In the last exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Bernard Tschumi, reflecting on the relationship between Concept, Context and Content, writes: As Marcel Duchamp demonstrated a century ago, in 1914, a bottle rack placed in a museum immediately modifies the status of the object, transforming it into art. Hance in architecture, a concept can be “contextualized” or, inversely, a context can be “conteptualized”.

Starting from this issue the most important question to ask ourselves is: what can a space for a museum look like in the 21st century? For an exemplary museum of the 21st century?

We answered the question by imagining a “space in motion”.

Traditionally, the space of a museum is a constant and the artwork is a variable. Both the artist and curator interpret the space in order to give the viewer the resulting combination of both elements.
What new areas of research can be opened to art through architecture? What if artists, curators and viewers could experience a non-static, changeable space in a simple and functional way?
Could this idea of non-static nature affects the external look of the building so that the whole city would benefit from it?

A museum as a plastic ‘entity’, a museum that can be transformed, according to the different demands and needs of artists, curators and public.

A suspended exhibition area consisting of 2000 s.m. of permanent surface and 2000 more of variable surface. Easily divisible, freely positionable in space, consisting of bridges that can be moved around.

In the design the hypothesis is rationalized by considering a system of movable bridges which slide vertically and horizontally along a 4,80mt x 4.80mt grid-guided rail.
The ground support of the building is minimal, to leave the public area by the sea as free and accessible as possible, in order not to hinder, rather to strengthen the dynamics that hold the areas of this neighbourhood together.

A museum, as in the design of interior space as in the external image one, does not require a default image but so many different images that change over time. Images and spaces are the result of actions who lives the space and experiences it: the artwork, visitors, city and its climate.

A museum that becomes an artwork itself, but not through it’s form, but by losing -because is a space in motion- all distinctions between artwork, artist and public; Through the transformation process of the space, production site, observation site, comparison and exchange site are increasingly different over the time.

The museum is a canvas on which everybody can tell a different story every time.

A tribute to the Finnish architectural, physical thought and cultural context, as Bruno Zevi explains it in the History of modern architecture when he writes, about Aalto, … nothing is free than itself: structure, facades, plant, windows are closely linked in the name of a single issue, in the name of freedom that whole restores and determines: human freedom and space freedom within which the first is realized.

This is our vision.

ALFONSO GIANCOTTI, TA.R.I Architects e TREPUNTI ARCHITETTURA

with: Pietro Fantozzi, Claudia Sgandurra,  Luca Gaetano Malvasi, Marco Tarquini, Luna Vetrani.