“museums and airports, airports and museums – is already happening.
The SFO Museum, owned and operated by the city of San Francisco, has an enormous permanent collection and upwards of two dozen gallery spaces spanning three separate terminals. The Rijksmuseum has long had a presence, albeit small and threatening in a high-design kind of way, at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. The recently opened T2 terminal at the airport in Mumbai has a chief curator who has pledged to cover the place in Indian cultural artifacts. The airport in Taipei has a series of exhibition spaces curated by the city's various museums throughout its facilities...
The point I am trying to make is that the buildings museums have and the buildings museums are designing don't work.
Current museum architectural practice is basically glorified window dressing and spectacle as a status symbol. There is an entirely other talk discussing the role and the function of trophy buildings as a proxy experience for the people who feel they're supposed come to museum but don't actually understand anything about the work on display, but this is not that talk...
The opportunity of treating the airport as a museum is in the scores of people who travel for work and find themselves in the same airport, in the same terminal, week after week... The Smithsonian has a 137 million objects in its collection. It could fill every large and mid-sized airport in the country without breaking a sweat or even taking anything off the walls in Washington. Rotating those objects between airports would be trivial, or at least imaginable.”
It’s weirdly nice to read about something that kind of doesn’t matter but might get better because someone cares.
Or, like, it matters but it isn’t the end of the world if it does or doesn’t happen, unlike everything in politics right now...
FB: palate cleanser - what if airports became museums
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