Impression-ception (or Impressionist architecture?)

The part of this week’s reading that resonated with me the most was Kenneth Frampton’s discussion of light, especially as it relates to art display in museums. Frampton mentions that modern curatorial practices of lighting artwork with artificial lights reduces the work to a commodity and creates a sense of placelessness. He argues that the lack of the natural light spectrum across the artwork contributes to this placelessness; the use of artificial light represents the universal technology that has been favored over local, place-specific, “regional” natural light. However, if galleries and other display spaces responded to the changing impacts of time, season, and humidity, it would “guarantee the appearance of a place-conscious poetic – a form of filtration compounded out of an interaction between culture and nature, between art and light.”

His discussion of the changing light immediately made me think of the works created by the Impressionists (who were working in the recently Hausmannized Paris which we looked at last week), specifically Monet’s series of paintings of haystacks and Rouen Cathedral. How interesting would it be if museum, gallery, and exhibition design really considered the climate of the place and used that to enhance the display of art. Architecture could add another layer of light variation to paintings already interested in the ephemeral effects of light. Imagine the unique experience of viewing Monet’s haystacks on a cloudy day in the afternoon in the northeast in the winter versus viewing the same series on a sunny day in the afternoon in the southwest in the spring. The architecture could continue the light explorations Monet sought to make permanent over one hundred years ago and bring the artwork a renewed sense of life.