Activating Space
Just last weekend, I had a “Eureka!” moment. I had spent weeks mulling over my project (and my broader thesis) in an ongoing attempt to understand what exactly I was trying to argue about museum architecture. Sadly, I had stumped myself. Part of the reason is that my argument didn’t really hold strong—while design matters in museums, it only does so in combination with a multitude of factors, like people, material objects, programs, and more. So, what I realized is that this really isn’t just about architecture, and placing as much emphasis as I had on museum architecture defeated the purpose of demonstrating the power of spatial agency.
Similar to what Jane had mentioned the week of our Pecha Kucha presentations, architecture has always been perceived as the top echelon of design, perhaps because building buildings is, in a practical sense, a highly specialized profession that requires a unique set of skills. It’s why we tend to attribute creative genius to a sole architect. However, this also is exactly why we tend to isolate architecture as something that has an autonomous existence. There are multiple factors that go into the design of a building that can sometimes be undermined by placing so much emphasis on the conceptual design itself. What’s important to remember and what’s most relevant to this project is that at the end of the day, a building means nothing if it is void of its social context.
So, with revived inspiration from Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture by Nishat Awan et. al., I have decided to broaden my project beyond just architecture. Using Lefebvre’s three theories of space as my new map layers (i.e., spatial practices, spaces of representation, and representational spaces), I will demonstrate how the museum facilitates community engagement to ultimately project an “esprit de corp” that its architects attempted to capture in the new design. These three variations on space will serve as lenses for thinking about: 1) space in a physical sense, that is, the visible and tangible aspects that we directly interact with; 2) spaces or structures that represent and/or reify power relations; and 3) spaces lived, a more conceptual approach for thinking about our existence within social groups. In terms of what this will look like on a my map, it’ll be a combination of media that relay information about the physical space/structure of the museum, the programs and activities within and around it, and the broader priorities, mission, and goals of the museum that allow it to form a collective Queens identity out of a celebrated diverse community.
I’ve spent the last few weekends at the Queens Museum wandering around the new space, observing movement, and capturing through audio, video, and photographs how the new space is activated. Last weekend, QM Director Tom Finkelpearl was warming up visitors at a ping pong table against the backdrop of a spectacular Peter Schumann mural. In the featured image for this post, I’ve included a sample from a multilingual literary flash mob that took place in the museum’s new atrium. Milena Deleva’s book exchange, a local community group, offered this fantastic performance featuring women of different ethnic backgrounds reading texts in their native languages. This was the perfect symbolic gesture for bringing the community into the museum. All of this not only activates the new space, but offers communal claims to it as well. That was my “Eureka!” moment.
Fabulous, Salem! Lefebvre’s tri-partite model offers a helpful schema for *abstracting* from the physical museum itself, and it allows you to “decenter” the building — to recognize that architecture isn’t an omnipotent, auteurish, deterministic practice. These three new categories — physical space, programs/activities, broader missions/priorities contributing to a collective local identity — open up your project in myriad ways: it expands the types of things you’re looking for and the kinds of documentation you can gather; it enriches how you represent what the Queens Museum *is* (i.e., it’s more than just a building).