MSD DIRECTOR’S SERIES 2012
The Housemuseum: speculations on the conjunction of art and architecture and the private/ public realm
Introduction by: Professor Philip Goad – Director, Melbourne School of Design
Presentation by: Corbett Lyon – Lyons
11 July 2012 – Lyon Housemuseum, Kew, Melbourne, Australia
Presentation Outline:
The art museum from private ‘wunderkammer’ to modern art museum has been a fertile site for investigation and critique by architects, curators, collectors and art historians.
The beginning of the 21st century has seen an unprecedented expansion in the number of public museums worldwide and the concurrent emergence of new private museums and collections which offer an alternative experience to our public institutions. How are these new museums re-calibrating the relationship between art and architecture? How is contemporary art and new media being framed through new spatial considerations and modes of display? What will follow the now ubiquitous ‘white cube’?
The Housemuseum, located in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, is an experimental and speculative project which Lyons has used to explore new possibilities for the conjunction of art and living, to challenge traditional concepts of public and private space and to explore new relationships between art and architecture.
In this illustrated lecture Corbett Lyon will trace the key precedents, influences and concepts which have informed the Housemuseum design — Guggenheim, Keisler, Soane, the Parisian flaneur, collection taxonomies, modes of display and the genealogy of the museum type — and how these research strands have been brought together in a new hybridised type — the ‘housemuseum’.
As a building which functions as both private home and public museum, the Housemuseum interweaves and juxtaposes institutional and domestic spaces in a way which disturbs conventional readings of ‘home’/’museum’, and ‘public’/’private’ and displays contemporary artworks in an interior landscape which is conceived around ideas of perspective, movement and scenography.
Professor Corbett Lyon is a founder and director of Lyons, a Melbourne based architectural design practice. Lyons’ work focuses on the contemporary city and has been the recipient of numerous national and international design awards. Lyons has represented Australia at the Venice International Architectural Biennale and the firm’s work has been published in the Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture, in Taschen’s A-Z of Modern World Architecture and in a recent practice monograph more — the architecture of Lyons 1996 — 2011 published by Thames & Hudson.
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