MEMORY AND INNOVATION IN THE ART MUSEUM
Thesis written by Manuel Portaceli Roig, University Professor of Architectonic Projects; supervised by PhD. Architect Jorge Torres Cueco, University Professor of Architectonic Projects at the Architecture Technical College of Valencia.
       The following paper has its origin in the consecutive and sometimes simultaneous projects related to the exhibition and preservation of works of art.  Among them, five museums made up, since the late 80’s of the last century, the background of my activity as architect and professor.  All these, in most cases, linked to architectures that time had passed on to us, witnesses in general, in an appalling state, maybe reflection of a sad centenarian history. 
      The different projective stages involved an investigation aimed in several directions that I explain here, where I focus on the building of the five museums.
      Many questions arise when facing up to the Art Museum project: what a museum is, what its objective is, how and in which way the different exhibition areas are created, areas that from the sixteenth century are offered by the history of architectonic shapes until we get to the complex present requirements. 
      When studying some of the many museums built in the last 35 years, we come to the conclusion that the wise use of the different exhibition areas inherited from J.N.L. Durand in 1802 is the base of the most appropriate answers that have been given to the history of architecture project. 
      Nevertheless, we can observe that if the concept of the 1800’s museum has been exceeded at a cultural level, at a planimetric level new museums raise again the question of numerous articulated typologies, clearly identifiable, that without adjusting themselves to a prearranged outline, offer different experiences that change the traditional traces of the museum.   Therefore, we observe that the best contemporary examples show how through an aggregation process of the different exhibition areas, historical as well as new, dismembered and recomposed without restrictions or preconceived systems, architecture can answer to the specific purposes of an institution with a popular success that has paradoxically thrown into crisis the objectives it was originally built for. 
      Regarding the place, we need to remember the specific role that the museum has in a city.  Many of the new museums are born trying to fit in the place, reconfiguring different perspectives or making up for injured fragments of the city.  And the origin projects of this paper try to take into account all these considerations.
      Concluding the reflections brought up in the different sections of this research, I present here an analysis of the five museum projects, origin of those reflections.  In all the projects, it is assessed, from the reading response capacity of their old factories, the eligibility of the different exhibition areas that we have inherited from the experience of architecture, as well as its organization in the complex program of an art museum in order to reach an adequate proposal about the place it is located and the practical object of the project. Summing up, the raison d'être of each project is stated here as confirmation of the resulting hypothesis of the research done for that purpose.
      
      Doctoral candidate: Manuel Portaceli Roig                                                       May 2012