Social biographies of space.
In ‘An ethical future for museum and gallery design, appearing in ‘The future of museum and gallery design,” Suzanne MacLeod raises the issue of museum built forms in relation with the social world. In particularly, she and her team assume that the built environment can be understood as “social and cultural productions constituent of social relations and active in the making of our social world.” Social relations and social experience exist, she argues, only “in and through space.” Social biographies of space, therefore, is a tool to understanding the deep structures of a physical site, by recognizing that the site is an “ongoing human and bodily production,” embedded with both “multiple biographies” of the past lives and the living inhabitation, which produces “relationships, identities and experiences as our understanding of past, present and future.”
