on site review 20: museums and archives

Why museums and archives?

I have long thought that architecture is a material archive of the social, political and cultural conditions of its making. Reading the built environment as an archive of embarrassingly naive impulse to shockingly cynical thought clearly comes out of all that textual work we laboured over in the 1990s. It still stands us in good stead. However, the magical archives of my memory are quite different:

1959: the old Provincial Museum in Victoria when it was at one end of that Victorian pile of granite that is the Parliament Buildings, where a stuffed albatross hung in the main staircase. We took down a bird skull we’d found on the beach below our house on Portage Inlet. An old fellow patiently pulled tray after tray of bird skulls out of a long wall of thin flat drawers so that two little kids could learn how to identify their little grebe skull.

1967: the UBC Anthropology Museum when it was in the north end of that ugly pile of granite that was the Main Library. You got to it through the Fine Arts Gallery, through a narrow door and into a vast, dark, completely magical cavern of totems, statues, lumber, fetishes, cabinets stacked in front of cabinets, tight pathways winding through what felt like an auctioneer’s storeroom. Nothing then was ever interpreted, there was no textual space between you and the thing; there was just you, generally ignorant, and the thing, generally mute.

Marvellous. A coup de foudre.

Stephanie White, editor