ABSTRACT
IN THE FIFTEEN YEARS BETWEEN 1889 AND 1904, GEDDES discovered that his many ‘evolutionary’ activities had begun to take him in one specific direction: towards the foundation of a new kind of museum movement. It was to be unlike any other museum movement in that the visitors to the museum became participators in its life, its aim being the evolutionary one of helping people and place, organism and environment, to be brought into a closer and more fruitful relationship. Geddes had an anarchic vision of the individual development of people and place. The community, taking responsibility for its own future, he believed, would want its own culture-institute, its Outlook Tower, its powerhouse, to co-ordinate all the activities in developing the interrelations of Place, Work, Folk. The precise nature of this museum movement, however, had to remain ill-defined. The opportunities of the moment had to be seized, in true evolutionary fashion, to help find new ways of encouraging people to interact with place. The problem with evolutionary activities was that they could not be predetermined. For most of the fifteen years Geddes was experimenting with his prototype museum in Edinburgh, he was not sure what his next move would be.
