• 10 years ago
• Posted in:Process Blogs, Project Proposals
• 1
• Author: Salem Tsegaye

Description
This project will serve as an extension of and guiding research tool for a working thesis in the field of Design Studies. Tentatively titled “Temple to Forum, by Design: The Evolution of the Queens Museum’s Social and Spatial Dimensions,” the thesis will explore the notion of community engagement as it is implemented in and projected by museums, with a particular focus on the Queens Museum of Art in New York City.
Typically, we place community engagement within the realm of museum education, which often extends from, supplements, and supports the content within museum exhibitions. Museums facilitate public programs and a wide variety of outreach activities to break down the idea that the museum, as rooted in its Western tradition, remains an elitist institution, not always accessible to the community within which it is situated or the community it is intended to serve or represent. This theoretical porousness of the museum has become a growing trend, deemed by scholars and practitioners as the transition of the museum from temple to forum. The temple serves as a metaphor for the traditional museum’s priority to present and monumentalize temporally fixed narratives often established by dominant social groups. On the other hand, the museum as forum, or civic space, is intended to facilitate dialogue, where narratives are fluid and established in collaboration with individuals that no longer represent passive patrons but active co-creators.
As an academic ode to design, the thesis will attempt to further the temple-to-forum debate by placing emphasis not only on the social dimensions of community engagement (e.g., museum education, public programs, and outreach) but the spatial dimensions as well (e.g., exhibitions, interiors, architecture, and geography). Focusing on the spatial configuration of museums redirects our attention away from content and towards context, that is, from the what to the how. It allows us to zoom out from our traditional focus on artifacts as cultural media to the museum itself as cultural medium.^[1]
Discussion
This topic is fairly timely in that it coincides with a major architectural renovation project at the Queens Museum that will be completed by Grimshaw Architects this fall. To offer brief historical context, the Museum was established in 1972 as a result of local groups advocating for the preservation of the Panorama of the City of New York, a three-dimensional architectural model of the City that is over 9,000 square feet in size. This model was built to be displayed in the New York City Pavilion during the 1964 World’s Fair, the very same pavilion that was originally built for the 1939 World’s Fair. In the late forties, following World War II, the building (now called the New York City Building) housed the United Nations General Assembly as a temporary site for UN headquarters.
Up until now, the New York City Building has housed the Queens Museum in 50 percent of its space, with the remaining 50 percent being allocated for a City skating rink (interestingly enough, unlike other pavilions at the World’s Fairs, this building was constructed with the intent of having permanent recreational use). Much of this development can be attributed to the (in)famous Robert Moses, who was known for the many transformational parks and highway infrastructures he built in New York in the 20th century. In fact, this is how Flushing Meadows-Corona Park was born. The New York City Building is located in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, and the park itself is incredibly fragmented by a parkway and two expressways running through and around it. With the exception of a major renovation completed in 1994, much of the building has remained the same, and so have the accessibility issues that come with an expansive park that was never designed to accommodate users of public transportation. This is something that has always been a challenge for the Museum.
Despite these spatial barriers, the Museum has facilitated off-site programming for several years to accommodate the community it serves, also being the community within which it is situated. After all, its mission is to present “programs and exhibitions that directly relate to the contemporary urban life of its constituents,”^[2] which makes for a unique case considering the borough’s 48 percent foreign-born population. Going back to what makes this topic particularly timely is that the Museum’s renovation will transform the building from one that is closed and uninviting to one that is porous and welcoming. Having cultivated relationships through its off-site programming, and now doubling in size by eliminating the skating rink to accommodate a larger permanent collection, classrooms, and performance spaces, the Museum anticipates it will double its annual attendance. Most important to this case is its plan to further activate itself as a civic space—the Museum intends to build on its existing partnership with the Queens Public Library by potentially housing a branch in the near future, which would make it the first fine arts institution to do so. It is possible what the Queens Museum is doing out of necessity, many others will replicate as the model for the 21st-century museum.
Spatial Argumentation
The central argument is that in order for a museum to truly transform from temple to forum, its philosophy of community engagement must manifest not only in its social programming but in its spatial design, and I plan to use the Queens Museum as an exemplary model. I have decided to forego comparative spatial analyses in order to devote my full attention to conducting a thorough, in-depth analysis of the Queens Museum’s spatial evolution, placing the most emphasis on its newly completed renovations and exploring how the Museum’s architecture responds to and reflects its social context. My hope is that I can use this mapping project as a generative research tool, allowing me to explore dimensions of my thesis that I may not have previously considered.
While I plan to conduct interviews with representatives from the Queens Museum and Grimshaw Architects, I also plan to work with the Museum’s Registrar/Archives Manager, Louise Weinberg, to recover materials from the 2002 exhibition “Designing the Future: The Queens Museum and the New York City Building,” which documented the transformation of the New York City Building, through architectural models and plans, from its initial 1939 design up until the design competition that was held for the most recent City-managed capital project (note: does not include final design due to change in hired firm, will request access to final design materials from current architect). The general idea is to draw correlations between designs that were successful and those that were not to understand what kinds of features the Museum sought for transforming itself into a new civic space. Materials from the exhibition include:

• Design documents, renderings, photographs, artifacts, and memorabilia from period between 1939 World’s Fair to early seventies opening of QM (includes material from use as NYC Pavilion during 1964 World’s Fair, as temporary site for UN General Assembly, and as recreational facility in between these three major periods
• Works of art and archival documents offering overview of Museum’s growth related to its permanent collection, special exhibitions, and educational programs
• Documents related to the 1990-94 renovation of the Museum by Rafael Vinoly
• Images of architectural models and/or other visual materials from 2001 design competition held by QM in partnership with the New York City Department of Design and Construction and the Department of Cultural Affairs; including materials submitted by competition winner Eric Owen Moss Architects and competition finalists Evidence Design, Fox and Fowle Architects PC, Hanrahan + Meyers Architects, and Salazar Davis Architects; also includes 198 concept design entries received in the first stage of the competition

Tentative Bibliography
Awan, Nishat, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till. 2011. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. New York: Routledge.
De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Doucet, Isabelle and Kenny Cupers. 2009. “Agency in Architecture: Rethinking Criticality in Theory and Practice.” Footprint 4: 1-6.
Jacobs, Jane. 1992 (copyright 1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books.
Karp, Ivan and Steven D. Lavine. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Lash, Scott and Antoine Picon, in conversation with Kenny Cupers and Isabelle Doucet. “Agency and Architecture: How to Be Critical? Footprint 4: 7-19.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mattern, Shannon. 2007. The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sassen, Saskia. 2002. “The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 46: 4-25.
Schultz, Lainie. 2011. “Collaborative Museology and the Visitor.” Museum Anthropology 34: 1-12.
Traganou, Jilly. 2009. “Architectural and Spatial Design Studies: Inscribing Architecture in Design Studies.” Journal of Design History 22: 173-181.
Yaneva, Albena. 2012. Mapping Controversies in Architecture. Surrey: Ashgate.
Media Types
For this project, I will conduct interviews with key staff at the Queens Museum and representatives from Grimshaw Architects. I hope to record the interviews and possibly transform them into edited audio files that will integrate anecdotes with ambient sounds (pending consent). I also hope to transcribe some of the interviews and incorporate some of the written text into visual representations of each museum. I will conduct archival research to retrieve photographs and/or orthographic projections documenting the architectural history of the New York City Building. I hope to access the Queens Museum’s archives and possibly parts of the Queens Historical Society’s collection.  In terms of geography, since my focus is on one building, I hope to create drop points on the URT that will mark key design interventions that physically manifest the Museum’s philosophy of community engagement.