The musealization of an artist's house as an architectural project

Artist’s houses that are opened to the public as museums shift from a private and everyday to a semi-public and institutional functioning. This transformation of an artist’s house into a house museum might appear as a mere legal issue or as a matter of making previously secluded rooms and collections accessable to the public. But this musealization of an artist’s house always involves a set of museological and architectural interventions as well. Not only need the house and its content to be displayed as historical documents through a careful mise-en-scene and through the addition of a sub-text of labels or explanatory panels that disclose the meaning of these historical documents; there is also a need for a logic and clear visitor’s route in a house that was not intended for this. Often this already demands architectural design decisions, but it is mainly in the introduction of the supporting museum functions like the necessary office spaces and an entrance hall with reception desk, cloakroom and bathrooms that the musealization comes down to an architectural design challenge. The proposed paper wants to discuss the artist’s house museum from an architect’s point of view, on the basis of a selection of artist’s houses that were recently transformed into museums, such as the Atelier-Museum Luc Peire in Knokke (B) or the renovations of the Permeke and Rubens house museums. I want to propose the artist’s house museum as an architectural typology by mapping its various typical architectural and spatial characteristics. The first crucial point of interest here is how the spatial division is articulated between the historic interiors, the exhibition spaces and the museum’s service spaces outside of the visitor’s circuit. A second architectural question is how the museum as an active institution can be given an architectural ‘face’ while respecting and presenting the house and its collections as historical documents; how can both the ‘authentic’ private atmosphere and the contemporary public museum be given shape, and is there a place for authorial design in this mediating exercise