INLAND MUSEUM PARK
International Open Design Competition, Incheon Museumpark, Metropolitan City Government, Incheon, Korea
Port cities are hubs of world trade, facilitators of cultural immigration and emigration, loci, societies of multicultural atmospheres. Incheon is a port-city, with settled foreign cultures that today remain distinct. Museums; for so long untouchable temples of culture, are now entering a digital age. The site, for a major new museum-park, is historically industrial and brick, and the buildings to be reused can be seen as representative of the hybrid port-city condition (of a local and international cultural mesh). Our approach then, has been to join and yet maintain as distinct, a dual nature; to design a museum-park that embodies the contiguous multiplicity that we can see in the urban pattern of Incheon, where cultural settlements are bounded by circulation-paths, rather than mixed or segregated. In section, our principal move is to part the museum ‘temple’ or ‘archive’ (a layer lifted above; a ‘frame’ and an expansive ceiling ‘horizon’) from the museum ‘park’ or ‘laboratory’ (a layer grounded by the earth, ‘planted’ and ‘natural’). This approach then is neither simply singular nor divisive, and we do not create two separate museum forms (we create neither a museum as a metaphor, nor a museum as a morgue). Rather, we design ‘both’ an ‘archive’ and a ‘laboratory’, together, as distinct horizontal layers— a strategy that, as with Incheon, allows cultures (history and art) to thrive side-by-side, simultaneously, distinct and yet dependant and dialogic. Science derives its authority from placelessness. A museum is in principal a ‘site’; an ‘interior’; less a symbol and more felt, an experience. A museum is also a ‘container’, integrating people and objects through atmospheres (acoustic-space). In history, the identity of a museum was its collection. In a past modern age, museum identity was architectural form-as-logo. Today, the contemporary museum is living through a hyper-connected electronic information-age, where identity is neither ‘object’ nor ‘facade’ but ‘interior’; emotions and imagery (the online identity and the cultural memory shared by the visitor online). Scale and monument are not relevant. Atmosphere and situated- engagement are. For a museum; what you see is where you see it, content and context are one. A museum may also be a statement of values. Our approach then has been to embrace and to work with contemporary conditions throughout, and to return museum design to its essential— that the interior space serves the museum content. We have focused upon the creation of compelling internal atmospheres, spaces sequenced and framed so as to achieve a direct integration of audience and content. We have designed the ‘park’ as an ‘interior’, and most radically, we have deconstructed the OCI Incheon Factory Office as a museum artefact, elevationally inverted. Our museum park+temple is universal but not singular; we see it as a contiguous landscape of introspective wonder, a place of distinct yet involved interior spaces. Essentially, we have designed somewhere to ‘visit’ (immersively) rather than somewhere to ‘see’ (literally to read).
CREDITS
David Vardy
Shengze Chen (CATS Shanghai)
Gu Zheng (Dedang Shanghai)
Xu Jiayi
Zhang Ningyu
Yi Xiaoxuan
