Period Room

Definition

The period room is the museum display form in which a furnished interior is assembled or preserved to represent "how things really were" in a past age — the exhibited interior as historical document. The concept's theoretical weight comes from the critique of its claim to authenticity. Trevor Keeble argues the period room represents "the layering of one age through the optic of another": history "is made and remade according to the needs of the present," and the premise "this is how things really were" "periodizes experience into incommensurable slices of history" — so the displayed interior "cannot avoid some key tropes of modernity, including its utopian and/or dystopian polemics" (2006, pp. 2–4). Jeremy Aynsley adds the reception side: modern museum visitors are aware of "the manipulability of the period room as a text, with a 'use, life, and afterlife'" — hence the room's actual value "may lie, not in what the spaces themselves reveal as 'authentic' documents, but rather in what they reflect about the attitudes, values, and ideologies of those presenting them" — curators and visiting publics alike (2006, p. 18). Georgina Downey extends the critique to the architect's house museum: the musealized home is "a kind of double modernist text," a period room whose period is the architect's own life, whose didactics and display "theatrics" are "constructed discourses in themselves," and whose readings "will constantly shift in relation to the theatrics or forms of display and didactics selected by curators."

Key Thinkers

• Trevor Keeble — the concept's optic-theorist: the period room as "the layering of one age through the optic of another," history made and remade to present needs (not yet paged — see log).
• Jeremy Aynsley — the text-theory extension: the period room as a manipulable text with "use, life, and afterlife," valued for what it reflects of its presenters (not yet paged — see log).
• Georgina Downey — the architect's-house application: the musealized home as "double modernist text" whose readings shift with curatorial didactics; the "shifting lens" documented at the Cabanon/E.1027 (2018).

Related Concepts

• House Museum — the typology in which the period room's logic is at its strongest: the building itself "part of the collection."
• Interior as Biography — the period room's biographical variant: the room assembled to document a life rather than an age.
• Memory — the period room as commemorative apparatus; the layering optic as memory's museum-form.
• Site of Memory — Nora's frame for the famous-person house museum: the period room as lieu de mémoire.
• Domestic Interior — the period room's raw material: the furnished room extracted from inhabitation and made to mean an era.
• White Cube — the display logic the period room inverts: context reinstated rather than withheld.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — the concept's wiki-source: Keeble's "layering of one age through the optic of another" and the "periodizes experience into incommensurable slices of history" critique (pp. 2–4); Aynsley's "use, life, and afterlife" and the value-claim (what the rooms "reflect about the attitudes, values, and ideologies of those presenting them," p. 18); Downey's application to the architect's house museum — "a kind of double modernist text" — with the Casa Gaudí and Cabanon displays as instances ("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").
• Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the concept's preserved-instant variant: the studio-museum as a period room of the recent past, where the layering optic collapses — the Whiteley Studio's working space "retained as though the painter had just recently walked out of the room," so that comparing photographs "from the 1980s with those more recently taken allows for 'then and now' comparisons; however, due to the preservation of the studio, it is merely Whiteley's presence in the photograph that reveals the time frame in which they were taken." Where the period room layers ages through optics, the preserved studio erases the interval: preservation so complete that the age-marker is only the occupant's absence. See house-museum, spatial-document, thickened-present.

Open Questions

• Keeble's critique says the period room constructs "incommensurable slices of history"; Aynsley's says its value is what it reflects of its presenters. Can the two be reconciled — is the period room's presentism its failure or its only possible mode of meaning?
• Downey's architects' homes are period rooms of the modern period. Does "modern period room" dissolve the concept (the modern critic of the period room is herself periodized by the room she critiques) or complete it — the "double modernist text" as the form's truth?
• "What is and is not original is signposted" (Downey): does the signposted period room escape the authenticity trap, or merely relocate it — from object to label?
• The wiki's house-museum case (Spankie) turns on re-creation; the period room turns on representation. Is every re-creation a period room, and every period room a re-creation — or does the difference (whose optic, whose arrangement) mark a real typological boundary?