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Lighting design in museums: exhibition vs. preservation
Raul Fernando Ajmat
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On how lighting shaped museums
Viviana Gobbato
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2021
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Architecture vs. Art: The Aesthetics of Art Museum Design
Larry Shiner
Contemporary Aesthetics, 2007
Many art critics have complained that the most dramatic art museum designs of the last decade have upstaged or interfered with the art within. This essay examines eight contemporary cases before drawing some lessons for art museum design, and ends by setting the architecture vs. art problem in the context of the philosophy of architecture, focusing on the issues of function and symbolism.
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Design Factors in the Museum Visitor Experience
Regan Forrest
Over the past half-century, museums have evolved from being predominantly cultural repositories to playing an important social role as venues for educational leisure experiences. Accompanying this development has been an increased emphasis on optimising the visitor experience. The physical context of the museum has long been recognised as an important facet of the visitor experience (Falk & Dierking, 2000). However, the way that visitors perceive and respond to different types of exhibition environments on a holistic level has received relatively little research attention until recently. A key limitation in advancing research in this area has been a paucity of methods for quantifying and analysing visitor perceptions of the exhibition environment beyond simple measures of satisfaction. In order to address this gap, this thesis describes the development of a model for characterising how visitors perceive different exhibition environments – Perceived Atmosphere – and relates it to different facets of the visitor experience. As part of this study, a quantitative instrument known as the Perceived Atmosphere Instrument was piloted and refined. This allows the relationship between exhibition environment and visitor experience to be explored in greater depth. Development of Perceived Atmosphere was informed by environmental psychology, in particular environmental cognition, theories of spatial perception and the research field known as atmospherics (Kotler, 1974). Atmospherics is the study of the influence of retail environments and other service settings on customer attitudes and behaviour, and this study applied similar methods to a museum context. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected to explore and compare visitors’ perceptions of different exhibition environments at the South Australian Museum, a large natural and cultural history museum located in Adelaide, Australia. Qualitative data were collected through 12 pre-arranged accompanied visits to the museum, while quantitative data were collected from 602 visitors to the museum who agreed to participate in the study by completing a questionnaire that incorporated the Perceived Atmosphere Instrument. In addition, a small number of participants (n = 60) were unobtrusively tracked prior to completing the survey, allowing some preliminary analysis of the relationship between Perceived Atmosphere and visitor behaviour. Factor analysis of the 30 semantic differentials that comprise the Perceived Atmosphere Instrument produced a four factor solution interpreted as Vibrancy, Spatiality, Order and Theatricality. There were statistically significant differences between galleries on three of these four dimensions. These differences were interpretable in light of each gallery’s physical characteristics, but also indicate that a space’s perceived affordances are as important as its measurable physical properties. Of the Perceived Atmosphere dimensions, Vibrancy is the strongest predictor of affective, cognitive and behavioural engagement. Spatiality is a predictor of a sense of relaxation in the exhibition environment. There is a negative correlation between Order and a sense of cognitive overload. These results show that quantifying Perceived Atmosphere in an exhibition setting is technically feasible, theoretically coherent and capable of providing novel and useful insights into the environment-experience relationship. As well as advancing our theoretical understanding of the environment-experience relationship in the museum context, these findings make practical and methodological contributions to the field. The Perceived Atmosphere Instrument is a novel, easy-to-administer research tool that can be applied to a wide range of museum settings. The ability to characterise exhibition environments by their Perceived Atmosphere properties, in particular Vibrancy, Spatiality and Order, will be useful for exhibition planners, designers and evaluators.
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Museum Lighting - an holistic approach
Dionysia Drakou
2019
Among the environmental parameters that effect exhibited artifacts, light is the most complex and the only essential for the observer as to appreciate the artifacts, thus being one of the most critical variables of art exposure. Research on strategies for energy saving and the renovation of light destined to Heritage is examined by daylight admission and Light-Emitting Diode (LED) technology. The extended review of the literature presented below, over museum lighting, evidenced the parallel advance of lighting principles with lighting design, concerning what determines visual quality and perception. Lighting quality is an interdisciplinaryfield of research affecting human activity and under a requested task, visual performance, while at the same time improving well-being. In this sense, the role of the lighting designer is to match and rank human needs with economic and environmental aspects as to architectural principles and to translate the results into a feasible design and an ef...
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Reshaping Museum Spaces - Architecture, Design, Exhibitions
Delphine Aboohi
Reshaping Museum Spaces: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions is a book edited by Suzanne MacLeod, emerged out of a conference held at the University of Leicester in April 2004. The book is composed of seventeen chapters, written by different authors, which are divided in four sections that would like to lead to one idea: how come museums had such a radical reshaping in the recent years. Each author explains, with some examples, his own opinion about what are the most evident reasons of these changes, both on the architectural (inside and outside), social and cultural aspects. The authors keep questioning what kind of types the new museum spaces are required, and highlighting a range of possibilities for creative museum design. The authors reflect about the complexity, significance and malleability of museum space, which is always open to change. In the recent years, while museums became consciously «recognized as drivers for social and economic regeneration, the architecture of the museum has developed from its traditional forms into often-spectacular one-off statements and architectural visions». Unfortunately, the most highlighted example of this phenomenon, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao designed by Frank O. Gehry, that succeededto transform a provincial city in Spain into a touristic destination, isn’t explained enough but only mentioned as the «Bilbao Effect» (known as the power of iconic architecture to place a city on the cultural map). Also other iconic museum architectures such as Berlin’s Jewish Museum or Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati are absent. In parallel, Suzanne MacLeod and the other authors try to analyze the reciprocal relationship between construed and curated space, or in other words, between museum building, exhibition and exposed objects. The difference of approaches about the book’s topics result as a mix of descriptions; in certain cases the description is structured by the author’s opinion on a specific topic (architecture or exhibition) lead by some examples. In other cases the authors choose to give only a detailed description of one/two museums and their exhibition, in order to touch both arguments (architecture and exhibition) which results more complicated to understand. I think that an interesting result of this book stays on the comparison between the different opinions on the same topics, and in this way I try to compose this summary. I followed the book four sections, trying, from one hand, to bring all author’s viewpoints, and from the other hand to have a logical connection between the different parts, considering also my own position and adding some comments from other books.
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STUDY OF MUSEUM LIGHTING AND DESIGN Approved
ameera nabeela
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Investigation of the Luminous Environment in Louis I. Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum A qualitative and quantitative study
POOJA HORA
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Museum architecture and its ambiguous meanings
Carmen Popescu
visuality/ Iconicity/ instrumentalising space
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Lighting in museums, visitors’ experience and satisfaction in a heritage context. Study cases in Northwest Argentina
Natalia Bazan, Raul Ajmat
Lighting design in Museums in Argentina is not particularly oriented to meet visitors' satisfaction. Lighting is aimed at meeting quantitative requirements for objects’ conservation and preservation. Visitors' visual comfort and quality of exhibitions are not properly considered to meet their satisfaction with the visit. This study aims to analyze the relationship between measured illuminance levels in exhibitions, the subjective evaluation of lighting and overall satisfaction of visitors. Visitors' subjective assessments of lighting, and oveall satisfaction were carried out in two museums in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina: • Museo Casa Histórica de la Independencia (1st museum – high symbolic connotation; natural and artificial light) • Museo de Arte Sacro de Tucumán (2nd museum – unfrequented; mostly artificial light) Data collection was done through a survey (questionnaire), based on findings of relevant literature on museums, with four sections of information considered relevant for visitors' satisfaction and divided into two parts
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