ABSTRACT
More recently, the unbuilt project for the Guggenheim Helsinki which, despite its demise, illustrated some exciting ideas about the potential social and spatial relations it might encourage, was based in part on the opportunities for highly personal and subjective experiences felt at Louisiana. In the cultural sector, progressive museums have utilized a whole range of spatial and social strategies to aid processes which one way or another can be understood as attempts to open up increasingly abstract (abstracted from life) spaces of culture to appropriation. A key spatial characteristic of socially engaged museums evident in the interior of Battersea Arts Centre is porosity; a porous structure which opens up opportunities for a blurring of boundaries between areas of life and action ordinarily kept apart. In the main, however, museums and heritage sites comprise what are to all intents and purposes singular spatial and social settings characterised by highly predictable and proscribed forms, uses and meanings.
