The Museum. The space of Grace

The Museum seen as a repository of memories to be kept and handed down has happily nourished the intrinsic meaning of its architecture for some time. Thanks to Museums, contemporary architecture has been able to express some quite extraordinary formal, constructive, and expressive potential. The Museum as an autonomous work of architecture emerged at a time when Hegel was declaring the fulfilment of the historical path of the European spirit in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History written between 1821 and 1824. In his Lectures, Hegel highlighted a simple fact that is crucial to our historical experience. We become aware of things, Hegel said, when they appear at dusk. And at that point, we can only reminisce over what has been. However, the past – the ‘already been’ – as much as it has been summarized, schematized and reorganized through abstract and conceptual knowledge, continues to populate the spaces of our interiority and collective memory and still surfaces today as a premonitory agent of revelatory anxieties. In other words, the Museum appears to our eyes as a formidable premonitory agent of revelatory anxieties.