Museo delle Culture (Milan)
The Museo delle Culture ( MUDEC ) in the northern Italian metropolis of Milan houses the city's ethnographic and anthropological collections as the “Museum of World Cultures” . It is interdisciplinary affiliated research facilities and a convention center. The new MUDEC building planned by David Chipperfield and largely completed in 2014 is one of the conceptually and architecturally most highly regarded new museum buildings of the present. The address is: Via Tortona 56, I-20144 Milano .
collection
As part of the Museum of Natural History , founded in 1838, a collection of ethnographic objects, which had been growing rapidly since the 19th century, had become independent and had been exhibited with other municipal collections in Castello Sforzesco since the beginning of the 20th century , where it was significantly increased by a bombing in 1943 was reduced. Even after the rebuilding of the Castello as a municipal museum, the collection remained completely stored, with the exception of the Egyptian section. The current inventory is the result of a reorganization in the Milanese museum system.
architecture
The project of a new museum building goes back to the early 1990s, back when the city of Milan decided that, in the southeast of the city center district Porta Genova to revitalize that the vehicle manufacturer Ansaldo left behind industrial wasteland to buy, convert it into a center for cultural activities and the World Heritage to dedicated exhibition house with the long-inaccessible collection holdings.
Based on a design by British architect David Chipperfield , the house was built in two levels on an area of 17,000 m². The foyer, library, conference rooms, restoration workshops and the museum's educational areas for children and young people are on the ground floor. The upper floor contains the permanent exhibition and special exhibition rooms. An essential feature of the architecture are the cuboid building masses made of glass and concrete, which, on the upper floor, are clad with titanium sheet, are reminiscent of the industrial past of the place. This exterior view contrasts with the curtain-like curved glass surfaces around the large central atrium of the exhibition area on the upper floor, which can only be experienced from inside. They “form something like an inward-facing facade” that “creates an almost sacred place”. Originally the building opening should Expo 2015 , under the motto Feeding the Planet ( "World Food" was), to be completed, but the official opening was shifted because had led a dispute between the city and the architect to costs and deadlines to that Chipperfield said goodbye to the project. The trigger was the use of cheap and poorly laid lava stone instead of the basalt that the architect intended for the flooring .
Permanent collection
The current arrangement of the exhibition presentation deviates from the usual, mostly geographically structured systematics of ethnographic representations. Rather, it reflects the history of the collection and its growth; it thus shows which intentions were connected with its coming about and traces the historically changing view of foreign worlds in six sections:
- With objects from the collection of the canon Manfredo Settala (1600–1680) the example of a baroque chamber of art and curiosities is presented, in which the objects according to the categories Naturalia , Artificialia (man-made objects) and Mirabilia et Exotica (admirable and strange objects) were classified.
- The second section shows objects collected by missionaries and researchers and marks the growing scientific interest in the 19th century.
- This is followed by a hall with exhibits that were added to the collection from the perspective of colonialism.
- Section 4 examines the interest of Milan art collectors in the art of the Far East, not least in their textiles from the point of view of the Milanese silk trade.
- Room 5 is devoted to the role of the world exhibitions in the rapid expansion of world trade and the increasing appreciation of foreign cultures, exemplified by the world exhibition in Milan in 1906 .
- The last room reports on the relocations and destruction during the Second World War, the subsequent restorations and shows some particularly valuable individual items.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hartmut Möller: Museo delle Culture Milan , in: db deutsche bauzeitung, issue 10, 2015.
- ↑ Hartmut Möller: Museo delle Culture Milan , in: db deutsche bauzeitung, issue 10, 2015.
literature
- Henning Klüver: Instructions for use for Milan, 2015, p. 66.