Professor Jack Lohman was appointed Director of Museum of London in August 2002. Prior to this he was CEO of Iziko Museums of Cape Town, an organization consisting of fifteen national museums. He worked for English Heritage between 1985-1994 developing exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Jack is Professor of Museum Design at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts in Norway and Chairman of the International Council of Museums UK. Jack was educated at the University of East Anglia where he studied History of Art. He read architecture at the Freien Univeristat in Berlin and obtained an MA at the University of Manchester. He went on to study Architecture and Conservation in Warsaw
Anyone who has worked on a major project that requires accommodating the pressure of crowds in public spaces knows that there are definite mechanisms for hurrying people along, or slowing them down. Colin St John Wilson’s sunken piazza in front of the new British Library takes its visitors from the roaring traffic of London’s busy Euston Road and deliberately delays them with its wide steps and irregular plateaux. The architecture makes you pause. It makes you reduce your speed even before you enter the building proper. What the piazza does is prepare you for the sensibility of the library space. It is architecture that slows you down.
It is these ways in which buildings permit the experience of time that I want to examine, both actual and, more suggestively, metaphorical time. And I want to begin to ask: if buildings do permit an experience of time, to what purposes might such an experience be put? How can we harness the power of what we might term ‘architectural narrative’?
Let’s begin in Osnabrück in Lower Saxony. The Felix Nussbaum Haus was the first of Daniel Libeskind’s buildings to be fully constructed, designed in 1991 to house the collection of the 20th-century German painter, Felix Nussbaum. It is a compelling building, and its three intersecting volumes carry a variety of narrative determinations, from its larger symbolic triptych of house, path and bridge to its deliberately metaphorical interiors of blind corridors, slashed windows and fragmented space.
As in many of Libeskind’s buildings, the architecture represents a kind of journey. But what first strikes one, even before one has begun to engage with the intricacies of the building proper, is the bold delineation of materials. For the three parts of the Felix Nussbaum Haus are made of strikingly different materials: the first part panelled in long strips of oak, the second a path of concrete, and the third a bridge covered in sheets of zinc. The best laid plans of architects can, experientially, be lost on visitors, who may be distracted by the myriad competing elements of function and form. But Libeskind uses a straightforward – and unmissable – inaugural gesture to dramatise the three parts of his building’s story. To move through his museum is to remember one’s initial sighting of it, and as such, the materials constitute a kind of narrative.
Frank Gehry once said, in a characteristically unfussed manner: ‘It seems to me that when you’re doing architecture, you’re building something out of something.’ He went on to explain that what exists prior to the building – whether it’s materials or the city itself ¬– is already rich with meaning: ‘There are social issues, there’s context’.
Describing the plethora of new buildings near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in the 1990s, he was critical of an overly conservative approach. ‘The other new projects on the square, which are trying to be copies of the 19th-century buildings that used to be there, look pastichey and miss the point. They didn’t learn.’
Gehry’s language to describe the bank he’d been asked to design (and describing what any of us can learn from other buildings) is exciting. He talks about how ‘the scale of the moves I made on the façade of this building relates to Pariser Platz’. He also focuses on material. ‘The stone is four inches thick because the [Brandenburg] Gate’s stone is also very gutsy.’ For his building to make sense, he needed to understand the way it would be shaped by the architecture of the past, not just as imitation, but as a set of historic principles ¬– gutsy, large-scale – which could be adopted to make something new.
The material build of a structure is one way in which architecture can alter the nature of our experience, an experience we cannot help but understand in chronological terms, whether it is by association with materials of the past or by establishing a deliberate sequence of fabrics that tells a story.
Yet what is enclosed by all that material? There are equally in many buildings what we might call narratives of space. Indeed one of the most long-established aspects of public architecture is its connection to ceremony. Buildings do not offer a random sequence of possible movements, but instead cultivate a consciously hierarchical approach to them. Buildings have their own story to tell, and physical progress through them (as well as waiting and delay, to say nothing of restricted access) are ritualised events in which time and motion are made to carry symbolic meaning. Indeed, they are buildings that insist on a sensibility of time.
Let’s look to India for an example. Traditional principles of kingship in India were set down in a wide-ranging literature of princely education. Among the many theories that explain royal authority was the idea that sovereigns were exalted above ordinary mortals because of the magic power of royal ceremonies. The consecration was the most important of these since it infused the king with cosmic force. In the central rite, the abhisheka, or ceremonial bath, the sovereign was identified with a divinity such as Indra, the king of the gods.
As the ritual, so the building in which it takes place, which itself becomes structured and designed to accord with proximity to the king, and by extension, to the divine. As George Michell writes:
Sun motifs appeared on the walls and ceilings of palaces, suggesting the beneficial influence of the heavens . . . Gem-encrusted chhatries, or umbrellas, were held over the king as he sat on his throne . . . [Their] multiple tiers indicated the ascending realms of the heavens.
That the king’s throne was intended as an axis mundi, or cosmic pillar, is demonstrated in the late 16th century at Fatephur Sikri, where a massive monolithic column inside one of the royal pavilions supports a seat used by the Mughal emperor Akbar for private acts of meditation. The importance of free-standing columns dates back to the early Indian kings, who used them as emblems of power and as appropriate vehicles for royal proclamations.
The monolithic column – as fundamental an architectural feature as we could wish for – becomes the very heart of the princely story. It is not just the place where power is wielded, but the architectural endpoint towards which visitors of state and envoys from other countries hoped to journey, moving nervously through outer precincts, through audience halls and private chambers, as they were gradually led through the royal palace to meet the king.
Palaces are not unique in this, though their formal scale lends itself to such complex paths. Indeed the papal palaces of Rome have a particular language to describe the size and sequence of rooms through which visitors had to pass. The more important such ambassadors were, the further they were allowed to advance and the larger the rooms became. Temples and churches carry similar narrative potency, as do buildings of government and judiciary. In the 18th century, proponents of the Baroque encouraged a new ideal of movement through space. Architects and town planners laid public squares in Paris and Turin, improved street layouts in cities as convoluted as Rome and designed buildings marked by what one critic has identified as ‘an interest in movement above all, movement which is a frank exhibition of energy and escape from classical restraint’.
Buildings became a kind of theatre, where the performance of the liturgy, for instance, became much more open, rood screens and chancels withdrawn and the venture from noisy street to high altar unimpeded, and all the more dramatic for being so. Open spaces might seem less narrative, less determined. But what Baroque artists strove for was an immediacy of emotional impact that reinforced the prevailing ideology, whether religious or political, as natural and inevitable. The story in a Baroque church or palazzo becomes an unequivocal one, not so much free as singularly, perhaps ruthlessly, effective.
My point is that in all such spaces, a story is told. There is no escaping the ascent of the stairs, the movement along the nave, the gaze drawn upward toward the dome, the apse, the pillar, the monumental edifice. One moves toward these things in a series of ever more powerful approaches, stopping at thresholds, identifying transitions from one defined area to another. Walking through architectural space is not like swimming across a lake or crossing a field. It remains, as it has so often been in the past, a highly ritualised movement through time.
There is a third principle I’d like to mention briefly in this examination of how buildings make us experience time. We have materials; we have the construction of space itself. There is also a sense of outlook that architecture provides. Buildings have, of course, in a variety of ways always had an understanding of prospect: from the pleasing room with a view to the highly symbolic importance of directing the human gaze religiously or politically in a particular direction.
But contemporary architects such as I.M. Pei have found brilliant solutions to the problem of competing with the past by taking the ‘view’ as an integral part of their new buildings’ design. When you are asked to build near the grand palais that is the Louvre in Paris, how on earth do you respond? Pei’s solution was neither to compete nor capitulate, but to take it as a given that any new building has an inevitable relationship with those that have preceded it. With this idea as his starting point, his new entrance to the Louvre brilliantly draws visitors to its noticeable modernity, then surprises them inside by its self-effacing transparency. To descend the escalators of Pei’s glass pyramid is to be forced to cast your gaze upward towards the old palace itself. His showpiece allows the former showpiece its own importance and gathers up history as part of its modernity.
The new Parthenon Museum in Athens does a similar thing, setting out its own expressive interest, while at the same time, subduing its importance to that of its unparalleled site, with glass floors and open spaces that provide constant views of the Parthenon above and ongoing archaeological excavation below. The addition of I.M. Pei’s exhibitions building to the German Historical Museum in Berlin has been similarly evocative of itself and of its neighbouring buildings. As Hans Ottomeyer, the director of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, has enthused:
The profound scepticism predominant among architectural critics and architectural professionals that architecture of quality may represent a disruption because it does not adapt to and fit in with the surrounding built environment, can be perceived as absurd in the context of Pei’s architecture. The facades respond to, reflect and resist the urban buildings and streets around them in a kind of dialogue. They open up new vistas and meticulously composed perspectives and images
that have already become subject matter for postcards and souvenirs of Berlin.
Postcards may not be our ultimate goal, but what a thriving testament to a building’s impact: a building that says not just ‘look at me’, but ‘look around you’.
We can agree then, I hope, that buildings offer a particular experience of time. I’d like to move on to consider to what uses such an experience might be put. If time matters, as it seems to in our hurrying world, and if a sense of history is thus an inescapable aspect of the human condition as we perceive time passing, how can architecture be used to help us understand that condition or improve it?
My interest is, as you might expect, cultural, for I’ve learned over the years how important it is for people to have a sense of time, to appreciate their own history and to connect that history to the many other stories to which it relates. You could say that, as the director of museum, I work with time.
And it is not an accidental content. To understand the cultural weight of museums as a few rooms of ancient objects set out to be admired is to miss their impact. People are moved by history. It is as if their place in the world demands that they make sense of what has gone before them. What museums permit – rather like the buildings of I.M. Pei – are perspectives on the past: they provide windows into the actuality of lives in other times and other places, and encourage a sense of connection to those lives. When museums communicate well – and it is here where architecture and design feature so strongly – they create sympathetic spaces, where what one gains is not just knowledge of past lives and other cultures, but an appreciation of their connectedness to our own.
Extract from a keynote lecture to be delivered by Professor Jack Lohman at the 'Transformations: Creating Landmark Museums' conference on 18th March in London
