The study of the built environment traditionally examines architecture as being historically or culturally representative of time, place, and culture, effectively creating a continuous design narrative for researchers to understand and interpret. In the last century, this narrative has evolved to include museums of architecture or architecture collections, such as Greenfield Village (Michigan) and the Manitou Cliff Dwellings (Colorado), which have also become an integral piece of American cultural tourism. These complexes are aimed at providing places for visitors to engage with buildings as an integral part of a shared cultural history, and often include different building types from various locations and historical epochs, while uniting them under the theme of “American”. Drawing from Scandinavian examples such as the Norsk Folkemuseum (Norway), the Skansen Museum and Zoo (Sweden), and the Elverhøj Museum of History of Art (Denmark), as well as the established architectural typology of the art or cultural museum, these open-air facilities give the domestic and international public a way to experience historic architecture and sometimes ways of living, and therefore history.
Although generally popular for tourists, these types of museums present an interesting dilemma for growing cultural heritage discourse that encourages presenting context for historical remains where possible. Many of the earliest sites removed buildings from their original context for the purpose of preservation, which saved the building from destruction but now presents a difficult interpretive situation for interpretations with varying purposes and temporal contexts. Other examples such as Colonial Williamsburg (Virginia) unite the temporal context of the buildings by restoring all buildings to the same time period, causing some discrepancies in the narrative for accurately portraying the “life” of architecture. This paper will discuss the idea of architectural collections as part of American tourism history, and the problems presented as part of a modern cultural heritage discourse.
About the presenterKristin Marie Barry
Kristin Barry is an Instructor of architecture and art history at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where she will soon be completing a doctoral degree in the History of Art, with a focus on architecture’s involvement in cultural heritage discourse and interpretation. She received her Master of Architecture from the University of Cincinnati, where her thesis research focused on the developing architectural typology of the archaeological site museum, an interest sparked through her work at several world archaeological sites. She has participated in excavations in Greece, France, Israel, Egypt, and Turkey as an architect and planner. This work combines her professional practice as an archaeological architect with research in cultural heritage interpretation and management, which she uses to teach students how the historical narrative of the built environment provides thousands of years worth of precedent studies in architectural history/theory.