Museums in the Digital Age: How is Architecture Redefining Cultural Infrastructure?

Introduction: The Paradox of the Digital Age

In an era where we can browse the world’s greatest art collections from our smartphones, a striking paradox emerges: While curator Beatrice Grenier declares that we “no longer need to go to the museum” because we “carry it in the palms of our hands,” we simultaneously witness an unprecedented boom in the construction, renovation, and expansion of new museums. Grenier’s new book, Architecture for Culture: Rethinking Museums, answers this pivotal question, suggesting that museum architecture itself has become a live testing ground for redefining cultural infrastructure in our time. These buildings are no longer mere containers for artifacts; they have transformed into dynamic entities ranging from spaces for local congregation to organizational projects on a global scale.

From Library to Stage: A Journey of Historical Transformation

To understand this shift more deeply, we must return to its roots. The book traces the European history of museums back to Vivant Denon, the first director of the Napoleon Museum (later the Louvre). In their infancy, museums resembled libraries, displaying fragments of the past without a clear linear narrative. However, this model gradually evolved into embodied spaces, where history became a living substance presented through an organized timeline, often dictated by national schools of art history. This transformation not only changed how collections were displayed but also radically altered architecture’s role in shaping the visitor’s relationship with history.

A Unique Model: The Chinese National Archives as a Reading Museum

The Chinese National Archives stands as a unique and hybrid model, occupying a middle ground between a museum and a library. This model is fundamentally characterized by its focus on the “reading experience,” a direct reflection of the nature of its collections and the exceptional status of Chinese painting as a living record of Chinese history. While a visitor to the Louvre moves through galleries to see paintings accompanied by explanatory texts from the museum’s staff, the Chinese National Archives treats texts, books, and calligraphic materials as works of art in their own right, displayed in a way that allows their content to be read directly. Here, these items transform from mere objects into evidence, records, and living repositories of culture.

Architecture-for-Culture — **Architecture for Culture: Rethinking Museums,** *by Béatrice Grenier. Rizzoli, 256 pages, $55. Courtesy the publisher, click to enlarge.*

The Reader-Spectator: The New Ritual in the Museum Experience

In this context, a new type of visitor is born: the “reader-spectator.” This visitor is not a passive recipient but an active participant in a live “performance” of “recording heritage.” Through the very act of reading, the visitor immerses themselves in a quasi-religious ritualistic experience, interacting with texts that possess an eternal potential for reading. This interaction expresses the history recorded by these materials while simultaneously embodying it in the living present. This ritualistic quality allows for a temporal extension of ancient Chinese civilizations, including the rebellious rupture of Mao’s China in the twentieth century. In this space, both modernity and tradition become entities existing in the past and the future simultaneously.

The Imaginary Museum: Malraux’s Revolutionary Vision

These transformations cannot be fully understood without revisiting the revolutionary vision of French thinker André Malraux in 1947 when he proposed the concept of the “Imaginary Museum” or “Museum Without Walls.” In this concept, photography – and digitization in our age – allowed for the integration of artifacts from any civilization into one great museum, placing every work of art from any culture on the same level of fundamental importance. However, Malraux did not imagine this idea could be realized in a real, physical space; he saw it as possible only in the form of a book or, today, in the digital museum. The article questions: Did Malraux underestimate the performative capacity of architecture? Was he unimpressed by contemporary attempts to rewrite the concept of the museum, such as Mies van der Rohe’s “universal space,” Le Corbusier’s ramps, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral?

Architecture as an Answer: Re-staging History in Space

The project by the Amateur Architecture Studio in Hangzhou for the National Archives suggests that the answer to Malraux’s questions may lie in the architectural form itself. Here, the performative dimension of the building – a plan representing a masterpiece by Li Qing – becomes a living architectural re-enactment of history. In this design, all periods of the past find themselves existing on the same plane of contemporaneity, executing what Malraux called the “historicity of time,” which makes the past and present synchronous. This concordance between philosophical vision and architectural embodiment demonstrates how architecture can be an effective medium for realizing complex cultural concepts.

Conclusion: Towards a Future of the Performative Museum

The analysis concludes that the history of 20th-century art is a complex assemblage of hybridized timelines, which the Chinese government today actively seeks to reframe as a continuation of its ancient past. In this landscape, architecture emerges as a key player in shaping the future of cultural institutions. The museum is no longer just a building housing artworks; it has become a performative platform that re-enacts history and participates in its making. While the National Archives of Publications and Culture strives to realize the hypothesis of a “museum without walls,” architecture proves that it is not only capable of accommodating this idea but also of developing it into a rich and complex spatial and material experience, demonstrating that physical walls can, paradoxically, be a tool for achieving cultural universality.

✦ Archup Editorial Insight

The article delves into the fundamental shift of museums from passive repositories to interactive, performative platforms, focusing on contemporary architecture’s response to this change in an age of digital dominance. The proposed design for the Chinese National Archives raises questions about its functional efficacy; the complex circulation paths and the unclear relationship between primary and secondary spaces may undermine the natural flow of visitors rather than enhance it. The design relies on the idea of “ritual” in interaction, but the enclosed architectural form and visual and physical barriers could actually hinder the generation of the immersive, interactive experience it aspires to create. The relationship between the building’s massive scale and the human scale of individual reading appears unbalanced, creating a gap between the design’s intention and the user’s actual experience. However, the plan’s efficiency in handling the complexity of the historical timeline stands out, as it successfully integrates multiple temporal layers into a single, coherent spatial framework, providing a flexible structure capable of accommodating simultaneous and overlapping historical narratives.