Inverted Museum

The concept for the Inverted Museum seeks to question architectural hierarchies of ornament, envelope, function, and occupation. It asks the question – what happens when we turn the museum inside-out? Instead of an institution housing rooms, housing frames, housing paintings, what if the institution were a painting, housing frames, housing rooms, housing museums. After a number of attempts at defining the frame on my own, I returned to the idea of appropriation researched at the beginning of the year and developed the inversion concept with a single piece of Rococo ornament, taken from the Zwiefalten Abbey Church in Bavaria. In the spirit of the Rococo, I developed a scaled model for the museum from mirrored, scaled, and multiplied copies of this cartouche, resulting in an impossibly complex form shaped by the edges of the frame and the resistance of the paper. 3D scanning helped to import this collage into computer space where thoughts on enclosure and occupation began to play out. The future of the project lies in the development of the references into my own personal interests in plan and section, so envelope, occupation, and frame begin to speak more faithfully to the concept of an inverted museum.