MILA  NIKOLIĆ  ARCHITECT

Abstract | In our culture the museum occupies a privileged place symbolically, but also physically, in the city. And not only does it occupy it, but it creates it, defines it, changes it and gives it meaning. This thesis demonstrates that that place is in the museum cluster. And in the cluster, out of which it becomes almost impossible to contemplate the museum, the museum is changing; the meaning and the importance of its basic aspects are changing. My hypothesis is that in the museum project the urbanistic aspect – its place and relationship with the city – takes precedence over its museographic and architectonic aspects.

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The content – collection and display – and the architecture of the museum merge into the cultural density of the cluster as the place of the museum, highlighting that place and urbanism in the foreground. The place – the cluster – becomes thus the key to a new reading of the museum and the city. Supporting the idea of multi-place, with multiple functions, meanings and audiences, the cluster is dismembered. It is considered as the physical location in the city, the urban form the cluster takes, the dynamics and relationships it establishes, and the public place, which it creates in this interaction with the city.

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Through a historical, comparative and critical analysis of these four dimensions of the place of museums, in the four chapters, the dissertation proves the hypothesis, as well as the theory of the locus genii, showing the fundamental role of the museum cluster as a force that organizes, generates and transforms the museum system and the urban system. It demonstrates that the museum boom, by creating, changing, and emphasizing museum clusters, represents a revolution in the relationship and conception of the museum and of the city.

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From the museum, the cluster is observed a whole range of radical changes and innovations in the museum, in the very museum cluster and in the city, through which is explained the primacy of the urbanistic aspect in the project of the museum, and the theory is extended to the importance of the museum aspect in the project of the city. The cluster of museums is raised in the rank of an urban manifesto, showing that new models of the museum-cluster, the museum cluster and the "city of museums", are different scales or levels of an urbanism of densities and flows that maximizes the use and impact of museums and public spaces between them in the mobilization and dissemination of culture and cultural information.

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Although the study includes a wider historical and geographic space to demonstrate the extension of this still little investigated and insufficiently well-known phenomenon, the accent is on the transformations of the museums and their clusters and systems during last three decades, in the principal European cities, including also the remarkable cases from other continents that suggest the possible directions of future development.

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Keywords | cultural infrastructure, museum cluster, contemporary city, public space

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Website |  museumcluster.wordpress.com

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