This project proposes new archival storage, study, exhibition, and lecture spaces within the Penn Museum's existing courtyard. The intervention serves as a point of contact between the the museum and its curators where museum holdings rest ready to be reframed as actors in new narratives.
In this way, the proposed archive is a seam between ambiguity and definition, a contextual bridge that staff must ceaselessly traverse in order to construct meaning from the museum collections.
Analog models in polystyrene and poured concrete seek to materialize momentary operations of twisting, billowing, or folding. These abstract structures must in turn be interpreted subjectively to become programmed space. Architecturally, the archive seeks to express its role as an interpretation of artifacts--a generator of subjective narratives--rather than an static or absolute truth.
Fall 2017