Museums stage public encounters between visitors, objects and stories. This is not limited to a tour through the exhibition spaces, it starts already with monumental or ‘tresholdless’ entrances.
OASE 111 highlights historical and contemporary mechanisms and motifs of such staging. This shifts the focus in the discussion about museum architecture, long centered around (iconic) exteriors and (good) exhibition spaces. Current museological developments concern the whole configuration between city – or landscape – and gallery. Storage depots become visible or open to visitors, revising the boundaries between front and backstage. Streamed events find a stage in a fixed auditorium, a forgotten corner, or on a temporary platform.
The essays in this issue of OASE speculate on the importance of the architectonic staging of museum visits and activities, as institutions rethink their roles within an accelerating event culture. The scenes of the museum are not examined on the typological level of the museum building, but in a walk along meaningful places.
Geert Bekaert Prize for Architecture Criticism
Book
Reviews
From Words
to Buildings
In this issue of OASE, the history of the
architectural book review is outlined through case studies. This Call is written by Christophe Van Gerrewey and Hans Teerds. The deadline is 20 December 2023.
What
does the author’s ‘owning’ of a project mean? And does this sense of
ownership still prevail in contemporary architecture culture? Other more
open forms of cooperation and co-creation are emerging alongside the
concept of individual singular authorship.
Through a
series of concrete projects, the contributions in this issue explore the
field of tension between architectural aesthetics and issues of energy,
technology and materiality. Ecological practices in architecture must
not only be effective in providing solutions, but inevitably raise
questions of beauty, affection and perception as well.
Call for Abstracts OASE #115 about “Interferences: Migrating Practices in Europe”, written by Justin Agyin, Kornelia Dimitrova,
Christoph Grafe and Bernard Colenbrander. Deadline is June 19, 2022. Read the full text of the OASE #115 Call for Abstracts in the PDF.