ABSTRACT
The influential American architect and town planner Clarence Stein (1882–1975) published widely on museum design, particularly in the 1930s. Stein’s garden city communities were organised around the physical safety, practical needs, convenience, and limited finances of their future residents, rather than on the creation of architectural landmarks and sweeping vistas. Similarly, in his museum designs, Stein privileged not the architectural style or appearance of the museum building, but the needs of the visitor and the museum worker. Facilities that met these comfortably and efficiently would then determine the layout and appearance of the building. This internal, functional layout should be very carefully planned, based on a close and detailed analysis of visitor needs and behaviour; collection preservation, storage, handling and management; staff accommodation and facilities; and the flow and interactions between all of these activities. Stein wrote: ‘We must plan it [the museum] from the inside out, based on the requirements that experience and reason have taught us to be necessary’.
Stein emphasised the back-of-house functions of museums. He predicted: ‘The service portion of the museum of tomorrow will be planned as integrally as in a modern factory’. He created elaborate diagrams and flow charts illustrating the relationships, both spatial and functional, between storage rooms, study-storage, receiving rooms, photography studios, touring exhibition assembly rooms, workshops, freight elevators, fumigation facilities and the like. He argued that museums should provide comprehensive study facilities where specialist students or craftsmen could access everything relevant in the museum’s possession. Stein’s remarkable ‘Art museum of tomorrow’, a utopian design published in 1930, had detailed specifications for study-storage. He wrote:
Every authentic work which the museum finds worth keeping should be arranged in an orderly, systematic manner so as to facilitate research, comparison and study … The student in a museum should be able to surround himself with material just as he would in a public library.
In 1944, Stein argued that the installation of study-storage in old and new museums ‘is the essential cure for inertia, and for dying museums’.