The Arhcitectural Production Of Nature, Dendurew York

摘要

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s numerous New York City museums engaged in technically sophisticated expansions and renovations of their interiors. The upgrades of interior space combined new architectural strategies for display with advanced atmospheric systems for the preservation of objects. Such spaces provided more exhibition area and enhanced museum real estate for capital leverage, but they also advanced the museum as a locus of cultural maintenance. Among museum rebuilding projects-which included the Museum of Modern Art's expansion and residential tower and the Guggenheim Museum's North Annex-the expansion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1974-1988) most vividly illustrates the power relations embedded within these new spaces where museums produce a specific form of "nature" devoted to display and conservation. When completed, the Museum's Sackler, Rockefeller, Lehman, and American wings housed spectacular, historically significant artifacts protected from urban air pollution and the exterior climate in performatively engineered spaces.