The surreal museum an intervention for the Cincinnati Art Museum /

by Lange, Andreas.

The comprehensive public art museum may be considered a surreal space. A reinterpretation of surrealism as an aesthetic methodology based in the cultivation of the unheimlich can help inform and direct an approach to museum planning and design so that modernization highlights and emphasizes the multiplicitous nature of the museum. As a staged environment that surpasses direct functionality and rationality, the surreal museum is a scripted space for the performance of cultural identity. The amalgamative development of museum buildings, the embedded typological forms, the strange relationship between displaced objects and display space, and the anxious overlaps in program make the comprehensive art museum a very complex and incredibly rich architectural space. The Cincinnati Art Museum is an exquisite corpse of a building illustrating all the qualities of the surreal museum. A strategic architectural intervention into the Cincinnati Art Museum can expose and emphasize this surreality. iii v