Roberta
a fantastic discourse on Rogers who I knew very little about - only from the odd grainy photo as a side bar in a bigger Italian story, Piano, Scarpa, Magistretti, Aulenti in the UK.
All the obsession with Scarpa as museum designer amongst UK architects, and yet your slides show Roger’s incredible facility at exhibition making - compare these slides with similar content in the Med and Renn gallery at the V&A - stiff by comparison , and perhaps because the display here is ‘like walking through a city in micro’, flanneures, promenaders rather than a curatorial sequential or clustered approach. Rogers was an urbanist, Scarpa was not. It makes a difference. ( My own masterplan ‘FuturePlan’ for the V&A, in 1998 described ‘the V&A is like a city with with quarters, a British quarter, fashion quarter, a European quarter (LoL) etc). This mantra was recited by the chairwoman at countless openings - I cant say that this urban vision went beyond the intellectual organising structure in the exciting way you describe. I think that in the end UK museums are more like Selfridges, galleries are like stores within a ‘temple’ store, invested by each designer as their own rather than part of a continuum like the Milanese interior designers perhaps. So the large scale objects across the V&A don’t work in the same way as the equestrian figure in the Rogers’ photo because that big picture thinking has to straddle several projects over many years, directors, heads of design and funded out of different pockets.
Eva Jiricna’s V&A sequence from front door to garden, now largely removed, wove a high-end and stylish thread through the non-display spaces. ( A view of the new garden from the entrance was essential to the FuturePlan, like an English country house, she emphasised it. A new generation ripped out her stylish shop and blocked the view- having lost/forgotten/ignored the principles of the masterplan.
You are describing such an exciting way of making larger scale interior museum landscapes. Everyone bangs on about Castelvecchio but the lessons here are astounding, I can't think of an example that adopted this approach in the way you describe.
Thank you
Stephen
Roberta
I realise why I was so struck with your paper. In my masterplan for the vast Grand Egyptian Museum (2008-12), the galleries were conceived as an ‘archeological field’. It was all laid out like a visit to an ancient site but under cover. This meant that temple fragments, statues were all placed as if they were at Luxor or Leptis Magna. This gave a visual and narrative frame to how visitors would move through the story and across time through four dynastic periods. It was also framed against the view in the distance of rage Giza plateau and the pyramids themselves which are then at the same ‘scale’ as the artefacts within the galleries. In essence the Same concept as Rogers ....
Stephen
@stephen thank you so much for your insightful observations. I had never thought of a comparing the Castello Sforzesco and the V&A galleries, but I will definitely look at the latter under the lens you have suggested ... as soon as going for a stroll at the museum becomes a viable option again.
I think what you say about Rogers being an urbanist, or at least someone who is interested in anything from the scale of "the spoon to the city" – as he used to say – is very true and certainly a substantial difference with Scarpa, who is much more focused on the detail. Take Scarpa's drawings, he starts from the centre of the page with the plan/elevation and, a bit obsessively, keeps drawing around it, until he gets to the margins, where he defines the smallest details at a progressively bigger scale. Rogers wasn't particularly good at technical drawing and didn't really engage with it, but perhaps, had he been forced to adopt a similar technique, his point of arrival would have been the city rather than the detail. And indeed the details of the props at the Sforza Castle are not nearly as exquisite as those designed by Scarpa.
I'd very much like to see your Masterplan for the Grand Egyptian Museum, would you be able to point me towards some material about it?
Thanks,
Roberta
Roberta
I can send you a Report FYI on GEM if you give me an email address??
Thanks
Stephen
please do: roberta.marcaccio@musex-design.org
