The recent opening of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris opens new and significant horizons for reflection on the theme of the relationship between architecture and museography. At the same time it invites an overall re-examination from this point of view of the entire experience of Gae Aulenti ever since the competition for the "aménagement intérieur" of the Musée d'Orsay was announced. This should include, along with Orsay, the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Georges Pompidou in the same city and Palazzo Grassi in Venice.

Thematic specificity, conceptual foundation and modes of resolution of the relationship between architecture and museography in Gae Aulenti's work are seen in terms of the considerations that follow from a point of observation within the discipline of architecture (1). 

External circumstances and general criteria of approach

In the current "upswing" of interest in the museum as an institution, the intense and long-standing design work of Gae Aulenti occupies a prominent position, not only because of the evident scale of her commitment, but also owing to the peculiarity of characteristics consequent on an unusual combination of external circumstances, which define the unity of its "thematic scope" and the diversity of its specific "treatment" in relation to the "museographical genre" and to the "locus of foundation" of its architecture.

In close connection with qualified programmes, the recurrent theme of the art museum has the opportunity, from time to time, to linger over the specification of different "species": the vast and complex layout of the Musée d'Orsay, home to works that bear witness to the breadth and variety of artistic output from the middle of the 19th century to the threshold of the 20th - from Gustave Courbet's Un enterrement à Ornans of 1849-50 to Henri Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupté of 1904 - is flanked by the measured and unitary ensemble of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, where works of painting and sculpture from the first sixty years of the 20th century are on show, starting out from Matisse again and ending up with the abstraction and object-art of the fifties and sixties. Alongside these homes tor permanent collections there is also the treatment of a dynamic institution like that of Palazzo Grassi, a museum intended for exhibitions and related cultural activities of a temporary character.

Symptomatic of an increasingly widespread contemporary attitude (and its repurcussions on the spirit), the location of each of these works inside existing buildings covers an unusual range of typology and expression: in relation both to the dynamics of places that have passed to the so-called condition of "re-use" and to the "positioning" of these same places with respect to the function of the museum. While for buildings like Palazzo Grassi the historico-social conditions of a "functional shift"' and the cultural ones of a " physical continuity" as fragments of evidence have been established for some time, the theme of the reutilization of obsolete buildings of the "industrial civilization" is of more recent acquisition and more uncertain standing. In this case it is exemplified by the huge railway station of Orsay dating trom 1900.

But with regard to the intervention of "refoundation" carried out on the fourth floor of the Centre Georges Pompidou the doubtfulness of the definition increases, since the building in question, of recent construction and not at all obsolete, does not need "salvaging" or "converting" to another purpose. And yet a "conversion" has been carried out: while the term of "preparation" or "decoration" seems inadequate to convey its significance and the expression "transformative restoration" does not appear to be pertinent, there can be no doubt that the museum design produced by Gae Aulenti represents a significant overturning from the inside of the concepts that underlay the previous designs as well as a distinct change in the perception of the very architecture in which it is located.

No less varied, significant and paradoxical is the sequence of situations - of opposition, affinity, juxtaposition and superimposition - resulting from the relationship between the building's original purpose and its use as a museum: of opposition in the case of the railway station, in its spatial and functional conception in spite of the virtual kinships or analogical conjunctions that can be established on the level of the literary game(3); of affinity in the case of the noble's palace, not just because of the bias towards representation that can be found in the typological layout, but also because it was in houses like this that the idea and function of art was developed, making them the direct antecedent of the public museum of art; of superimposition, finaly, in the case of the Centre Georges Pompidou, a modern "container" for museum activities of a temporary as well as a permanent nature.

But another reflection emerges with regard to the relationship between original purpose and conversion: that the inevitable consideration of the powers of evocation of a building reduced to that state of a fragment of evidence is associated with the destiny and perception of the same powers in the work of art which has reached the stage of being preserved and exhibited in a museum. Just like the work of art, the building - having come to the end of its integral and direct participation in the configuration of the features of an age - consigns what is left of it to preservation, study and contemplation. Constituting a particular form of a "heterotopia of accumulating time"(4), this type of museum includes the building that "houses" it among the works in its collection.

Nevertheless, alongside this evocative disposition, which recalls the motif of transitoriness, another, quite opposing one emerges: one which relates to the current properties of both work of art and building, which assure their continuance and effectiveness beyond the variations in historical and social cycles, beyond the initial purposes and motivations bound up with the circumstances of time and place. A disposition that recalls the motif of permanence and therefore invites one not to lose sight of the theme of the autonomous "internal statutes" of the different "discursive formations" which coexist, in the museums under consideration, in highly peculiar forms.

To the set of external conditions referred to here - and to the series of difficulties that derive from their related consideration - is added an internal one, concerning Gae Aulenti's attitude towards design. An open and at the same time fixed attitude: sensitive to the multiplicity of values inherent in each situation and determined to bring all of them, without exception, into the channel established by the assignment, which constitutes the final term of reference and control over every collateral or superimposed operative and communicative purpose. Such openness and decisiveness is also reflected in the clarity of the choice of 'tools': in the face of a space characterized by pre-existing structural and architectural configurations, the theme of 'conversion' to a museum function is developed in ways intrinsic to architecture, rejecting both the aspects of precarity and indefiniteness corresponding to a certain notion of the modern museum interior, and the approach limited to the representational and metaphorical level typical of current 'reuse' ideologies.

But this is an approach that marked her design work even before the museographical experience that was set in motion by the competition for the creation of the Musée d'Orsay: in her frequent attendance of circles that entertained increasingly uncertain and vacillating relations with the discipline during those years, the definition of different situations in internal space - the private, those of exchanges and entertainment - weaves the threads of a story that employs, tests and constantly investigates the specific means of the language of architecture (5).

Given these premises, Gae Aulenti's eight-year-long experience with the theme of the museum lends itself to profitable investigation from the viewpoint of an extremely unusual relationship between architecture and museography. A relationship that, seen in terms of its traits of universality and uniqueness, never takes shape in a linear fashion or, as Aulenti herself puts it, "bi-univocally." This is for two fundamental reasons: in the first place because architecture and museography represent complex systems, each of which is endowed with a sphere of essential autonomy, "reducible" one to the other only by means of "successive approximations"; in the second place because these two systems are continually traversed by other discursive formations, endowed in their turn with a sphere of irreducibility and positioned in such a way as to interfere and interact with the terms of composition of the principal relationship.

The consequent break-up of the problem into innumerable functional, cultural and contextual determinations generated by the encounter and observation of the different parts in question is proper to the initial phase of each project and refers back to a question of method, or "modality of work," as Aulenti likes to define it, which consists in the "search for constraints"; as far as the latter is concerned, "the deeper it is the more useful it turns out to be." The subsequent construction of the project is the moment for selection and choice. The result, the architecture of the museum, comes across as a "whole" in which can be made out, legible in their discursive specificity and the inevitable bond between them, three fundamental constituent parts: the architecture, the "locus of foundation" and the museographic program. The modes and moments of their autonomy and mutual relationship require treatment in detail.

Museum architecture: elements and composition

On the assumption that Gae Aulenti rejects the existence, in historical terms, of one "typology of the museum," while claiming on the other hand that it is possible to speak of "museum architecture," one of the most thoroughly investigated aspects of her research has consequently been her work on spatial typologies and the functional connotation. The idea that the museum interior should be made up of a stable, more or less complex and subdivided group of spatial units that are architecturally defined but not self-sufficient (in which structure and form are executed with the works themselves and the act of visiting for which they have been conceived), contradicts on the one hand some modes of approach distinctive of significant trends of modern experience, and on the other raises again a thorny question that had already cropped up with the emergence of the first mature examples of museum architecture at the beginning of the 19th century.

First of all this stubborn sticking to the task in its variable determinations of place, context, content and purpose - which excludes "by definition, by intellectual convinction, the a priori proposal of a language" - establishes a distinction with respect to the ways in which some masters of the modern movement (Le Corbusier and Wright in particular) have approached the theme of the museum. While they certainly interpreted its function and significance and translated them into architectural terms, it was more of an idealized essence than one expressed in terms of the complex phenomena of its real determinations (6). Secondly she is radically opposed to the ambiguities that underlie the progressive dismantling of the museum interior carried out in the name of a comprehensive transformation of the civic institution aimed at making it ''anti-monumental" and "democratic." The "open plan" museums envisaged by the avant-garde movements and actually realized since the war in faithful adherence to the three-told requirement of flexibility, transparency and neutrality do not in fact provide convincing responses, not even in so far as strict accordance with the aim is concerned: like excessive rigidity, the elimination of all spatial constraints involves, in an apparent paradox, the loss of all freedom of display and utilization (7).

In this connection it is not without significance to note that, at bottom, even the "abstract" planning exercises on the theme of the museum promoted by the "Prix de Rome" towards the end of the 18th century, and their subsequent codification in Durand's model of the Precis (8), in spite of the absence of any reference to a program, to a particular organization of the museum, were actually more concrete and practical and effectively "universal." In fact they stood on the solid base of the proven qualities of architecture, of a spatial organization of the museum learned from previous experience in contact or mixed up with other "types." An experience that included, and not in a subordinate position, the physiological and cultural dimension of the visitor's perception.

However, while the rigidity of these schemes, prototypes of the 19th-century art museum, does not correspond to the requirement of considered developments in the historical and critical disciplines that preside over the collection, organization and interpretation of works of art, the excessive indefiniteness of the late-functionalist "neutral containers" appears to be inadequate for satisfying the needs of the museum as a public institution. Catapulted into the indistinct scenery of shifting spatial situations, the visitor is bound to experience the loss of his own visual and cultural bearings.

Pointing out these differences and distinctions serves to provide a historical and critical background for the awareness that prompts Gae Aulenti to decisively reaffirm the need for a definite and stable spatial structuring and configuration of the museum interior. With all the consequences that this involves on the technical plane as well as on that of language, which ought never to be essentially separate. In this sense, the resort to "typical museum places", such as rooms and galleries, does not at all represent a mere revival of tradition, nor a reference to static models or their reduction to typological fragments to be combined in more or less complex aggregates as a citation of "museum memories" (9). Rather it is a recognition of the unsurpassed validity of particular spatial situations and the consequent, necessary commitment to resolving with and within them the requirements of an adequate expository mobility, of a high perceptual quality and of a rigorous control of environmental conditions (where the recourse to highly sophisticated means and techniques lies outside any sort of technical rhetoric). Fundamental in this connection are the lessons provided by the application of Kahn's methods to the Fort Worth museum and the galleries of New Haven, where the architecture competes with the demands of museology by calmly proclaiming the sphere of its own constitutive autonomy, without any ideological restraint on bringing its own resources into play or asserting itself more or less rhetorically as a purely creative gesture.

Each of the museums realized up to now is illustrative of the effectiveness and coherence of the diligence applied and of the methods referred to. Apparently taken for granted at Palazzo Grassi is a redefinition of the boundaries to the spaces already determined by the existing layout, given the constraints imposed by those responsible for preservation. But the rigidity of the constraints does not prevent attainment of the maximum flexibility of display and the best possible conditions for perception. Here as in other cases the collaboration with Piero Castiglioni has been of decisive importance: Aulenti has repeatedly stated that a fundamental component in the definition of museum architecture is the work on illumination, tackled right at the outset of each project (10). In the Musée d'Orsay the complexity and diversity of the volumes of space in the old railway station has at times required a work of cutting, of internal subdivision (grand nef, salons ovales, galerie des hauteurs), at others suggested a process of union (pavilion Amont, galerie Bellechasse) and even permitted actual inclusions (the towers of the grande nef), but always with a view to the recognizability, precision and functionality of the spaces as far as the requirements of display and perception are concerned (11)." The definition of the spatial units in the Musée National d'Art Moderne at Beaubourg is based on more rarefied factors; here we can see as it in vitro the process of generation and matching of the fundamental constituent elements of Gae Aulenti's museum architecture (12).

A common tension that informs and guides the formation of such spatial situations is the search for a translation into architectonic shape of the essential elements, the "raw materials" selected for construction: light, space and surface. The creation of voluminous perimeters to rooms and galleries marks out the proper extent of the museum space in a code of construction, containing the installations necessary to its "functioning" and supporting the "pages" of its story.

Other decisive factors: the works and the context

In the full awareness that the work is not experienced independently of the space that contains and displays it, the reappropriation of the museum interior in the full architectural definition leads directly to tackling the problem of its expressive connotation. A central, complex problem, not at all a "superstructure." Also in this case too a number of outside references may help to clarify the significance and the meaning of the position taken by Gae Aulenti.

The particularly tense debate to which this question gives rise, the solutions that have been attempted since the creation of the first public art museums (13) are indicative of extremely different conceptions. It is a question of the relationship that the configuration of the display space establishes with the works of art and, in those cases where the museum is created out of an existing building, with the architecture that contains it. Two conceptions tace one another from diametrically opposite positions: from the supposed location of the work in the reconstructed scenery of its own "original time" one passes to the requests for and attempts at suspension of the work "outside any time and any place", or in the all-embracing topicality of "eternally present time". The pedagogical intentions that underlie these contrasting positions are evident: in both cases a particular connotation of the immediate surroundings becomes a device for exercising a direct influence on the psychological structure of perception of the work. They are the prevalent and alternating, sometimes even simultaneously present positions expressive of the extreme oscillations produced by the encounter between architecture, historiography and art criticism in handling the theme of the museum in the modern age, from classicism to historicism to modernism of course, testimony to an intense, difficult and contradictory relationship with History.

Exemplary in this sense is on the one hand the dominant attitude towards the arrangement of individual rooms in museums which had led Karl Friedrich Schinkel himself to design, around 1830, frames for the Altes Museum in Berlin in the style of the era in which the picture was painted (14) on the opposite side, in the widespread cultural climate in the fifties and sixties of this century, the aseptic location of pictures, systematically stripped of their frames, on movable panels with no reference to time or space. 

But these same post-war years saw the emergence of an approach to museum architecture that took quite a different path. The space of the architecture was closely integrated (in language and in composition) with that of the display. Once again the problem of historical time was central, but it was not tackled either in terms of evocation or in those of suspension; rather it was its transitory dimension and its "depth" that were explored, in order to bring history alive for the public "as relevance to the present day and as problem" (15).

Reviving the notion of ambience (16), in contrast to that of the abstract container, the "Italian museological tradition" of Franco Albini, Ignazio Gardella, Carlo Scarpa and BPR - to which I am obviously referring, but limiting myself to picking out a number of distinctive general traits - reassigned to it the function of a mediator between visitor and work of art. A didactic function, for which the architect assumes responsibility by involving, and bringing up-to-date, in the relationship with existing structures the essence of the architectural tradition, while avoiding any tendency to echo its "formal appearances."(17)

Hence the mediation is not concerned with re-creating nor with eliminating the context: the work is presented in its current condition of a testimonial fragment; its evocative force is all the greater when the environment in which it is set proclaims and measures the temporal distance (and therefore functional, cultural, etc.) that separates it from its original location (from the act, the motivations and the context of its creation); its potential for expression and communication is brought out all the more when the surroundings in which it is presented are able to stimulate, liberate and relate it to a time with the aesthetic sensitivity proper to the moment in which the museum is founded.

Thus the plane on which this mediation, a sort of dialogue at a distance, is carried out is predominantly that of the physiological structure of perception, of abstraction rather than representation, expressing itself in what has been described as the "poetics of contrast", turning on "weights," "textures," the perceptual qualities of the materials and the states of tension and rest of forms, surfaces and volumes. To other means, specific to other disciplines, is entrusted the task of furnishing elements of complementary knowledge,

"guiding" the visitor along integrating routes (18).

The majority of these experiences are carried out within spatial structures and configurations that are already established in advance, so that the project is at one and the same time a creation of museum locations and an inclusion, in the patrimony of works of art, of the very building that contains them, since the relationship set up with the existing architecture is conceptually analogous.

There is a surprising thematic continuity between the museological experience of Gae Aulenti and the work carried out in the two decades following the war by the Italian architects mentioned above. In part it may even be called a continuity of approach, if not exactly of method: in the roots of the ethics that mould the relation with existing struc-tures, in the consistent, basic confrontation with museology, in the enthusiastic exercise of the profession. Of this tradition, says Pierluigi Nicolin, Aulenti's method "aspires to be the heir"(19). She herself has stated it explicitly, speaking of the spirit that has inspired certain choices in the design of the Musée d'Orsay, with regard to both Laloux's architecture and the works of art. One thinks for example of the Buxy stone used to face the "outer" and "inner" walls of the museum in the grande nef and the salons ovales: its "weight"' has the function of counterbalancing that of Laloux's spaces and décor, while its surface also has the property of refracting light in a manner that is "equivalent" to the luminous and brilliance of the works themselves (to allay conservative doubts about the use of stone as a backing for display Aulenti could cite its previous use by Albini in the Palazzo Bianco). Then consider the feeling of lightness and airiness in the galerie des hauteurs, which sets the impressionists in contact with the Parisian landscape and its everchanging sky, while firmly rejecting any even veiled concession to the kind of "emotive" solutions that might easily have been suggested by works "so familiar, so well-known, so much a part of our imagination."

Here as elsewhere the prevalence of an attitude of emotional detachment and the abstention from judgements that directly involve psychological and sociological justifications with regard to the works of art are not a declaration of extraneousness to them, but a consciously established limit to an action that has to be kept as far as possible within the field of the "primary reality of perception," if the visitor is to be allowed to approach, or return to the work of art unhampered by more or less subtly scenic "filters."

The rigour with which this limit is fixed and with which the cards of the expressive connotation of the museum interior are played within it is however the mark of a clear conceptual distinction with regard to the ethics that shaped the relationship with existing structures in the museological tradition referred to above. It is a sign of what might be described as the shift from a "poetics of contrast" to a "poetics of opposition." It is a distinction that becomes especially clear in the manner in which the project reinstates and relates the "fixed" discursive parts with which it is recurrently confronted: museology and the locus of "foundation."

In works in the "Italian tradition," museographical analysis is closely bound up with that of restoration, to give rise, in the most emblematic cases (for instance Scarpa's museum at Castelvecchio), to mixtures, overlays, coincidences, in short to fusions between the two levels of discourse by means of the materials, techniques and formal instruments that substantiate restoration and the preparation of museum displays. In a multi-faceted interplay of references and connections attained by measured divisions, what is expressed is a basically concilatory attitude, a painless and at times "playful" way of bridging the gaps between past and present, between text and context: having "established the relationship between the existing monument and the new architecture, obtained the permeability of the old structure to the museographical circulation," equal naturalness is then applied to tackling "the direct confrontation of its own formal instrument with the individual works," eventually achieving an indissoluble rapport between "route, fluidity and transparency of the architectural space and works on show(20).

In other words it is the same aptitude for the "patient" reconstruction of fragments of text that Manfredo Tafuri detected in Albini's preparation of Palazzo Bianco. On its appearance on the threshold of the fifties, the latter "immediately constituted an obligatory point of reference for a culture that tried to safeguard, on every occasion, reassuring equilibria"(21).

Gae Aulenti's approach is different. An examination of her project for the "aménagement interieur" of Orsay reveals the degree of attention paid to the "museum materials" and the consequent shift of "themes connected with the actual conversion of the building" into the "background"(22). But her work since that time only offers a partial confirmation of these considerations.

At the Musée d'Orsay as at Palazzo Grassi analyses and solution of the museographical problem and solution of the problems of "conversion" seem to take shape as separate discourses, each one designed to look for the primary motivations of its own formation within an autonomous sphere. And within certain limits this is actually what occurs. At Palazzo Grassi the restoration takes placethroug repair,reinforcement and "treatment" of the "wounds" caused not only by the natural aging of the building, but also by the adaptions to new functions that were carried out during the fifties. It is a rigorous restoration, from the masonry to the finishings and the décor, to which or in the margins of which "annotations" and "comments" have only been added in exceptional circumstances and in a circumscribed fashion. Then the museum architecture has been introduced, which carries in itself, in its own "body, " the elements that structure and shape it: air-conditioning units, lighting systems and display surfaces. None of this affects the substance of the building: this is used as an anchor, added onto and overlaid in ways that reveal the lesson learned from the post-war masters, but at the same time there is a detachment, with it being opposed in a way, as an independent and highly self-sufficient part of the discourse. At the Musée d'Orsay, where the situation is more complex, the detachment, the opposition between different parts of the discourse is equally evident and at times strongly accentuated: "so that the two identities are defended." Aulenti states it baldly: "Laloux is restored, so that he may be like a work on show."

Consequently the establishment of a relationship of opposition does not give rise to confusions. But, "inevitably," the game of oppositions turns into a game of exclusions; far from producing "reassuring equilibria," the work of "conversion" confirms the transformation of the building, of its functional nature and cultural expression, into a fragment. Its place is taken, with the completeness, autonomy and force of an image that corresponds to those of a function in progress, by the museum architecture. And then it does not matter much on the conceptual level whether the building within which this architecture is created is an ancient monument or a contemporary one: not so much with the restoration, but with the inclusion, in the correspondence between it and a functional and expressive necessity in relation to the works of art and the act of their perception, is declared and confirmed the transition to another state, where at the same time is revealed and "preserved," but only to the extent in which it is excluded, all the possible diversity and identicalness of a previous "self". It is an operation that, on the plane of terminology, demands a suitable name: from here on the term "conversion" will be replaced by that of "refoundation."

That such an act of refoundation is also carried out on the fourth floor of the Centre Georges Pompidou, a monument of the modern age and at the same time a "container" for museum activities. confirms the "rule" and in addition takes on the value of an emblematic direct confrontation between two antithetical conceptions of the museum interior.

However this contrasting and exclusive mode of action would lose interest and "legitimacy" if it was not as firmly anchored to its "terrain" as it is: if it did not find its rules in it and did not refer to it the expressions of its own foundation and manifestation. Rules and expressions that are once again structural; that is to say, which leave out of consideration the "historical account of the building," not commenting on it nor evoking it in a nostalgic fashion by recourse to metaphors and allusions, but continuing it by exploiting what is of permanent value in it. Let us confirm this by concrete examples.

Palazzo Grassi and Beaubourg represent completely different "ter rains of foundation," in a way even diametrically opposed: in the first case there are very strong structural constraints, both typological and expressive; in the second there is apparent freedom from any sort of constraint. But, again: at the time of intervention Palazzo Grassi was already a locus of stratified events, whereas the Centre Georges Pompidou retained its original "guise" essentially intact. And yet in both, by different roads and different means, the same line of reasoning is developed with consistency. With the Venetian building, it was not just a matter of confirming its typology and "character," but of "laying it bare" of the muddle of overlaid "narrations" (the last of which, the restoration carried out in the fifties and subsequent alterations and decorations, had reduced it from an „airy and orderly system“ to a "confused and even gloomy place"23). With the Parisian „container“ it was necessary to sort out the unsubstantial tangle of tubing and ribbing in order to reveal an essence obscured by the excessive transpar-ency. In Palazzo Grass the 18th-century building structure and the 19th-centurv decoration become the "structural constraints" that the restoration sets out to reinstate and whose narration is rigorously supported by the new intervention. The order of the transverse bays in Piano and Rogers's building is adopted in turn as the structure and module of rhythmic articulation of the spatial units in the Musée National d'Art Moderne. In both cases the " new" interposes a substantial distance between "locus of foundation" and works exhibited; a distance that plays the conceptual and functional role of distinguishing and mediating, on the plane of opposition, fractures of time, discourse and concept.

With the project for the Musée d'Orsay this approach has already taken on rigorous shape. Yet scale and the particular nature of the setting impose and at the same time reveal different modalities. All the structural constraints selected are adopted and reinstated by the act of refoundation. But if with respect to the other two museums one sometimes gets the impression that the actual statement does not correspond fully to the "promises" put forward in the project, it should not be forgotten that in this case the "bodies" formed by the "locus of foundation" and the museographic scheme are joined by the binding one of the ACT proposal, winner of the competition for the "architectural" transformation of the old railway station into a museum. In the huge nave, which remains the "most awkward" space for Aulenti, the refusal to act "by representations," by urban metaphors, the bringing into play of "chromatic devices," the transformation of the idea of a central, sloping road into a succession of flat terraces and the physical limits that will turn them into "open-air rooms" for sculptures, the opening of the middle "transept": these are all measures that operate in a transverse direction, as well as making the area less dramatic. While they manage to translate back in functional terms that orthogonal intersection of routes that the structural interpretation of the original typology reinstated, they do not prevent its weakening on the visual plane. A weakening that in the intentions of the French architects assumed the force of an annulment. In fact their project proposed a "redécoupage" of the space of the old station which was "très largement ouvert de toutes parts", orienting the entire building around a single axis, suggesting "un cheminement longitudinal comme dans une basilique" and framing "la vue perspective du hall de la gare" with the "cours et les terrasses qui le bordent" (24). Aulenti would seek in vain to counter this centralized system with a completely different one, meeting with strong opposition from those responsible for the "fabric" of Orsay. Given these clarifications, the outcome essentially confirms the arguments put forward at the time in support and explanation of the definitive project of aménagement (25), and in addition accentuates the aspects connected with the variety, distinction and integration of spatial typologies in relation to the "objets d'art" and to the museum program, the "crucial problem" with which Gae Aulenti was expected to deal and to which we will return later.

In general recognition and emphasis should be given to the coherence of the search for a relationship between museum architecture and the architecture of the station, based on a close oppositional correspondence between their respective structural and figurative geometries. Here too, moreover, the new takes on the additional task of distinguishing and mediating, figuratively as well as functionally, between existing context and works of art. But in this case the temporal and discursive fractures that separate the two "narrations" are also interspersed with moments of conjunction and juxtaposition. If the structure and original purpose of the station appears to be alien to the museum function, nonetheless this station and this museum communicate with one another on two levels: "speaking" of the same time and expressing kindred cultures, or figurative "sensibilities." Of significance in this respect are the solutions to the architectural and museological problem adopted in the pavillon Amont and in the salons ovales.

Attention has been drawn on more than one occasion to the "amphibious" nature of Laloux's architecture, in which are clearly visible the traits of a design culture that had been making use of the structural properties of iron for some time but which had not yet acknowledged its "dignity" of expression. By laying bare the pavillon Amont, Gae Aulenti uses the fabric of the building as a demonstration of the history of architecture, revealing the principle of construction that underlies the whole structure and disclosing the apprehensions which Laloux made such an effort to conceal. In a spirit that brings to mind Benjamin's interpretation of "Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts," the revelation of the construction seems to point a finger at the "unconscious" of its designer. In this "ideal" site for the foundation of the section of the museum devoted to architecture, the intervention takes on the subdued tones that allow the rediscovered pieces of architecture to "speak." The distinctions between old and new become less marked: the contrast is more subtly achieved by using the "discarded arguments" of Laloux himself. In the salons ovales, where the structural and superficial integrity of the building demands restoration and does not permit the manipulation of "discovered" materials, one observes the re-establishment of an oppositional dialogue "at a distance." But the great importance that Laloux's architecture in its most representative aspects in the academic sense has in the spatial and figurative characterization of these rooms counsels - since in the meantime other spaces in the Hotel block have been made available for exhibition use - a significant rectification of the museographical arrangement: the post-impressionists, intended for location in the salons ovales from the outset, will be moved to the more sober galerie Bellechasse, while the direct contact with the testimonial fragments of the context may be more suited to the Salon painting, characteristic of official taste under the Third Republic.

Architecture and museography

The definition of the conceptual terms of the attention reserved for the theme of "conversion" of the existing building and the observation of some of its particular modes of realization constitute a fundamental presupposition for more specific consideration of the criteria that shape Gae Aulenti's approach to the theme of museography and the particular ways in which it finds expression. To consideration of the "human dimensions" of perception and movement and to evaluation of the "figurative weights" of the works of art is in fact added the "survey" of the "structural measurements" of the locus of foundation, to constitute that set of constraints with which the interpretation and the spatial-figurative translation of the Museum programme is constantly confronted. Constraints which Aulenti's method seeks out and adopts not as negative limitations, but as genuine motivations and active stimuli for the definition of the project.

The consideration of the more or less complex levels of interpretation of artworks, as established by different museographic programs, is therefore accompanied and intertwined with that of contextual conditions, through perceptual interferences that ensure visitors the possibility of both concentration and orientation. In fact Gae Aulenti regards the act of visiting a museum as "real work," and the relationship with the work of art "is always unsettling and conducive to reflection".

Hence it is necessary to create conditions so that obstacles and anxieties encountered and generated during long "strolls" through enclosed spaces are reduced or eliminated. This is helped by the possibility of orientation offered by any exhibition space in relation to other significant spaces in the building or to the outside. And at the same time it is necessary to define the conditions that permit the establishment of an intimate and meditative perceptual rapport with the work of art on the one hand, but that also answer to the requirements set by the museographical programme or by the visitor's own desire of establishing consequential relationships between works, their different groups and different techniques on the other.

This two-fold character of closure and openness, of saptail and "narrative" autonomy and heteronomy, gives rise to systems provided with a route whose force permits and generates other routes, and whose articulation invites pause and movement, separate observation and comparison, contemplation and reflection. It is evident that the "concentration" referred to, with an emotional approach to the work by the visitor excluded, does not put forward a merely "physiological" one; just as the "orientation" that we are talking about goes well beyond the simple perception of topological relationships between oneself and the setting. They are possibilities and modes of perception which are all the more broad and complex when the discursive formations in question, positioned according to relations of oppositional correspondence, communicate their contents and form directly. The pedagogy that underlies Gae Aulenti's museum architecture is therefore founded on the principle of stimulation, not on that of guiding perception. It produces intellectual unease, not gratification.

If we wish to check out these assertions of a general character in particular contexts, then it is convenient to start with Palazzo Grassi, where restoration and readjustment to the function of a museum have to contend with an "open program", subject to continual redefinition. On the "fixed stage" of a permanent arrangement of the architecture different artistic itineraries appear from time to time. The use of the building for museum activities of a temporary nature obliges the architecture to provide special display conditions: a program that is a sum of a very wide range of possible museum "events" must be matched by an architecture that is capable of interpreting and conveying the general form of display.

Just as the rigidity of "format" of rooms and corridors, thanks to the use of suitable techniques and solutions, does not constitute a hindrance to solution of the problems raised by the rotation and variety of works on show, the succession of spaces which respects the typological layout of the building becomes a sort of "palimpsest" which can be used to find suitable definition and development of different museographical itineraries. Thus in each successive "event" the interlacing of "histories" and "discourses" is renewed, in the reciprocal, clear distinction of "subjects".

To anyone who visits it during the breaks between one initiative and another, the museum building takes on the appearance of a strong and suggestive "proposition" that is waiting to be "demonstrated.' The demonstration takes place equally but differently on the preparation of each exhibition, when the works, without looking like an "unsuitable decoration of the rooms," complete, finish off the act of standing at a remove from the walls and ceilings decorated with "sheets" of plaster. It is then that the museographical itinerary fully reveals the typological and topological interpretation of the building: in movement, which is also constant visual reference, around the inner court, and in its direction, which at the beginning and end of the route is oriented towards the external light coming from the "campo" and the canal.

As at Orsay, the museographical itinerary at Beaubourg is determined by the arrangement of permanent collections. In both cases the spatial and figurative translation of the "programme" defines a route oriented contemporaneously towards the examination of the works and of the setting. The visitor undergoes a complex experience of cross-references and stimuli.

In the latter case, the smaller dimensions, the uniformity of the "locus of foundation" and the greater "homogeneity" of the "museum material" offer conditions in which, given the premises with regard to methods and attitude described above, the autonomous and mutually interacting development of the inserts that make up architectural and museographical narrative is set out with almost theoretical rigour. Display structures, spatial typologies, modules of breakdown and aggregation of space in relation to historically related groups of works and lines of interpretation subdivide and organize the "found" architecture, revealing them in parallel with structural order, language, internal dimensions and location in the surrounding urban context (26).

What this experience represents from the viewpoint of the museography of modern art is explicitly defined by Dominique Bozo, director of the MNAM, whose criticism of the "ideological conception" of the museum in the seventies (on the same "'grounds" that have emblematically sanctioned its success in Paris) finds a highly effective opportunity for expression and verification in the architecture of Gae Aulenti. So, in contrast to the "museum without walls," to the spatial "explosion, to the point-like break up of the previous presentation, comes the formation of "units of presentation that make the best use of the collection and the nature of the works," re-establishing dimensional relations between them relating to the historical conditions of production and perception (the atelier, the collector's apartment), but without any improper attempt to conjure up "atmospheres" and "ambiences. There is consistency and awareness in the rejection and surpassing of that all-embracing conception of "actuality," that in the Kunsthallen of the seventies imposed the American spatial garb of the "happening, of the "action," on materials that also conveyed a sense of other moments and attitudes (27).

On the museographical plane, what was taking shape on the opposite bank of the Seine, at Orsay, represented a still greater upheaval, destined to have repercussions on the plane of art criticism and history as well. In this case the interpenetration of architecture and museum program becomes even more forceful: the limit strictly set to the role of the architect by Bozo - "everything that is not museographical route pertains to (the architect)" - still holds true for the collaboration with Michel Laclotte, but in this case his "layout" appears less rectilinear. From a "program on the qualities of volumes, light and circulation (28), one might expect at Orsay answers to these highly complex questions, both because of the different levels of interpretation of the works that the architecture has to permit and because of the difficulties involved in combining a museographic itinerary of remarkable breadth and complexity with the strong spatial and figurative structure of the former station. This is a problem that it would seem worth taking a closer look at.

As is well-known, a considerable part of the collections housed in the Musée d'Orsay consists of works from the Jeu de Paume and Palais de Tokio museums, and brings together some of the most representative artists and schools of the late 19th century. They are collections that were built up from donations and by a policy of acquisition which has been directed ever since the twenties towards the re-evaluation of the kind of "independent art" to which the criteria of selection of the Ecole des Beaux Arts had previously shown open hostility. Yet it was a patrimony that disclosed major gaps and did not satisfy the desire of the man in charge of the new museographical program, Michel Laclotte, to present at Orsay an image of the complexity, variety and even contradictory nature of the period in question. A period of which the collections referred to, especially that of the Jeu de Paume, only represented, and even then not exhaustively, those aspects that were forerunners of the modernist currents of the 20th century. In short they fitted in with the one-sided view of the "19th century as premiss to the modern." Moreover, they put forward a certain idea of modernity, excluding painters "not at all in the rearguard, still less reactionary, simply not belonging to the Parisian avantgarde." It was, as Laclotte points out, a period to which the expressions of official art also belonged, the exponents of which were not just the contemporaries of, but sometimes also the teachers, friends and acquaintances of anti-academic artists. To fill these gaps in the collections at Orsay, then, works were rescued from storage or from the provincial museums and the new policy of acquisition was aimed in several different directions.

The obvious advantages of a more complete and "detached" view of the art of the late 19th century also give rise to a number of difficulties. A program of this type is not only open to the criticism of those, especially contemporary painters, who "see in the association within the same museum of things that had not been associated previously as a questioning of Cézanne and the modernity of the 19th century, and therefore a questioning of their own modernity;" it also runs the risk, on the one hand, of creating confusion and disorientation with an artistic "material' that is so enormous in quantitative terms, qualitatively so heterogeneous, and technically and thematically extremely diversified, and on the other, of the questionable nature of a selection of works and artists that may seem to be based exclusively on the principle of historical documentation and not on that of artistic quality.

Laclotte's response to these doubts and objections is on several levels. He rejects the idea that the interest and value of this museum lies in presenting the 19th century "as the origin, the matrix of the 20th century:" in fact "the idea of always setting oneself in relation to modernism" seems "completely absurd" to him. As for the problem of the multitude and heterogeneity of the works on show, this results from the very richness and contradictoriness of artistic developments and personalities in the period under consideration, which permits of no simplification except that of making ideological selections. As an example of "a very strong antinomy" he invites us to look at the field of the decorative arts in the mid 19th century, "where one sees alongside the completely modern output of Thonet the furniture of Fremiet decorated with Merovingian motifs".

The program is in any case founded on an extremely thorough preliminary study, which consisted in an enormous separation of things, in making many small compartments, that is to say small groups of painters and sculptors, and in carrying out in the first place a historical and critical analysis of all art objects: furniture, architecture, painting, sculpture." The historical and critical analysis has also involved a selection, but one based more on the ability than on the fame of contemporary artists. From every current and tendency, from major figures but also from many "unknowns", including "rather unusual things", are on show works that are significant not only because they form a "complete" testimony of an era, but for the artistic qualities that its products display... with the occasional exception, as with the sculpture for instance, where Laclotte admits the presence of "rather kitsch objects".

The criteria of matching, sequencing and division into sections that unite, relate and distinguish the works selected in this way for a unitary programme of exhibition are such as to avoid easy confusions. "In principle each room contains only works that stand in close historical relationship to one another." The presentation is made by "artistic families" and, wherever possible, by individual artists (29). "The mixing up of different forms of creation has been totally avoided." Hence there is no reconstruction of "ambience" and "atmosphere" (3), and not even a didactic combination of art objects with fragments of testimony to the "material culture" or with other documentary genres. The temporary exhibitions and "dossiers," set up in spaces annexed to the main exhibition circuit, are given the task of explaining the context of the works. The imaginary visitor is left with ample liberty to decide whether to follow the complete itinerary of the museum or to devote his attention to particular artists or movements, and whether to combine his study of the works of art with an examination of the "dossiers" or to "limit" himself to an appreciation of their aesthetic qualities.

There are two main scales of perception in the Orsay museum: the first is a close-up and direct one within a group of closely related works; the second is the one that remains in the memory, at the end of a visit, when the different sections, located in well-defined areas, are revealed to the mind in their succession, distinguished and at the same time bound together by a guiding thread that is thematic and chronological, but also architectural and contextual. Between these two scales are situated innumerable intermediate levels of perception: the divisions - between one group of works and another, between one space and another - exist side by side with the conjunctions, spatial and visual. Conjunctions that are not just between works, but also between places: museum architecture and architecture of the station, interior inside an interior, and then the exterior: the urban landscape. The itinerary involves a simultaneous perception of time and of space: of the historical perspective in its entirety and in its breaks; of phenomenal multi-discours the splitting up, juxtsition and recomposition of the "discourses".

The identification, adoption and explanation of the structural rules of the locus of foundation help to organize in spatial terms and convey in symbolic terms the evolution and the distinct and interrelated convergence of the different "developments" that make up this great "story." Specificity and appurtenance, displacement and simultaneity, discontinuity and continuity of the historical time and of the artistic and spatial creations that make up a fragmented, although complete in itself, testimony to it are founded on the adoption and represented in the enunciation of the following systems: orthogonal intersection of the routes on the levels of the existing platform and of the quai; real and apparent symmetry of the entire building structure along the axis of the great nave; diversity and connection of locations in the typological pluralism and in the compositional unity of the station-hotel complex.

The first of these three systems lends itselt to housing and restoring the initial part of the visit to the rez-de-chaussée within a network of routes intersecting at right angles; here one becomes aware of the nultiplicity of thematic and expressive tendencies in painting, sculp-ure and the industrial applied arts from the middle of the 19th century up to 1880, with the exception of the impressionist school whose earliest examples date from around 1870, when it still seemed to have direct links with the realist school.

In the field of painting in particular, the individuality of the artists and schools is put over especially well, along with their mutual affinities, the points of direct contact and of more indirect reference. The dialectics of the museographical discourse takes on persuasive force in the translation and spatial organization entrusted to the architecture.

An eclectic line, which extends from the premises of the classical-romantic opposition of Ingres and Delacroix and goes on to illustrate, passing through the historical scenes and the ostentatious portraits of the academic painters who got their training at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, artistic figures who worked in the field of the "revealed reality of the dream" like Puvis de Chavannes and Gustav Moreau, to include the early works of Degas, runs parallel to a realistic line. The latter is introduced by the expressive force of Honoré Daumier and goes on to focus, through the pictures of the Chauchard collection (Millet and the landscape painters of the Barbizon group), on the "non-idealized reality" of Gustave Courbet, to finish with the works of Edouard Manet (including the very famous "immoralities" of the 1863 and 1865 Salons) and of the future impressionists who are portrayed alongside him in the huge canvas by Henri Fantin-Latour, Un atelier aux Batignolles, dated 1870.

As long as it acts within the great nave, the museum architecture develops a symmetrical partition, which the slight ditterence in width between the Lille and Seine galleries does not have sutticient force to gainsay. Only in the transept does the greater depth of the side over-ooking the Seine become evident; beyond this point the nave continues in a symmetrical fashion, concluded by the two towers. Behind these, concealed by the screen of the verrière, rises the escalator leading to the galerie des hauteurs: an asymmetrical extension of the program, but one which the architecture does not take the trouble to back up. Instead the architecture of the great nave predominates, which two lateral staircases in front of the towers make it possible to "grasp as a whole," by climbing to the terraces that run along the longitudinal edges. It is a deviation with respect to the itinerary of the exhibition... or a pause, an invitation to reflect on a "highly specific" space, to get one's bearings before moving on again, or along the "multiple itineraries" that, once the initial section has been traversed, the program offers to the visitor.

At a later stage it is possible to continue examining developments in avant-garde painting after the historic and stylistic break in 1870, by climbing directly up to the galerie des hauteurs on the escalator or following the evolution of architecture in the late 19th century on the various levels of the pavillon Amont. Before this, however, there will be a pause in the space beneath the towers, where the maquette on a scale of one to a hundred of Charles Garnier's Opéra quarter acts as the fulcrum of a reflection on the town-planning, architecture, sculpture and theatrical set-design of the Second Empire.

The visitor will pass through other "highly specific" spaces, through the collection that will lead him to the threshold of the 20th century, always invited to make a "thoughtful" examination of the work, always called back, his gaze drawn upwards, by the interrelated whole of each area, always invited to establish visual and cultural relationships with the architectural setting and at times with the urban landscape in the intervals that mark his movement through the "space of art." Having passed through the café des hauteurs, he will discover the room devoted to the neo-impressionists and renew his acquaintance with the works of the Customs officer Rousseau, Paul Gauguin and the Nabis in the "ateliers" of the galerie Bellechasse. Other connections and appurtenances will become clear, as in the meantime he has observed from the terrace overlooking the Seine the gardens of the Tuileries, the Louvre building and, in the distance, the Sacre Coeur. Before descending to the intermediate floor, he will have wandered round the court of the hotel and "scrutinized," through a small slit in the verrière, the great nave in its entirety. Continuing through the salons ovales and the sculpture terraces, he will come to the interior of the tower-showcases where the creations of Guimard and the chairs of Thonet and several other illustrious central European architects are on show. From here he will be led upwards again; in the break between one section of the route and another, he will once again be offered a view embracing the whole of the nave, but this time from the opposite side.

Many other examples, different routes and observation points can be added to these. What is interesting, however, to break off the analysis at an inevitably incomplete stage, is to emphasize that out of what has been realized and described up to now emerges a common and complex conceptual tension, tested and expressed in a very wide range of modes of realization. Adopting in opposition the "structural" constraints of the "materials" on which its own constitution is founded, Gae Aulenti's museum architecture interposes itself in the visitor's experience as a moment of self-assertion and mediation between works and context. The reestablishment of a functional and expressive unity is not achieved at the expense of the different identities of the parts of the discourse of which it is composed, which simultaneously "declaim" their exclusion and their presence, their passing beyond and their remaining, their weakness and their strength. From this derives the specific nature of the equilibrium cunningly re-established at the end, which encourages rather than inhibits the continual emergence of unsettling stimuli.

1) The fundamental source of material used in the construction of this text is the notes based on a series of conversations with Gae Aulenti which took place between December 1986 and March 1987. Except where there is a note refer-ring to another source, the reference is to these. The section devoted to an analysis of the museo-graphical programme of the Musée d'Orsay is based on a conver-sation with Michel Laclotte.

More valuable information, for which it is not possible to provide definite attribution, has been sup-plied by Monique Bonadei and Mirko Zardini.

2) The expression was coined by P.-A. Croset and S. Milesi, "Gae Aulenti, Piero Castiglioni, Italo Rota. Il nuovo allestimento del Museo Nazionale d'Arte Moderna nel Centre Georges Pompidou", in Casabella, no. 515, p. 54.

3) Cf. in this connection, the arti-cle by P. Nicolin, "Paris: Museo d'Orsay," in Lotus international, no. 35, 1982, pp. 15, 16.

4) In the sense used by M. Foucault, "Spazi altri. I principi dell'eterotopia", in Lotus interna-

tional, nos. 48/49, 1985/86.

5) Cf. V. Gregotti's introduction to Gae Aulenti, Milan 1979.

6) Cf. N. Pevsner, "Museums," in A History of Building Types, Princeton 1976, pp. 11-138.

7) Cf. the point of view of D. Bozo in the interview with C. Lawless, "Ritorno al museo," in Casabella, no. 515, 1985.

8) Cf. N. Pevsner, "Museums," in op. cit., pp. 52, 53.

9) L. Basso Peressut and F. Premoli, "Architettura, tipo e contesto nel progetto del museo," in I luoghi del museo, Rome 1985, pp. 52, 53, interpret the recent works of Stirling, Ungers and Meier in these terms. However one cannot agree with what they have to say about the museums "of the mas-ters of the modern movement" displaying a "greater continuity with tradition (especially in their typology)."

10) On the restoration and conversion of Palazzo Grassi to a museum, cf. M. Romanelli, "Gae Aulenti, Antonio Foscari, Palazzo Grassi", in Domus, no. 674, 1986.

11) On the project for the Musée ( d'Orsay cf., as well as the article 1 by P. Nicolin referred to above, the presentation by the authors themselves, G. Aulenti and I. Ro-ta, "Aménagement intérieur del Museo d'Orsay", in Casabella, no. 482, 1982, with an introduction by P.-A. Croset and, ibid., E. Regazzoni and P.-A. Croset, Destinazione museo. On the completed work, cf. C. Bertelli and J.C. Garcias, "L'architettura interna del Museo d'Orsay", in Domus, no. 679, 1987.

12) On the project for and the realization of the MNAM cf. P.-A. Croset, "Gae Aulenti, Piero Ca-stiglioni, Italo Rota. Il nuovo allestimento del Museo Nazionale d'Arte Moderna,' cit.

13) Cf. N. Pevsner, "Museums," in op. cit., pp. 59-69.

14) Cf. J. Sievers, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Lebenswerk: die Moebel, Berlin 1950, figs. 207-217. N Pevsner refers to this work in "Museums", in op. cit., p. 67.

15) Cf. A. Piva, La fabbrica di cultura. La questione dei musei in Italia dal 1945 ad oggi, Milan

1978, р. 58.

16) Cf. F. Albini, "Funzioni e architettura del museo", in La biennale di Venezia, no. 31, 1958, now also in L. Basso Peressut (ed.), I luoghi del museo, cit., pp. 105-108.

17) It is an obligation to which E.N. Rogers refers in "Il passo da fare," in Editoriali di architettura, May 1961; in this connection, cf. A. Piva, La fabbrica di cultura..., cit., p. 66.

19) P. Nicolin, "Parigi: Museo , d'Orsay," cit. 

20) Ibid.

21) Cf. M. Tafuri, Storia dell'architettura italiana 1944-1985, Turin 1986, pp. 64, 65.

22) P. Nicolin, "Parigi: Museo d'Orsay" cit.

23) G. Aulenti e A. Foscari, 1985-1986. L'ultimo restauro, Palazzo Grassi, Venice 1986.

24 These are argumentations by R. Bardon (who, together with P. Colboc and J.P. Philippon elaborated the general design the reuse of the station) quoted in "Orsay," special of Connaissance des Arts, 1986, p. XX.

25) Cfr. G. Aulenti and I. Rota, Aménagement intérieur del Museo d'Orsay, cit.

26) Cf. at this regard the useful description by P.-A. Croset and S Milesi, "Gae Aulenti, Piero Casti-glioni, Italo Rota. Il nuovo allesti-mento del Museo Nazionale d'Arte moderna", cit.

27) Cf. the interview to Bozo by C. Lawless, "Ritorno al museo", cit.

28) Ibid.

29) Sale Daumier, Courbet, Degas, Manet, Puvis, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin; place Carpeaux, Rodin terrace "promenade" Guimard.

30) An ironic example of the way in which these can be "assembled" is given by Françoise Ca-chin, director of the museum: "in the same room a Napoleon III canapé, the model of a facade by Haussmann, a historical picture in vogue at the Salon with background music by Meyerbeer", etc. (F. Cachin, introduction to Musée d'Orsay. Guide, Paris 1986).