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CONTENTS

154 Editorial: Interpretation, Experience,and the PastF R A N K G . M AT E R O

E S S A Y S

162 Storyscapes and Emplacement, Layer byLayerM A R Y M I T C H E L L A N D D AV I D S . B A R N E S

174 World’s Fairs: Language, Interpretation,and DisplayF E R N A N D O V E G A S A N D C A M I L L A M I L E T O

188 Housing the Bell: 150 Years of Exhibiting anAmerican IconF R A N K G . M AT E R O

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162

174

188

202

222

202 With ‘‘Feelings of Reverence for DepartedGreatness’’F R A N C E S H E N D E R S O N F O R D

222 The Display of Ruins: Lessons from theGhost Town of BodieD I A N A S T R A Z D E S

244 How Heritage’s Debate on Values Fuels ItsValorization Engine: The Side Effects ofControversy from Alois Riegl to Richard MoeC H R I S T O P H E R K O Z I O L

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PAGE 154

EDITORIAL

Interpretation, Experience, and the Past

FRANK G. MATEROUniversity of Pennsylvania

Figure 1. New York State Pavilion, Flushing Meadows Park, Queens, New York. Philip Johnson, architect (1964).Decay and the failed promise of the future combine to make a forceful and poignant postmodern ruin whoseinterpretation and reuse remain ambivalent, 2009. (Frank G. Matero)

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Any consideration of the interpretation and display of heritage sites demands reflection

on three critical questions:

• How should we experience a place, especially one that is fragmented, accreted, and

possibly illegible?

• How does intervention affect what we see, what we feel, and what we know?

• How can display promote effective and active dialog about the past across space

and time?

All conservation is a critical act that results in the conscious production of ‘‘heritage.’’

As an activity of mediation between the past and the present, conservation is ultimately

responsible for what the viewer sees, experiences, and can know about the past and its

relationship to the present. Much contemporary practice is concerned with finding an

acceptable balance between protecting the many values that characterize places of histori-

cal and cultural significance, not the least of which involves the complexities of change to

the tangible and intangible aspects that uniquely define all heritage. Such questions have

been fundamental to classical conservation theory and practice concerned with interven-

tions in the life of a building or place regardless of age. The tension inherent in this

dialectic defines the very nature of conservation as the push and pull between the emo-

tional and humanistic on the one hand, and the rational and scientific on the other (Fig. 1).

James Marston Fitch attempted to explain and guide such intervention policies through a

triadic model (Fig. 2) based on three tangible aspects of heritage:

1. The ‘‘present physiognomy’’ of the building/site, that is the accumulated physical

evidence including age, what Ruskin called ‘‘voicefulness’’;

2. the ‘‘architectonic or aesthetic integrity’’ of the building/site in purely formal

terms or the original artistic aesthetic intent, what Viollet-le-Duc termed ‘‘stylistic

unity’’;

3. the ‘‘phylogeny and morphogenetic development of the artifact across time’’ or

the development of type and structure, each work being unique and individual

unto itself, a concept associated with Cesare Brandi’s ‘‘potential unity’’ and related

to Gestalt philosophy.

M A T E R O E D I T O R I A L 1 5 5

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Figure 2. A triadic model of the modalities of built heritage. (Frank G. Matero)

More recently, intangible aspects of heritage places have joined the list in the name of a

more evenly represented values-based approach that has gone far in attempting to give

heritage greater visibility and meaning to a larger audience.1

At least since the late eighteenth century in Europe, sites of national historical impor-

tance have been maintained, repaired, and interpreted in a manner distinct from their

ordinary everyday counterparts. Whether preserved or restored according to the prevail-

ing principles of their time and place, heritage sites were viewed as exceptions to the rules

of normal building maintenance and repair and practical alterations. Take for example

the extreme case of ruins. Preservation and display as an integral part of their interven-

tion began in the eighteenth century with the belief in and contemplation of nature and

the solace that could be derived from a ruin. There was no question of preservation in the

Romantic or Picturesque attitude toward a ruin.2 The ruin was there to stimulate the

visitor, the effect sometimes enhanced by selective destruction and cultivated vegetation.

The pleasure to be derived was one of reconstruction in the mind’s eye of the ancient

place in its original state; the better one understood the ruin, the better the imaginative

reconstruction.

It was in the late nineteenth century that the first formal attempts to both excavate

and display in a scientific manner were attempted at excavations such as Assos (Turkey),

Knossos (Crete), and Casa Grande (Arizona). Like other heritage sites, the conservation of

ruins requires the removal or mitigation of deterioration; however, the very nature of

their fragmented disposition also determines and affects their meaning and character.

This has a direct and powerful effect on visual legibility and indirectly conditions our

perceptions and notions of authenticity.

The myriad ways a site can be mediated in the name of heritage directly affects how

that site is experienced, transmitted, and therefore understood. In contemporary practice

it is the professional in consultation with stakeholders—both cultural ‘‘affiliates’’ as well

as outside visitors—who generally influence how those narratives will be staged on site

and transmitted further through publication and social media. Heritage sites are what

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they are by virtue of the disciplines that study them. They are made, not found, and their

display is the interface that mediates and thus transforms. In their introductory remarks

on the art of exhibiting, Kossmann, Mulder, and den Oudsten sum up this challenge with

words that apply to any interpreted space including heritage places:

Like any other medium, the exhibition mediates between . . . two dimensions (things

and words) and thus becomes an agent in communicating knowledge and insight.

Exhibitions speak the language of the image and the mediating image needs to be

embedded in a metaphor capable of connecting the things and the words. That is

why language and interpretation are the driving forces in the materialization of an

idea, irrespective of the narrative structure. To articulate the idea a translation is

required and the key lies in the staging of the means.3

This synthesis of the visual, the emotional, and the intellect can occur through the trans-

formative power of design, and it is the designer’s job to bring an environment to life for

the visitor; using the language of the site. The visitor/spectator in turn determines the

interpretation of the visual based on what he or she fixes upon, despite how many spatial

tricks or words of explanation are offered in the process.4 This leaves the designer with

the difficult task of anticipating the many varieties of interpretations that will produce

maximum engagement.

The last century’s obsession with artistic unity, style, and connoisseurship in the

conservation of the visual arts planted the seeds for a revolution of intangible content

and process over tangible form. But the question now is are we losing the desire and

ability to respond to the simple physicality of things and places, to see, hear, and feel, in

deference to the aggressive revealing of content at the expense of the physical place? As

Susan Sontag warned in 1964, ‘‘Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art . . .

interpretation tames art by reducing it to its content . . . and makes it manageable, com-

fortable.’’5 Here Sontag recalls Hegel’s problems with the analytical zeal of ‘‘ ‘understand-

ing’’ upon ‘‘beauty’’ when he wrote, ‘‘Beauty, powerless and helpless, hates understanding,

because the latter exacts from it what it cannot perform.’’6

Site-based interpretation can offer up a complex reading that has the ability to reveal

much about a place or thing that is invisible; it offers another form of excavation that

completes what the trowel has removed or left behind. But then so can a site’s inherited

physical presence transport the viewer out of time through a series of experiential sensory

stimuli. In an effort to develop all-informing histories, we revise, revamp, reveal, and

expose, littering places with static commentary in the form of interpretive infrastructure:

information centers (no longer museums), signs, viewing platforms, protective shelters,

digital technology, and shops and cafes. Instead, to paraphrase Sontag, shouldn’t our ulti-

mate task be to show how it is what it is, rather than to show what it means?

Traditional curation and exhibition have long dictated that the curator controls con-

tent and until recently, the form. The curator was the primary and sole authority on

content—what to see, what to think—while the designer, if present at all, has been


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responsible for how to see. The white box neutrality of the twentieth-century avant-garde

allowed museums to liberate former collections from the residues of nineteenth-century

historicism and eventually any context whatsoever. Such display techniques quickly found

their way to heritage sites where modern materials such as glass, steel, and plastics pre-

tended to be neutral or invisible in their application. This approach would be challenged

by late-twentieth-century postmodernism, which cried out instead for ‘‘fiction over func-

tion’’7 and the use and intentional abuse of historical metaphors attempted to contextual-

ize architecture and museum collections as well as historical sites.

Today critics and students of narratology clearly differentiate between the static

‘‘staged’’ nature of postmodern architecture’s historical narratives with that of a more

processual or ‘‘operative narration’’ that exploits the hybrid narrative environments of real

and virtual space and advances in media technology to create ‘‘event spaces.’’8 A revolution

in display and exhibition, beginning in the 1960s challenged these notions of single disci-

plinary control and the passivity of the viewer/spectator in receiving meaning as well as

content for the visual arts. In today’s scenography, author, staging, and audience are all

part of the same dynamic system that defines narrative space.

Scenography is a new transdisciplinary field that represents the intersection of real

and virtual media spaces. Now applied to stage and set design, exhibition design, and

importantly urban design, scenography negotiates between past and present, between the

understanding of experts and the general public, between the everyday experience and the

production of visionary ideas.9 For all these reasons, contemporary scenography has much

to offer in the interpretation and display of heritage places.

Every place carries meaning; the visual world cannot be separated from the world of

thought. Each interpretation generates a story all its own, and like books each place has

its own accumulated history, despite the original text. In response to this challenge, the

concept of narrative space offers the possibilities for any location to tell its stories. Narra-

tive space should be a multidimensional, nonlinear experience allowing multiple interpre-

tations—alternative ways of seeing and experiencing. The visitor composes his or her own

story. Each visitor brings his or her own framework of unique knowledge, memories, and

expectations that need to be activated by the place and its presentation. That does not

mean a neutral or all-inclusive presentation, whereby the curator or designer is absent,

but rather it means an interpretation that allows for variations, deviations, but still within

certain limits. Interpretation and display become a matter of fuzzy logic.10

Take for example Franklin Court, the site of Benjamin Franklin’s house in Philadel-

phia and part of Independence National Historical Park, where a team of designers, engi-

neers, and archaeologists offered a revolutionary solution during America’s Bicentennial

in 1976 by revealing the site’s historical and aesthetic authenticities through real and

exaggerated elements (Fig. 3). The result was the construction of a spatial montage that

never confuses the present with the past yet allows visitors an open-ended experience of

history, memory, and time. Earlier plans in the 1950s to celebrate Franklin on the site of

his house included building a memorial park or architectural reconstruction. They were

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Figure 3. Franklin Cour t, Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1976. VenturiScott Brown, architects. (Frank G. Matero)

rejected despite the use of both approaches within the National Park Service and the

nation in general since the 1920s.

The alternative solution proved that didactic interpretation and somatic experience

could be achieved together through the skillful combination and display of above- and

below-ground archaeology as well as reconstruction at the urban interface, two- and three-

dimensional historic space as a hidden urban court and garden, an abstract house plan

and volume (the famous ‘‘ghost structure’’), and a multimedia underground museum. The

brilliance and success of the design solution lay not only in the diversity, placement, and

juxtaposition of the site’s interpretive components (both archaeological remains and

‘‘interpreted’’ features) but in the recognition that the original hidden enclave setting of

the Franklin site could offer up a powerful experience that brought time and space

together in an urban oasis appreciated in Franklin’s time as well. The successful integra-

tion of content and display that has remained relevant and engaging for contemporary

visitors even after thirty-seven years is proof that such open-interpretation works and can

be done well.11

No matter how we define built heritage conservation, are we not appropriating and

manipulating space in the interest of preserving and telling a story or stories? Modern

principles are invested heavily in the auratic values of the original or historic fabric to

access such narratives, and where this is not enough, buildings, features, and landscapes

are littered with footnotes as verbose as they are inarticulate.12 But the public demands

more of places, including heritage places; they expect sites of dramatic action, no doubt


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fueled by the familiar possibilities of film, stage, and exhibition. If built heritage profes-

sionals have much to learn from scenography and narratology, they can also contribute

much about the transcendent power of authenticity and its fragile nature in defining the

soul of a place.

Heritage sites should be deployed as narrative spaces especially for their uncanny

ability to present multiple stories, albeit (and perhaps happily) fragmented, simultaneously

and over time, through all our sensory channels. For public space, this is especially impor-

tant if conservation is to join other players such as urban design, public art, and city and

regional planning in their collective contributions to reconstitute public life. In its most

radical form, the notion of heritage sites as narrative space should enable the visitor, as

an active participant, to take part in the process of active remembering that reestablishes

history as a living legacy and opens up the thing or place to a process of interactive

decoding.

Like all disciplines, built heritage conservation has been shaped by its historical habit

and by contemporary concerns. What began as a focus on the specific, the singular, and

the tangible has developed into the protection of the whole place including its associated

customs, beliefs, and lifeways. Built heritage, like all places of human activity, are con-

structed. They are complex creations that depend on the legibility and perceived authentic-

ity of their components for meaning and appreciation. Yet they are also places that are

dynamic, possessing the power to remember, to admonish, and to elicit strong emotions.

How the interpretation and display of such places are realized remains the challenge for

the professional in shaping what we as spectators see, how we feel, and what we know.

References1. Erica Avrami, Randall Mason, and Marta de la Torre, Values and Heritage Conservation (Los Angeles:

The Getty Conservation Institute, 2000), http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/pdf_publications/pdf/valuesrpt.pdf.

2. While the basic definition of a ruin has remained fairly constant throughout recorded history, associ-ated meanings and values have not. ‘‘Ruins are the remains of human-made architecture: structuresthat were once complete, as time went by, have fallen into a state of partial or complete disrepair dueto lack of maintenance or deliberate acts of destruction. Natural disaster, war, and depopulation arethe most common root causes, with many structures becoming progressively derelict over time dueto long-term weathering and scavenging.’’ (Definition available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruin, accessed on June 29, 2010.)

3. Herman Kossmann, Suzanne Mulder, and Frank den Oudsten, Narrative Spaces: On the Art of Exhibit-ing (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2012), 6.

4. In this regard I am indebted to my colleagues David Leatherbarrow and Marilyn Taylor, who, intheir own distinctive ways, have sharpened and broadened my understanding of design, especially asprocess.

5. Susan Sontag, ‘‘Against Interpretation,’’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 1966), 7–8.

6. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, quoted in Speaking of Beauty by DenisDonoghue (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 24.

7. Hans-Peter Schwarz, ‘‘Routes to a New Scenography,’’ in Frank den Oudsten, space.time.narrative(Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), x.

8. Ibid., xi.

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9. Ibid., ix.10. Note 5 in Kossmann, Mulder, and den Oudsten, Narrative Spaces, 13. ‘‘In fuzzy logic everything comes

down to gradations . . . In fuzzy logic an answer to a question will always entail multiple optionsinstead of two extremes.’’

11. The current renovation of Franklin Court is focused on the complete reinstallation of the under-ground museum dedicated to Franklin and his world with minor changes to the above ground inter-pretation. In its day (1976), the underground museum was a model of innovative interactivetechnologies, which have proven to be much more short-lived than the interpretive design strategiesemployed above.

12. Thanks to Michael Lewis for this wonderful couplet.


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