House Museum

Definition

The house museum is the museum typology in which a dwelling itself is the exhibit: the preserved interior, its furniture arrangement, and its occupant's objects displayed in situ. In this wiki it is defined by the Freud case's peculiar double: after the 1938 exile, "the empty study and consulting room may be viewed in Vienna, but the contents of the rooms are found in London" — Berggasse 19 exhibiting Edmund Engelman's 1938 photographs in the emptied rooms where the furniture once stood, while 20 Maresfield Gardens (Freud's final home, opened as the Freud Museum London in 1986 after Anna Freud's death) preserves the re-created arrangement, "the desk… separated from the museum visitor by a rope," its surface "obscured by writing implements, smoking paraphernalia, and antique figurines that leave seemingly little space to write." The typology's constitutive act is re-creation: the London house is authentic because "the objects were arranged in the same order they had sat on the desk in Vienna" — the house museum preserves not a building but an arrangement, "the relationship of its parts," making it the museum form whose exhibit is an interior's relational order rather than its artefacts.

A second subcategory, theorized by Georgina Downey (after Postiglione's The Architect's Home), is the architect's house museum: houses "of architectural significance built by architects for themselves (and later converted to museums)" — the canon of Aalto, Gropius, Wright, Horta, Le Corbusier, Mackintosh, Morris, Mollino, Taut, Seidler, Soane, Utzon, van de Velde, Voysey and Wagner — which "always engage two lines of interest: they are works, and they afford biographical testimony to their creators" (Postiglione, p. 9) and which "helped cement the legacy of the architect in question" while serving students as "'hands-on' sites of learning." The two subcategories differ in exhibit-logics: the Freud houses re-create an arrangement; the architect's houses present a designed work whose inhabitance is the evidence ("we hope to encounter and to understand their conceptual 'program for living' by walking through the house") — Casa Gaudí shown "primarily as an exhibition space for furniture," the Cabanon toured as a biography. Both share the type's narrative power: house museums "can convey stories told in the round, through all the senses, which is why house museums are sites of pilgrimage where visitors attempt to re-experience past senses of interiority and spatiality," and in both "the building itself is part of the collection" (Jug).

A third subcategory, theorized by Marian Macken (2018), is the artist's studio-museum: the preserved working space of an artist, exemplified by the Brett Whiteley Studio (a former t-shirt factory in Surry Hills, Sydney, occupied as studio and home from 1985 to the artist's death in 1992, opened to the public in 1995 under the Art Gallery of New South Wales) — "one of the few studio-museums in Australia dedicated to the work of a single artist." Its exhibit-logic differs from both predecessors: the upstairs working space "is retained as though the painter had just recently walked out of the room; unfinished paintings and art equipment are left as if the act of painting will continue" — preserved making, not preserved arrangement or preserved designed work. Its defining structural difference: while a house museum exhibits dwelling, the studio-museum exhibits a workplace of production, and its preservation therefore severs the future of that production — "there will be no future productivity, no future paintings with Whiteley's signature produced within the space." The space is "observable but not occupiable": "It is not the artist's studio that is being visited, but rather, the residue of a former inhabitation" — the room as spatial document and, read critically, as a full-scale, post factum model that "question[s] the inherent authenticity that the full-scale space demands." See trace, thickened-present.

Key Thinkers

• Ro Spankie — the typology's theorist via the Freud case: re-creation as the clue to the arrangement's significance; the desk behind the rope, "curiously anonymous in comparison to the famous couch"; the 1938 Engelman photographs "exhibited today in the empty rooms" (2018).
• Sigmund Freud (and Anna Freud) — the type case's makers: the 1938 London re-installation as the house museum's founding act of re-creation, decades before the house opened as a museum in 1986 (via Spankie).
• Emily Stokes-Rees — the narrative-space pole: the museum whose building, nation and story are symbiotic — against which the house museum's exhibit is a single life's arrangement (2018).
• Georgina Downey — the architect's-house subcategory's theorist: Postiglione's two lines of interest, the musealized home as Nora's lieu de mémoire and "double modernist text," the curatorial tactic of open interpretation, and the trace as the house museum's shifting evidence (2018).
• Marian Macken — the artist's-studio-museum subcategory's theorist: the Whiteley Studio as preserved making ("as though the painter had just recently walked out of the room"), "observable but not occupiable," the room as spatial document, replica-as-post-factum-model, and the museum's severed future (2018).
• Gennaro Postiglione — the architect's-house canon's cataloguer: the "two lines of interest" thesis, the "more sturdy relation between occupant and dwelling," the "poetic manifestos" preservation-claim (The Architect's Home, 2013; not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• Narrative Space — the museum as narrative interior; the house museum as its biographical subspecies (the narrated life rather than the national story).
• Exhibitionary Complex — the visiting apparatus the house museum inherits: "the desk is separated from the museum visitor by a rope" — the directed look at an interior one may not inhabit.
• White Cube — the exhibition logic the house museum inverts: not the neutral container but the lived room as exhibit.
• Psychoanalytic Setting — the Freud houses' twin exhibits: the setting that "is also a memory, a method, and a metaphor," preserved by being made a museum.
• Memory — the house museum as commemorative apparatus: the emptied rooms and the rope-off desk as memory's architecture of absence.
• Symbiotic Spaces — the building–story symbiosis at its most literal: the house museum's story is the building's own inhabitation.
• Period Room — the display form the house museum shares with the museum's reconstructed interiors: Keeble's "layering of one age through the optic of another," Aynsley's text with a "use, life, and afterlife."
• Site of Memory — Nora's lieu de mémoire as the famous-person house museum's frame: the home converted to a community's memorial site.
• Self-Fashioning — the architect's-house subcategory's engine: the house as persona-machine, cementing legacy while its traces subvert it.
• Trace — the house museum's exhibit-principle after Downey/Grosz: "small signs of dwelling that provide a tenuous journey of memory and interpretation."
• Spatial Document — the artist's-studio-museum's ontological register (Macken): the preserved room as "a spatial document, or spatial archive, that serves as evidence of a course of events."
• Post Factum Model — the studio-museum's replica-register (Macken): the preserved interior read as "a full-scale, post factum model," which "question[s] the inherent authenticity that the full-scale space demands."
• Thickened Present — the studio-museum's temporal condition (Macken): "a snapshot of inhabitation, no longer undergoing change, yet continuously present"; the visitor's "two presents."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — the founding source: the Vienna/London split ("the empty study and consulting room may be viewed in Vienna, but the contents of the rooms are found in London"); Engelman's photographs "exhibited today in the empty rooms"; "the museum context of his final home at 20 Maresfield Gardens"; "Today, the desk is separated from the museum visitor by a rope. Curiously anonymous in comparison to the famous couch or the distinctively shaped chair, its surface is obscured by writing implements, smoking paraphernalia, and antique figurines that leave seemingly little space to write. It is this arrangement that remains in the mind rather than the desk itself"; Anna Freud's preservation (untouched rooms, 1939–1982) and the museum's 1986 opening (note 7).
• Symbiotic spaces (Stokes-Rees 2018) — the narrative pole of the museum interior: the building incorporated into the story ("the fortress is as much an artifact of the narrative the museum articulates as any other object displayed within").
• To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — the architect's-house subcategory: Postiglione's "two lines of interest" and "poetic manifestos"; the house museum as Nora's lieu de mémoire and "double modernist text"; Casa Gaudí "presented primarily as an exhibition space for furniture" with private life reduced to "two to three small rooms (bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen)," yet "the sense of interiority is strong, supported by the inclusion of a few original artefacts"; the Cabanon's twice-yearly, scholarship-transformed tour ("not, in fact, as 'god-like'"); "there is a deliberate curatorial tactic to leave interpretations fairly open; visitors are encouraged to think and experience the spaces as authentic, while what is and is not original is signposted"; the E.1027 "shifting lens" ("many tourists come not to see the Cabanon, but to see E.1027"; "about a third were Irish nationals").
• Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the artist's-studio-museum subcategory: the Brett Whiteley Studio (Surry Hills; former t-shirt factory; studio and home 1985–1992; public since 1995 under the AGNSW) as "one of the few studio-museums in Australia dedicated to the work of a single artist"; the working space "retained as though the painter had just recently walked out of the room"; "the space is observable but not occupiable"; "It is not the artist's studio that is being visited, but rather, the residue of a former inhabitation. The space becomes defined as a physical container of absence; the studio-museum becomes a vessel of a former creative dynamism"; the studio-museum as "a spatial document, or spatial archive… more specifically a document of interiority," and as full-scale post factum model; Edmund Capon's "curiously occupied" atmosphere and Barry Pierce's "time capsule of a generation of Australian artists"; the severed future ("no future paintings with Whiteley's signature produced within the space") against Arkie Whiteley's "not just a mausoleum."
• source-notes/fuss-sanders-2006-berggasse-19-freuds-office
• source-notes/melchionne-2006-living-in-glass-houses
• source-notes/potter-2006-kitchen-as-place-to-be
• source-notes/weir-2018-dali-interiors-heraclitus-concealment

Open Questions

• The Freud houses split the interior in two: setting without contents (Vienna) and contents without the original setting (London). Is the house museum defined by the unity of arrangement and room — and is the Freud case a house museum twice over (photographs-as-exhibit in one, re-created arrangement in the other) or its limit case?
• "It is this arrangement that remains in the mind rather than the desk itself" (Spankie): does the house museum preserve an interior's relationships or only its objects — and can a museum preserve a relationship at all, or only its props?
• Fuss & Sanders ask whether Berggasse's house-museum afterlife completes their reading, "with the visitor occupying the patient's seat among the collection"; Spankie's rope-off desk suggests the visitor is held at the desk where the patient was received at four feet. Is the museum visitor the setting's new patient — and what transference does the museum stage?
• The house museum commodifies dwelling as exhibit: does its authenticity rhetoric (the same order, the same objects) obscure that a re-created arrangement is a design act — the curator as the occupant-designer's heir?
• Downey's two subcategories display differently (re-creation vs. designed-work-plus-biography) yet share the premise that the visitor can read the occupant through the interior. Is the house museum's contract with the visitor epistemological ("stand inside of history") or hagiographic (cemento the legacy) — and can the "deliberate curatorial tactic to leave interpretations fairly open" survive the wall text?
• The E.1027 effect: scholarship (Colomina) measurably redirected pilgrimage — "some thirty percent of the group had come to explore Gray's work instead of Le Corbusier's." Is the house museum's meaning finally determined by scholarship rather than conservation — and what happens to a house museum whose subject has been refashioned out from under it?
• Casa Gaudí's profits fund the still-unfinished Sagrada Familia; the Cabanon's access is restricted by the neighbouring family's ownership. What economic and ownership structures shape the house museum as public text — is the musealized home structurally a patrimony machine (cf. patrimonial-interior)?
• Macken's studio-museum exhibits production preserved mid-act ("as if the act of painting will continue") — the house museum's founding honesty is that it preserves dwelling's arrangement; the studio-museum's is that it preserves the appearance of ongoing production that will never resume. Is the studio-museum then the house museum's uncanny double — the room still pretending to a future the museum has foreclosed ("not just a mausoleum," Arkie Whiteley insists) — and does the wiki's three-subcategory typology hold, or does the studio-museum's severed future make it a different kind of institution entirely?