Is the museum ever enough?

Dutch architecture would look very different today were it not for the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). Although few are aware of this, the former Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi), a foundational component of the Dutch architecture-culture infrastructure, was greatly inspired by, and in some ways modelled on, its Canadian counterpart. Not only was the CCA the sole institution explicitly referenced in the NAi’s preparatory material, but the institute’s first board was so impressed by the fledgling Canadian centre that, as it worked towards finalizing the new Dutch institute, it organized a fact-finding mission to Montreal in 1989, the year in which the Canadian centre opened its new facilities.[1] Its task was to understand how in the ten years since the CCA’s founding, the CCA’s founder and first director, Phyllis Lambert, had succeeded in establishing an entirely new kind of architectural institution, starting from the conviction that, as a public concern, architecture must be discussed within a broader societal context. What the delegation discovered was that intellectual exchange – particularly the ambition to foster continued dialogue among architects, historians, scholars and the general public – was the key element in what the fact-finding mission would eventually describe as ‘the only example of a full and complete formulation of an architecture institute to date’.[2]

It was no accident that the CCA was described as an ‘institute’ rather than a ‘museum’ since from its very foundation being merely a museum did not seem to suffice. From its objectives to its archival policies, the CCA defined the ambitious goal of operating both as an architecture museum and a study centre, a unique objective and scope that required, as early as 1979, to ‘invent a modus operandi’ for what was ‘virtually a new institutional type’.[3] Since then, the CCA has continued to develop and encourage both architectural discourse and public appreciation of architecture through research, exhibitions and publications based on its collections, while continuing to assert architecture as a public concern.

In September 2019, the CCA published an unusual volume. Aptly titled The Museum Is Not Enough (no. 1–9), its 200 pages bring together manifesto-like texts, interviews and imagery. Through these varied elements, the CCA attempted to distil not only what it had learned over its forty years of operating beyond the conventional museum framework, but also how it intended, quite deliberately, to continue working within that expanded territory. Beyond revisiting issues that had been central to the CCA since its founding such as research, archives, collections and exhibitions (already addressed in several of the centre’s earlier publications), the unconventional volume also identified more contemporary concerns, including mediation, education and digital presence, culminating in a range of speculative institutional strategies to reposition the CCA within the broader architectural (and cultural) landscape.

The Museum Is Not Enough (no. 1–9) amounted to a forceful manifesto, defined by the stylistic choice to articulate the CCA’s position in the first person. ‘I am an institution called the Canadian Centre for Architecture,’ it declared on the back cover. This first-person stance was extended on the pages within, with the authorship of the manifesto texts (and interviews) attributed to the centre rather than any one individual. In doing so, it implied that the bold statements and intentions contained within were to be attributed to the CCA as an institution, regardless of its founder, director, curators, archivists, researchers or any other staff member who happened to be associated with the institution at a given moment. Effectively, it suggested that the plans and directions outlined went beyond any personal ambitions or individual intentions and were instead a transversal line to be followed today, tomorrow and beyond.

As the 2019 publication was always framed as the first volume of a serialized edition, it was no surprise when, a few months ago, the CCA released a second instalment of its manifesto. The publication of this second volume, The Museum Is Not Enough (no. 10–14) reflects the centre’s ambition to sustain an ongoing conversation about the role of institutions, one through which the CCA can continue to adapt and evolve. While maintaining the approach and tone of the first volume – particularly its defining first-person narrative voice, which questions what a museum should be and do – this new volume nonetheless feels different. If the first volume was experienced as a radical rupture, the second reads more as a confident consolidation, in which the conceptual apparatus deployed earlier begins to find resolution through the purposeful implementation of new projects. Where the first volume imagined what could be different, the recent volume reveals how it has become so.

This is quite remarkable, for while the positions (or ‘lines of thinking’, as they are identified) articulated in the first volume (no. 1-9) seemed to coax and consolidate past projects into a coherent ambition that could indicate a path forward, the lines of thinking addressed in the second volume (no. 10-14) reveal how that path is now being actively pursued (even as it is intentionally adjusted along the way). From those positions, the CCA has developed a consolidated and consistent framework that has become the organizing principle for new projects and approaches pursued with far greater purpose and decisiveness. Although this framework establishes a coherent ideological line for the Canadian centre – one grounded in questioning, engagement and reflection on societal issues through architecture – it remains sufficiently flexible and open enough to respond to evolving conditions. And that is precisely what is made visible in the second volume of The Museum is not Enough, as a path that once seemed speculative has now become a lived experience.

The CCA’s newly practised reality is presented, substantiated and discussed across five new lines of thinking that reflect on film as a tool for research and display (no. 10), interrogate archival practices (no. 11), challenge the institutional authority of cataloguing (no. 12), speculate on alternative forms of public engagement (no. 13), and assert the possibilities of networked institutional agility (no. 14). As in the first volume, each line of thinking is presented in a discrete chapter, expressing the centre’s evolving position through first-person manifesto statements, complemented by images of various CCA projects. These elements are then contextualized by transcripts of a discussion, an interview, or even an essay or conceptual experiment, encapsulating how that particular line of thinking was informed by ongoing conversations with various ‘co-conspirators’, including writers, critics, museum professionals, scholars, film makers and social activists. Each line of thinking is therefore presented both as it currently operates within the CCA, and in relation to the various positions and discourses that have shaped it, creating a combination that reveals a productive tension between the radical ambition and institutional grounding of these lines of thinking. Effectively, these combinations offer the clearest expression of the CCA’s belief that the activity of any museum cannot be constructed from a fixed position and that ‘[u]nless the questions it deals with are observed from another angle, it is hard not to perpetuate the thinking that created them’.[4] As such, all five chapters reveal the CCA’s ambition to examine its institutional workings through multiple frameworks and perspectives, even as some adopt a more pragmatic stance while others remain largely speculative.

In ‘Where I Connect to Context’ (no. 11), the CCA’s ambitious postcustodial framework is illustrated through its recent projects in Africa, which support the digitization of Abdel-Moneim Mustafa’s archives in Sudan and Michael Olutusen Onafowokan’s archives in Nigeria. In these projects, the Canadian centre provides expertise and support for managing, preserving and providing access to the archives (primarily through digitization efforts), while their original owners retain physical possession of the documents and drawings.[5] The chapter also reveals the theoretical framework for the centre’s postcustodial efforts, as it includes a reprint of Canadian archivist Terry Cook’s seminal 1994 text ‘Electronic Records, Paper Minds’, complete with highlighted key passages emphasizing the strategic repositioning of archives from record storages to information hubs.

Extending this decolonial work, ‘I Look for Words I Have Missed’ (no. 12) reveals the Canadian centre’s reconsideration of its descriptive practices. Specifically, it discusses the centre’s efforts to apply ethical, inclusive and reparative approaches to the metadata and descriptive standards of its archive and library, in order to actively oppose the historical, political and social biases originally embedded within them. This critical cataloguing effort is primarily illustrated through images from the CCA’s collection, with captions reflecting the centre’s review process for titles and descriptions, and is framed by a conceptual experiment. By inviting nine guests from a range of backgrounds and disciplines – from social justice activists and historians to photographers and conservators – to provide descriptions of the same historical stereograph (depicting a girl and a dog on a porch), the inevitable subjectivity of textual metadata is revealed through nine markedly different, yet equally profound, readings of the same image and the world it captures. By juxtaposing these different readings, the experiment becomes a compelling argument for recognizing multiplicity as a counterweight to the power embedded in the descriptive authority of archives and other metadata.

In their complementary attempts to decolonize the CCA’s archives, these two lines of thinking are clearly progressive positions that directly engage with the world at large. However, they are also increasingly normalized practices at other architectural-cultural institutions, ranging from the critical cataloguing of the ArkDes in Stockholm to the postcustodial projects of LIGA in Mexico City, and everything in between (including various pilot projects within the Nieuwe Instituut’s Heritage Programme).

By comparison, the positions presented in the following two, notably shorter chapters ‘And We Instigate My Discomfort’ (no. 13) and ‘This is Me in Care of Elsewhere’ (no. 14) are far more provocative. Chapter no. 13 offers a speculative cookbook for cultural agitators, reimagining what an institutional event can be, complete with nine recipes that include ingredients, instructions and even spice levels. These range from ‘Slow Fade’, in which an event is planned without any clear beginning or end (spice level 1), to ‘Cancel Culture’, in which an institutional event previously cancelled due to controversy is staged (spice level 3). If the cookbook proposes programmatic flexibility within the museum, chapter no. 14 demonstrates the institution’s spatial elasticity beyond its walls. Reflecting on the CCA’s c/o initiative, no. 14 discusses how the institution has cultivated an international dimension by establishing temporary outposts through strategic local partnerships around the world, beginning in 2016 in Lisbon and subsequently operating in Buenos Aires, Tokyo and Dakar. Through this networked approach, the CCA encounters ideas, discourses, approaches, people, contexts and projects that would otherwise have remained invisible from Montreal, placing the institution in situations where it cannot remain its usual self, but must instead adapt and change.

Together, these chapters articulate a particular vision of institutional engagement, one that requires unprecedented flexibility and elasticity. This entails both a willingness to embrace formats that challenge conventional museum programming as well as a willingness to operate beyond fixed physical boundaries, as well as to collaborate with unexpected partners. It is in these two lines of thinking that the publication’s stated ambition becomes most visible: a deliberate self-destabilization to reposition the institution as an active, adaptive agent capable of responding to diverse contexts and publics. This approach forces the CCA to engage far more actively with architecture and the world around it, rather than merely observing them.

It is in these terms that the book’s first line of thinking, ‘I’ve Been Out on Location’ (no. 10), presents and advocates for the most visible shift in the CCA’s operations. Film, it would seem, has become a fundamental tool for the centre’s engagement beyond the walls of its galleries. Such engagement operates in both directions: towards the discipline, by enabling a mode of active investigation of architecture’s presence in the world at large, and towards the public by allowing a fundamentally portable form of engagement that collapses the distance between research and display. The parallel with André Malraux’s notion of a ‘museum without walls’ is instructive here.[6] Just as photography opened up new possibilities for the circulation, democratization and multiple readings of art in Malraux’s formulation, film here operates as a medium of democratization and expanded engagement for the CCA. It also enables the centre to understand and document more directly how architecture and its contexts are rapidly changing, capturing processes, conversations and conditions that static exhibition formats cannot adequately address.

Understanding this development also makes a notable absence in the volume more glaring: there is no line of thinking that addresses exhibitions. Such an omission suggests a deliberate repositioning, perhaps guided by a renewed understanding that if a museum is fundamentally defined by its exhibitions, then a centre must be defined by its other activities. The CCA’s recent shift towards film, networked partnerships and alternative forms of public engagement does not eliminate exhibitions but rather repositions them within a broader ecology of institutional activity that better fits the centre’s evolving priorities and its move towards operating ‘with a new agility’, privileging responsiveness over the fixed temporalities and spatial constraints of traditional exhibition-making. It also marks the extent to which the CCA has been ‘getting out more’.

Overall, the CCA’s efforts result in an institutional functioning that is no longer enacted solely in Montreal, but also out in the world through film, postcustodial collaborations and temporary outposts, with the CCA’s website serving as the network that binds them all together. This bold delocalization challenges the very idea of the museum, destabilizing its physical presence beyond galleries, beyond study spaces and beyond archival vaults. This reorientation grows out of the centre’s questioning of how its ‘past and present ways of making, of organizing, of naming, affect what [the CCA is] prepared to make accessible as knowledge’.[7]

Institutional self-examination of this depth rarely occurs in public, yet the CCA has chosen to think through and enact its evolution transparently, publishing its uncertainties and experiments alongside its convictions. Perhaps architectural institutions had become too insular, too detached, too self-centred. However, current and future volumes of The Museum Is Not Enough create both the structure and the framework for the CCA and other architectural institutions not only to become more porous, but also to actively cultivate and utilize that porosity, transforming institutional vulnerability into institutional strength. For, as stated in the very last sentence of the manifesto, ‘[w]hat is the point of questioning myself if I do not transform through the process?’[8]

Between becoming one of the world’s first Zoöperatives in 2022 and last year’s appointment of Sofie de Caigny as Head of Collections, with a mandate to critically consider archival representation and access, the Nieuwe Instituut is also undergoing something of a transformation, albeit in a less visibly apparent manner than its Canadian counterpart. Yet these changes seem curiously unarticulated in relation to one another, a disconnect arguably made most evident by the institute’s 2023 rebranding. While it dropped the ‘Het’ from its name to express that ‘polyphony’ is one of the institute’s core values, it has simultaneously adopted the descriptor ‘museum for architecture, design and digital culture’, effectively exchanging one form of institutional definition for another, even as it attempts to resist such delineations.

Perhaps, as the CCA’s example suggests, these institutional transformations need to be made more inclusive, more visible, more explicit and more clearly articulated as structural, deliberate choices, rather than being perceived as institutional drift. The question facing the British–Nigerian curator Yesomi Umolu, who will begin her directorship of the Nieuwe Instituut in a few weeks, is whether her mandate includes course correction, consolidation or continued expansion along the current trajectory.[9] Umolu’s appointment does signal a certain ambition for institutional transformation at the Nieuwe Instituut, since she has not only previously written about how museums could (truly) dismantle structural injustice, but also, in her previous role as Director of Curatorial Affairs and Public Practice at the Serpentine Galleries in London, championed structural change through efforts to make the institution more inclusive and accessible.[10] Yet the press release announcing her appointment as Director of the Nieuwe Instituut remained rather perfunctory and non-committal, providing little indication of the vision she brings, or of whether she arrives with a mandate for change at all.

Is a longer-term strategic plan being developed? Only time will tell. Yet, as the Dutch delegation discovered in Montreal in 1989, if needed, the manual for something more ambitious is readily available. The CCA has now published not one but two volumes detailing its approach, ambitions and ongoing evolution. No fact-finding mission is necessary, since everything is already in print. Whether the Nieuwe Instituut will engage with these lines of thinking, adapt them or chart an entirely different course, one thing is certain: the challenge of what an architecture institute should be, and for whom, remains as urgent in Rotterdam as it is in Montreal.