Co-visibility and pedagogy: innovation and challenge at the High Museum of Art

Abstract

Museum space is arranged not only to present but also to help understand displays. Patterns of visitor movement and the co-visibility of displays act as pedagogical media. This paper traces the recent history of the interior of the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, and identifies radical transformations in the interaction between architectural setting, exhibition design and curatorial intention. The original 1983 second-floor layout, designed by Meier, created ‘rooms within rooms’, privileged cross views and provided a web of vistas cutting through spatial layers of displays and meandering paths of movement, even as the structural grid notated an abstract overall order. Thus, it supported comparisons and a multiplicity of points of view rather than a rigid classificatory scheme. Also, it challenged focused frontal viewing and hence traditional curatorial approaches. The 1997 second-floor layout, by Scogin and Elam, masterfully deployed a formal exhibition language that resonated with Meier's architecture in order to implement a different curatorial programme, based on well-defined sequences of movement and controlled visual frames. The aim was not to impose an historical or stylistic classification, but rather to confront visitors with orchestrated assemblies of displays linking art to themes such as life, faith, the human figure or the city. In 2003, Lord Aeck and Sargent designed a new layout which reproduced the original ‘rooms within rooms’ implemented by Meier, whilst reducing the intricacy of internal subdivision and promoting less complex vistas. The evolution of interiors in Meier's original building stands in contrast to the simpler layout of Piano's 2005 extension for the High where architecture assumes the rôle of a more neutral and elegant background to the art works. These contrasts, their programmatic generators and their experiential consequences are documented and analysed as a case study in the pedagogical functions of museum space.

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