Advanced Studio V: Fall 1997 Instructor: Jim Williamson Museum of the Twentieth Century 'A silence like an answer, a silence of both resignation and expectation; a past and not past. There was not much else left.' Maria Dermout The Ten Thousand Things The museum of the twentieth century provokes questions about the construction of an institution at the end of the twentieth century. . . at the end of the second millennium -- a time when the ideas that inform such institutions and their programs are forced into reconsideration. This is true for the idea of the museum generally an d for the issues of representation that surround the museum specifically. The end of any number of humanist enterprises is a haunting possibility that inhabits any discussion of an institution of this sort and, of course, many of those motivations that inform architecture itself. Additionally there is the deafening cacophony of events, images and artifacts that have come to be the twentieth century and which indicate an unreconcilable display (if that is the right word) of text and object, word and image -- an accumulation of information and material that the comprehension, organization and categorization of which would threaten to collapse under its own literal and figurative weight. An architecture responding to these conditions will have to find analogical grounding in what may be in the end a fluid and unstable 'site'. Students in the studio will be asked to read into these circumstances positive attributes rather than problems to be overcome and solved. It is expected that new possibilities for the tectonic and the representational will evolve from the student's investigations into the issues presented by the brief. Collecting: Chance encounter, the banal and the incidental, the arcane and idiosyncratic traverse the traditions of boundary and hierarchy. As such, initial investigations into unconventional and new methods of organization, reference, and the mapping of event will constitute the initial assignments - - obsessive collectors, irrepressible chroniclers, devotees of arcana and the like will be the focus of the first exercises and discussions. Site sympathetic to individual student's approaches to the project and more detailed programmatic requirements will be determined after the first weeks of studio.