In a non-heroic pluralistic society the mass media strive to fill in this gap.
It
is a little out of the context of this article to describe how the fallacy was
developed that art was a panacea to get 'the great number' of our time out of
its new disease of alienation.
The
fact is that the museum had to reach 'the great number' through this.
As the
pressure was applied its form started answering this quantitative need through
a number of un- related pseudochoices.
The
development of the 'multiuse' museum filled with parasitic activities
'over-randomized' it as an integrated whole. Through this openness, an
overpowering amount of un- desirable unpredictability made it a quantitative
success, but in terms of quality it is facing a dilemma.
There
is no study yet applied, to my knowledge, on the relation between the number of
visitors in the museum and the environmental side effects. I am afraid there is
a definite point of congestion above which the uninvited interference is so
strong that the communication between the works of art, even for the
specialist, ceases, and the museum becomes a cultural slum.
I
am aware of the fact that Manet and Morissot met in the Louvre. Out of that a
major part of Impressionism – ‘Art-Mutation’ – came.
But
I think that the fact that our man-made environment is lacking places where
people will get together as humans again – which mayor may not have artistic
context, although by principle I think that art is one of the ways humanity is
tied together – should not lead to museums playing the role of something they
are not and will never by nature be equipped to be. What we lack is a problem.
The preservation of the basic environ- mental definitions in terms of structure
that works of art need in order to play their most important role is a very
serious problem, too.
I do not
think that 'the great number' should be kept out of museums. I do not think
either that we should keep 'opening' the museum as an organism, randomizing its
form to accommodate every day a greater quantity.
This
'over-randomness' coincided paradoxically with an increase in the directiveness
and 'over-structuring' of the museum in another way.
Its
form both as an architectural envelope and as a way of exhibiting the works of
art became aggressive. Popularization pressed it to become more easily grasped
and unambiguous as an environment.
It does not
contain aggregations of pieces waiting to be formed by the intellectual
participation of the visitor. Instead it is made up of sequences of patterns,
parts that are asking questions that will be answered by other parts
prestructured.
The
possibilities of choice into organizations of information of higher order are
reduced.
Spacial
highlights, lighting climaxes, juxtapositions and rhythmical repetitions reduce
its very essence from a garden for cultural breeding into a garden of
spectacles for consumption in leisure time.
It
is very interesting to note that when the architectural envelope creates the
illusions of pseudo 'freedom' form, in a fallacious way, which is the universal
space, the way of exhibiting the works of art becomes even more
'overstructured' and aggressive.
As
a result I am afraid the information which can be derived from the museum is
low. The certainty which arises is not a desirable one because it constricts
the freedom through which our cultural organization can increase.
The notion of
desired uncertainty of choice, openness of structure, is neither a sign of
human inability nor of necessary mystic, but a dynamic stage into the process
of human cultural evolution. It is a fact which has to be accepted rationally
and included constructively in our theory of design as an element of certainty
of design. It is the essence of growth.
What should be ordered should be constructed; what cannot be ordered should stay random. But the quantitative translation of it is beyond the limits of this article.