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“We no longer need to go to the museum,” writes curator Béatrice Grenier; “we can hold the museum in the palm of our hands.” Yet, as this issue of RECORD shows, there is no shortage of new museum construction, renovation, or expansion. In Architecture for Culture, Grenier, the director of curatorial affairs at Fondation Cartier in Paris—an institution that itself is opening a new location this month across the street from the Louvre, renovated by Jean Nouvel—attempts to answer this seemingly paradoxical question: why, when our ever-expanding archives are ubiquitously digital, are cultural institutions flourishing? Her answer: the architecture of museums is a proving ground for a rapid redefinition of what cultural infrastructure can be today, from a local meeting space for shared public life to a collective curatorial project at a global scale. The following is an excerpt from the first chapter, “The Museum is Scroll Painting.”

Architecture for Culture: Rethinking Museums, by Béatrice Grenier. Rizzoli, 256 pages, $55. Courtesy the publisher, click to enlarge.

In the European history of museums, since the time of Vivant Denon, the first director of the Musée Napoléon (now the Musée du Louvre), museums have mostly metamorphosed from a library-like form—exhibiting fragments of the past without a linear narrative—into spaces where history is materialized through chronological display organized by national schools of art history. China’s National Archives lie somewhere between a museum and a library, focusing on the experience of reading, due to the nature of their collections and the unique status of Chinese painting as a potential record of Chinese history. In the Louvre, visitors move through galleries, viewing paintings alongside texts written by the museum’s curatorial staff. In contrast, the National Archives exhibit texts, books, and objects related to the written word as works of art, displayed in a way that allows their content to be read—they serve as both objects and evidence, records, and repositories of culture.

The “viewer-reader” is invited to participate in “performing” the “record of heritage” through the act of reading. At China’s National Archives, the new museum experience fosters a form of participation centered on readership; in an almost ritualistic sense, visitors interact with objects that possess an eternal potential to be read, voicing the histories they record and embody in the present. The Centre Pompidou’s program was not entirely unlike that of the National Archives, but the latter has the potential—due to its display methods and collections and the specific status of writing in Chinese culture—to encourage an almost ritualistic dimension of the museum space as a site of historical reenactment. Its “viewer-readers” partake of the performed prolongation of ancient Chinese civilizations, subsuming the iconoclastic break of 20th-century Maoist China. Both modernity and tradition have always been located in the past, just as they are simultaneously located in the future. The performative dimension of the building itself—the blueprint being Li Cheng’s masterpiece—represents an architectural reenactment of history, where all periods from the past find themselves on the same plane as contemporaneity. This historicity of time, which makes the past and present simultaneous, aligns with what André Malraux proposed in his 1947 concept Le Musée imaginaire (Museum Without Walls), published 19 years before Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. For Malraux, photography allowed for the joining of artifacts from any civilization into a kind of supramuseum that would place any artwork from any culture on the same level of importance. But of course this could only be possible in the form of a book or, today, in a digital museum. Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu’s National Archives of Publications and Culture actualize the hypothesis of the Museum Without Walls, both as architecture and as a spatial and material experience of history. Did Malraux simply underestimate architecture’s potential performative power? Was he unconvinced by the attempts during his lifetime to rewrite the terms of the museum, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s “universal space,” Le Corbusier’s ramps, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral? He did not live to see the architectural interpretation of his own idea of the Maison de la Culture, for—as Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and Gianfranco Franchini’s early description of the initial inspiration for the Centre Pompidou makes clear—it owed a big debt to Malraux’s concept.