MICAS convenes international symposium on museum architecture and the Small-State Condition
Two-day research event brings together scholars from Harvard, ETH Zurich, the Sorbonne and IUAV Venice to examine how contemporary art institutions emerge within historically layered environments
The event, initiated by MICAS deputy chairperson and Educational Committee chair Dr Georgina Portelli, brings together leading architects, architectural historians, curators and museologists to examine how contemporary art institutions take shape within historically layered environments, with particular attention to small island and small-state contexts.
The symposium addresses a set of questions central to MICAS’s own formation: how public aspiration shapes cultural institutions, how architecture engages existing spatial and material structures to produce new forms of institutional presence, and how curators negotiate sites dense with historical meaning. The programme moves from the structural conditions framing such institutions to questions of architectural intervention, curatorial positioning and practice.
Day one opens with a lecture by Godfrey Baldacchino, Professor of Sociology at the University of Malta and Malta’s Ambassador-at-Large for Islands and Small States, examining the tensions of a port city and fortress economy.
Dominique Poulot, Professor Emeritus at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and one of the foremost historians of museums and cultural heritage in Europe, will anchor day one with a lecture on territorial scale and the challenges facing national museums.
Francesco Dal Co, Professor Emeritus at IUAV Venice and longtime editor of Casabella, will follow with a comparative analysis of two postwar museum reconstructions – Carlo Scarpa’s Castelvecchio in Verona and Hans Döllgast’s Alte Pinakothek in Munich.
The day concludes with an architectural walkthrough of the MICAS site led by Carlo Terpolilli of Ipostudio Architects, the firm responsible for the design of MICAS galleries, with orientation provided by Marco Mulazzani, Professor of History of Architecture at the University of Ferrara.
Day two features Alina Payne, Paul E. Geier Director of Villa I Tatti and Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, presenting on material time and institutional life in layered architecture, followed by Adam Caruso, founding partner of Caruso St John Architects and Professor at ETH Zurich, on architecture made in the present.
Edith Devaney, Artistic Director of MICAS, will deliver a curatorial positioning statement. The symposium closes with a moderated synthesis roundtable – Architecture, Institution, and Public Aspiration in Dialogue – bringing the perspectives of all speakers into open critical conversation across the two days.
