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Museum Windows

Art and context: Framing the experience

 

 

What is a window? Windows can be plainly utilitarian; they are also powerful symbols. They admit light into interior space and enable views of exterior space. As metaphor, the window—and glass, more expansively—is endlessly alluring, suggesting opening or closing, a point of transition, secrecy, voyeurism, transparency, reflectivity and so on.

 

Windows also can represent the relationship of a structure to its environment. This photographic study explores those relationships as they are revealed in the windows of museums. In a museum the dual functions of admitting light and providing views are fraught and often contrary to the institution’s primary functions of safeguarding its holdings and presenting them to the public.

 

A museum provides an aesthetic experience. My observations examine the aesthetics of the sometimes peripheral, occasionally integral experiences of the natural and cultural contexts inherent in a museum’s setting. Historically, museums generally have opted to minimize disturbances in the gallery experience by eliminating windows altogether.

 

Today, the role of the museum is changing. Programmatically, emphasis has shifted towards greater engagement with the community. This change has been expressed architecturally by more open and expansive spaces and also, occasionally, by deliberate attempts to harmonize the forms of the structure with natural or contextual surroundings.

 

In this book I present a selection of museum windows. Some of them frame splendid views of nature and/or their urban setting. Some are effectively opaque. Many are frankly utilitarian openings in the architecture that, possibly inadvertently, framed a scene that caught my attention. They are unified by the notion that art and nature remain intimately (even when unintentionally) connected and that museums are never entirely divorced from their surroundings. The intersection of art and nature is of great interest to me. I often find in museum windows surprising opportunities to examine that intersection.

 

Book may be previewed and purchased on MagCloud.com. Click here.

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