Diffused museum & museal networks of Material Culture/Cultural Heritage

Research focus

The Peer review has evaluated this group as Excellent

Theme the research group deals with is material culture of/in the territory. A culture identified as a series of heritages (manufactures, architecture & architecture interiors, natural elements) that are object of planning attention in a dynamic of transformations attentive to the preservation and understanding of memories, and to the awareness of their role in the making of a future. Those structures are at the same time bearer of adequate and renewed ways of life and of use of spaces and places and also they increase the value of memories and knowledge forms and materiality of the past are able to provide in this innovation process. A new and fruitful role of the museum institution is assumed, seen as promoter of a new sensitive and attentive planning in territorial compartments, in places and areas where the values deserve to be experienced as cognitive moments of our way of living and inhabiting (dwelling) the environment that surrounds us. The museum in places, the systems, the museum networks, all belong to one organization strategy for the knowledge diffused on the territory. It is a working hypothesis that focuses on the possibility of designing and creating exhibitions that can be visited either by moving-about nets of physical connections, of materialized places of memory, with “ crossings “ and routes, or by using computer networks or other multimedia with the same free capability to look for and find knowledge and learning. A project (or a system of projects): the diffused museum involves polarities and underlines the threads of physical and material memory of matter that is continuously subject to changes, and is therefore a contemporary condition of doing architecture. The research group aims to the definitions of problems and methods raised by either “diffused museum” either by museal networks, looking at the general theoretic matters and also with projects applied at different territories and contexts. The museum diffused in places is here thought of as a plan that means to permeate the advanced culture of territory. This would be put into act (both) through the definition of physical reality remodelling and re-planning hypothesis towards new meanings and ways of use for the historical landscape. And also through the activation of operations that would (could) involve tourism flows, choices for mass free-time, the desire to return to nature and the research of local identities as instruments of critical attention to the relationship between manenvironment and history. The aim of the research group is to experiment themes, i.e. the relationships between museum, city and territory, regarding acquisition, conservation and exposition of heritages; the capacity of the museum institution to make this knowledge active and part of the transformation dynamics of society, culture and of the physical structure of cities and territories; deepening the concept of “museum outside of the museum”, which means a museum diffused and integrated with community, places, spaces and geographical areas. These topics 172 are used for the study and the planning of places where the relationship between museum culture and territory culture is analysed according to different possible interpretations. A system of ‘museums in places’ (and in this particular research study the museum in ‘areas of (poly)technic culture’) can be put into effect by referring basically to three models: - a museum system defined as “linear”. It works in oro-geographical structures (rivers, canals, infrastructures) where the physical consequentiality of places , goods and exhibitions is defined; - a museum system define as “network” of places, physically coordinated and linked with percourses. - a museum system defined as “park” or area structure. It works with homogeneous and interrelated characteristics. The thematic park represents one of the main subjects of contemporary architectural debate. The heritage museums are the first examples of this kind of museum. They consist of entire villages, valleys and culturally homogeneous areas rather than of artificial places built to house real manufactured articles expressly brought there. Today a thematic museum must be able to make use of the construction of new infrastructures and of the strengthening of the existing ones in order to include in its ‘narration’ all the transformations occurred to the landscape in which it is situated and whose it is part, in order to over come the gap that separates the environment culture from the one of territory and the relative infrastructures: both the already settle down and the forthcoming ones.

Departments

Dipartimento di Progettazione dell’Architettura

Professors

Full Professors
Luca Basso Peressut
Gianni Ottolini
Associate Professors
Gennaro Postiglione
Assistant Professors
Mariella Brenna
Immacolata C. Forino
Sergio Boidi
Beppe Finessi