Keeping Culture - by Susan Holden & Ashley Paine (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An investigation into an oft-overlooked issue in the field of cultural conservation: the architecture of storage spaces

Published with vis-à-vis series.

Museums and archival collections are so vast that only a fraction can be shown at one time. The majority of stored objects will never or very seldom be presented to a wider audience. In recent years, visible and visitable storage strategies have gained traction with museums. Increasing the accessibility of reserve collections coincides with these museums' newfound commitment to institutional transparency and public accountability for the objects in their care. Keeping Culture explores the scope, scale and significance of contemporary cultural storage facilities, providing new insights into their implications for collecting, conservation and for the broader understanding of cultural heritage. It also brings the field's current interest in visible and open storage design into dialogue with the spatial evolution and programmatic disruptions that have defined the history of museums, as well as the architectural experiments that have accompanied the cultural work of keeping things.