Modern Museum Planning

In addition to the well known museums of the world, such as the Louvre, Paris; the National Gallery, London; the British Museum, London.; the Prado, Madrid; the Vatican Gallery, Rome; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Amer ican Museum of Natural History, New York; the United States National Museum, Washington, D.C. ; the Art Institute of Chi cago; the Field Museum, Chicago; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, there are many museums specializing in particular fields, and these often have buildings of special design.

Special Services.

School museums, of which there are several types, may require relatively little exhibition space but should have a large number of classrooms and laboratories, and a very complete library service. If the museum is engaged chiefly in supplying material for use in the schools its building may consist almost entirely of the workshops in which these collections are prepared and of facilities for handling and shipping. University museums usually have special facilities for class instruction in the museum and rearrange their exhibition cases as often as class requirements dictate.

Outdoor collections and outdoor museums are increasing in number and vary from the supplementary collection in a museum courtyard to the completely detached museum in the open air. Examples of the supplementary collections are the gardens of growing plants maintained by the Agricultural and Commercial Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the extensive garden of trees, plants and flowers which were utilized by the American Indians which has been planned by the Museum of the American Indian in New York. The outstanding example of this idea applied to the field of art is the Cloisters, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, an extensive open air collection of sculpture and architectural details. The earliest open air museum is that Good planning of a museum, whether large or small, dictates a simple and readily understandable arrangement of exhibition halls, easily accessible from the main entrance and preferably laid out so that an orderly tour of the building or of individual sections is possible. Offices should be so placed that the public may reach them quickly and easily. Mechanical shops, usually occupying the ground floor or basement, are arranged with regard for the trans ferring of bulky objects from the shipping platform to any of the exhibition halls. Preparation departments should be near mechan

ical shops and accessible from the curatorial offices without trav ersing exhibition halls. Lecture halls and auditoriums should be provided with separate entrances from the street so that they may be used when other parts of the museum are closed.

In the case of a museum erected unit by unit the same general arrangements may be secured ultimately. The adding of a wing may extend the main exhibition floor and add one or more new galleries, the new basement space permitting expansion of store and mechanical space. An addition to the rear often contains an auditorium with small lecture halls or galleries below. Through this gradual expansion a museum may come to have a central courtyard which can be utilized in a variety of ways.

Except in the case of very small museums, most institutions are divided into departments, each of which is allotted certain exhibition space, curatorial offices, study rooms, work rooms, storage space and mechanical shops, when appropriate. A central library may be open to both visitors and the museum staff or a series of sectional libraries may place all publications on a single subject in close proximity to collections of the same nature.

Special activities of museums often include the printing of known as Skansen, in Stockholm, Sweden, where, situated on a hillside overlooking the city, there is a group of peasant cottages, barns, sheds, windmills, belfries of churches and other pieces of native architecture. All are completely furnished and surrounded with appropriate things, such as carts and farm implements.

Certain large museums, such as the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art, have installed organs and give programmes of chamber music. The Art Institute of Chicago has a theatre of the drama. Astron omy has become susceptible of museum treatment through the recent invention, in Germany, of apparatus for projecting the images of the stars and planets on the inner surface of a large dome. The interior of the dome, in which the audience is seated, resembles a large auditorium, the projection apparatus occupying a raised platform. The American Museum of Natural History, New York, is planning to erect such a planetarium as a part of its astronomical hall. Chicago is also to have a planetarium and several have already been put in operation in Germany and Russia.