Museography habitable furniture

Museography habitable furniture

Macro furniture as exhibition architecture.

The Habitable Furniture Museography functions as an architectural exhibition platform that, like a habitable island, occupies the room with the construction of a museographic/architectural piece of furniture. Apart from being a support for exhibiting artworks, it also invites visitors to inhabit the museography by climbing onto it or entering its spaces. This typology also serves to spatially subdivide the room, not with walls, but with a habitable exhibition block. Throughout the furniture, different functions can be assigned to distribute, organize, and generate various dynamics around it, each having its own formal dynamics and engaging in different conversations with the surrounding walls of the space.

Continuous counter vitrine museography

Continuous counter vitrine museography

Extended counter that configures the exhibition space.

This typology is a large showcase that extends and creates various volumes, externally functioning as architectural elements to organize and distribute space and visitor circulation. In the case of the new Museum of Banco de México, these showcases not only display and protect artworks but also function like extended arms or counters that help us organize materials, circulation, and zone thematic cores of the exhibition. They use the same showcase as a museographic/architectural element that serves to vestibule, organize, and exhibit.

Pedestal Base Museography

Pedestal Base Museography

This museographic typology refers to projects that can be resolved by designing a large pedestal base that collectively displays them. These bases can be composed of multiple levels and designed heights that help to exhibit each piece in the best way possible. This typology functions more as a solid volume from which other volumes are subtracted and added to elevate, group, or prioritize exhibition pieces. Generally have been used to display sculptural objects, but we have slightly modified this device to also exhibit paintings, drawings, and other media. We have created pedestal bases that incorporate glass showcases, timelines, and even easels within their volumetry, enabling the exhibition of all types of artwork.

Central Table Museography

Central Table Museography

Interconected network tables Museographies

Interconected network tables Museographies

A topographic museography designed to choreograph multiple relationships and encounters between artworks and people.

This museographic typology is proposed as a continuous horizontal surface composed of interconnected modular tables in a network. It replaces the traditional idea of exhibiting on walls by placing exhibitions on tables in various formats, allowing for multiple configurations, spatial distributions, and circulations depending on the exhibition. Each table operates independently as a flexible unit, but when connected together, they function as a networked continuous exhibition surface, akin to a topographic display of information where artworks, texts, labels, objects, paintings, or any type of material that would typically be on vertical walls can be displayed. The tables are intended to serve the same exhibition functions as conventional walls.

Various types of tabletop devices are placed on this networked system of tables to hold and display documents, including supports such as drawers, easels for paintings, screens, and pedestals.

Visual Graphic Museography

Visual Graphic Museography

2D design as a museographic resource.

The graphic space of two dimensions is also a museographic space.

Museography works within the three-dimensional space of the exhibition hall to organize and display artworks. However, like any visual language, it doesn't always communicate directly and unequivocally. It often requires complementary museographic resources to mediate the artworks, messages, and general information with the public. These complementary resources include graphic, sound, audiovisual, and digital elements.

Among these mentioned resources, graphic design is the most commonly used complement in exhibitions. Texts, titles, labels, and descriptions always involve graphic design because every exhibition needs to communicate through some form of textual or graphic medium, whether it's in the exhibition space itself or in printed or digital communication.

The two-dimensional graphic space is also a museographic space where not only images and texts can be resolved, but also complex information content that would otherwise be difficult to communicate. Through graphic information diagrams, a vast amount of complex information can be translated into simple and readable diagrams for the public.

Vertical Wall Museografy

Vertical Wall Museografy

Common Knowledge Museography

Common Knowledge Museography

Common trades and anthropology of knowledge

Loitering Performative Museography

Loitering Performative Museography

Mobile devices to active phenomena

Furniture: Mobile, movable, traveling, moving. Contrary to a property or real state, a building is immovable, it does not move – it is a property. The city is built of real buildings but also of tables, chairs, bookcases, movable flower pots, which furnish the interiors of houses and buildings, as well as the exteriors of streets, squares and sidewalks of our Latin American cities, turning the streets into temporary kitchens, shops, dance halls or open-air markets. They micro-construct the city every day in the morning and de-construct it every night using elements that can move, furniture.

Museography of Being

Museography of Being

Contemporary museums, similar to commercial spaces, follow a consumption pattern—of art—that requires bodies to be constantly in motion, not at rest or relaxation, but in continuous consumption. This museography for being invites the museum visitor’s body to rest, reflect, and have an experience that is not only retinal and optical in the exhibition of art. The museum seems to cater only to the visitor's eye as if it had no body. These "living optical instruments" through which we see are within a body that tires from being paraded around, becomes distracted, bored, or irritated; it is not just a disembodied gaze floating through the exhibition halls from one space to another, from one artwork to another. This is why the museum must also provide moments of rest and seating for different bodies. This is what the museography for being explores, with the design of diverse seating systems that aim to offer various ways of being, reclining, resting, and perhaps observing the exhibition from another place and in another physical state of mind.

Vitrine Museography

Vitrine Museography

Modular assembly museography

Modular assembly museography

Museographies to reuse or just use and throw away?

Hanging Museography

Hanging Museography

Sound habitat museography.

Sound habitat museography.

Museography as sculpture

Museography as sculpture

Mechanic Museographies to interact

Mechanic Museographies to interact

¿How to exhibit documents in Art Museums?

Building Scale Museography

Building Scale Museography

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Abierto Mexicano de Diseño 2019 - Museo Nacional

2019 /

Modular assembly museography /

The 2019 Abierto Mexicano del Diseño commissioned us to do the exhibition design of two of their shows. The first was Pop, Popular, Populist. El diseño del pueblo. Curated by Mario Ballesteros and Tony-Macarena at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, and the second exhibition was Novedades at the Museo Nacional (MUNAL). For this exhibition design project we propose a modular construction system composed of perforated metal angles with wide flanges, assembled by bolts and with modular MDF as exhibition surfaces. Always influenced by common trades, this structure evokes the fruit shelves and grocery stores that are usually seen in any store in Mexico City.

Both structures were completely painted in one color as a strategy to consolidate the variety of materials that would be exhibited. In Palacio de Bellas Artes it was pop green to cut the marble feeling of the context and in MUNAL it was mamey, a skin color that comes from a tone of the fresco painted on the ceiling of the room.

Germen Estudio is a museum exhibition design firm specializing in creating a wide variety of exhibitions, ranging from modern and contemporary art exhibitions to anthropology, material culture, and archival displays, as well as historical exhibitions exploring economic processes or community narratives.

With over 10 years of experience, we have worked for numerous public and private museums in Mexico and abroad, offering expertise in the following areas:

- Comprehensive exhibition design for museums

- Coordination of exhibition content in collaboration with researchers, curators, and artists

- Production and construction of exhibition projects

- Installation of artworks in the museum until project completion

Our museographies function as diverse systems that allow for change, reuse, and growth, tailored to the aesthetic and budgetary needs of each museum project, aiming to create a comprehensive experience where exhibited works, visitor interaction, museum furniture, and architecture converge to generate a unique museum experience.

In 2019, our firm was awarded the Covarrubias Prize for Best Museographic Work by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), recognizing our excellence in museum design and exhibition implementation.

Giacomo Castagnola received his Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology (SMACT) from the School of Architecture and Planning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2013, and holds a degree in architecture and urbanism from Ricardo Palma University (URP) in Lima Peru. Originally from Lima, Peru, for seven years (2003-2010) he lived and worked in the Tijuana / San Diego border region where he established Germen, an architectural and design studio, to investigate the self-organized "informal" city that composes up to 40% of the urban and growing infrastructure of many Latin American cities. Currently, Castagnola works in Mexico City in architecture for exhibitions and museographies that explore new ways of displaying archives of art and material culture.

Logo Germen

Founder

Giacomo Castagnola

Arquitectos

Erik López
Cristóbal García

Past Collaborators

Fernando J Limón — San Diego, CA
Fernando Becerra — San Diego, CA
Carlos A. Augusto Paz — Tijuana, MX