PROJECT
Public

REPLICATIONS: A Museum 


Concept



“Sculpture records the first naive, unperplexed recognition of man by himself”.

           - Walter Horatio Pater


Playing on the contested space between the body and architecture, the thesis explored how the relationship between form and figure could be manipulated to create a novel approach to design.

Proposing the ‘Museum for Staging the Figure’ as an extension to the British Museum, the design considered new technologies of replication and serialization to question the existing museum and how architecture can integrate the historic object in the city.




                                                                                                                                                                                                                               




                                                                                               Architecture emerges in the form of the pedestal, the original construct that mediates figure and setting. Just as the pedestal allows for the duplication of the body into architecture, the manipulation of the interaction between the Museum and its inanimate inhabitants blurs the line between the subject and object of the setting. This allows for an architecture to emerge out of a bodily empathy to the material frame, distinctly sensational in its muted narrative.                                                                         





While the plan is instrumental in arranging a seamless order, it is a project designed in section and perspective, focusing on transitions between differences rather than alignment. The ground is formed to serve as the only true ‘boundary’, both vertically and horizontally.

The early concept model began with a conversation about the role of foundations as plinths, where both the visitors and figure-sculptures equally commit a series of stereotomic operations to create a place for themselves, whether it is by the demands of light, circulation or confrontation. The more generic parts of the building are then draped above it.

A key drive of the project was the suggestion that reproduction provides an opportunity to play on the expectation of scale, and that fragmentation created the necessity of the visitor to begin to relate to these mutilated fragments. As much as navigating the building, the visitor would have to orientate themselves among changing perceptions of their own scale and make-up, and the architecture set itself secondary to that relationship.

This was allowed by the fact that  in 2020 the British Museum uploaded a free online library of detailed 3d scans of their collection .

Ultimately, the building reveals itself not to be a museum, but a rather a stage that allows for the production of momentary tensions and confrontations between the spectator and the abstracted body. 

Mirroring the British Museum, it re-maps the existing exhibits with new expectations of the friction between figure and its setting, re-asserting an awareness of the visible plane as the play between expressive, articulated surfaces. Defeating the singularity of any one figure, it never-the-less asserts the autonomy of separate moments where the body demands a setting, accumulating these into a conception of the building as a interactive whole.