ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a detailed analysis of Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson’s brief description of the spatial genotype of the museum in The Social Logic of Space by pushing to a logical extreme the implications of the genotypical series that the museum concludes. Questioning the standard assimilation of museum display to categorisation and recalling the fundamental concepts of Space Syntax theory, it investigates the distinction between relation and configuration and suggests that a fuller understanding of the rooting of configurations in a ‘third space’ allows a reconceptualisation of cognition as configuration. It argues that the suggestion that ‘ideas are in things’ calls for the conjoined operation of spatial things, objects and things people do, and shows that syntactic form can be seen to co-emerge with semantic form. Space Syntax research has produced an impressive body of work that tailors its methodology to the analysis of museum design. This chapter seeks to contribute to the theoretical dimension of this research by showing what happens to Space Syntax when its theoretical apparatus is questioned by the museum.
