Berlin’s Neues Museum is one of the most moving and enigmatic cultural institutions I have encountered in my life of visiting cultural institutions. Originally built in the mid-19th century by Stüler, student to Berlin’s original starchitect Schinkel, the Neues Museum housed the Ancient/Pre-history and Egyptian Collections and offered a grand narrative of human history from the Tower of Babel till…
In the summer of 2014, London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) re-opened after an extensive architectural intervention by Norman Foster (the first phase of a master plan), and a re-think of some of the major exhibition spaces, most notably the First World War Galleries. The response has been incredibly positive; the museum has even been included as…
Architecture is one expression of the Promethean impulse: fire builds, fire burns, fire re-builds. It is the re-building that is relevant here. While questions about authenticity, aesthetics, and symbolic nation-building accompany every project attempting to contend with detritus, the specific questions guiding this project are: Are there architectures that permit reconciliation to be experienced as…
Bullet Hole Constellations offers an in-depth analysis of museum architecture and curatorial practice in Berlin’s cultural memory landscape. Anchored by close and contextualized readings of three iconic museums – the Jewish Museum (1999), the Neues Museum (2009), and the Humboldtforum-Stadtschloss (2019, projected) – – the monograph traces three distinct phases in Vergangenheitsbewältigung(the critical and dialogic working through of…
Read more bullet hole constellations: forty years of museums and memory in berlin (1989-2029)
Though I initially returned to Canada to conduct a cross-country study of major museums, I quickly realized the untenability of conducting a critical project aimed at assembling a national narrative – even one that uses pluralism as its organizing principle. I decided to switch my research focus to engaging with various negotiations between local, national,…
Disturbed by the ways in which memories are often left out of imagining futures, Sarah Gelbard, Amanda Montague, and I developed a series of workshops and activities aimed at storytelling in and against the realities of stakeholder consultation for urban development projects. We have mostly emphasized on the plans for a new Public Library in…
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