Open-Air Museums: Architectural History for the Masses

Abstract

a byre beside the house and a pig lies near the front door, his snout just above the mud. A young woman cooks dinner on an open hearth in the family's principal living space, and in the adjoining chamber a suspended sheet keeps pieces of thatch from falling on well-kept beds. As she empties a bucket of waste water out the door, she explains that this was a superior house when first built about 1820. Indeed, many farmers in the north of Ireland lived in a single room, bringing their animals through the house to reach a byre. This evocation of a recently lost style of rural Ulster life takes place not in County Tyrone, where the farmhouse was originally built, but in the Shenandoah Valley, outside Staunton, Virginia (Figure 1). The speaker's easygoing but instructive remarks remind us that we are in a museum-the state-supported Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia-and not a private house. Variously called outdoor history exhibits, folk parks, and open-air museums, such places specialize in the re-creation of vanishing scenes of human life, often complete with animals, crops, and ancient vehicles. With buildings as their principal elements, these institutions have become a major venue for public encounters with architectural history, particularly the history of folk buildings. They also raise important questions of preservation and interpretation. Removing a variety of picturesque old buildings and furnishings from their real environments in order to set them up at convenient distances from one another in a safe and sanitized park sounds quintessentially American. Actually, open-air museums originated in Europe and have, in the last few decades, become an international phenomenon. Their numbers are now growing at a surprising rate, from Anwei Province in China to Salt Lake City, Utah. Enclaves of French farm buildings have been re-created next door to others still in use in the Dordogne countryside. Ancient Japanese buildings have been museumized in places like Takayama and Matsumoto. There are open-air museums in Jakarta and Pretoria, Seoul and Addis Ababa, as well as in Dallas, Texas, and Montgomery, Alabama. By their nature, most open-air museums are national or regional in focus, presenting aspects of native culture drawn from a single country or district. The earliest openair folk parks, like Skansen in Stockholm and the Norsk Folkmuseum in Oslo, grew out of late-nineteenth-century ethnographic studies of indigenous folk culture. They reflected the notion that conventional museum displays were too confining a medium for presenting rich cultural material. They also embodied the same sense of nationalism expressed in folk-revival design extending across Europe in the same period. That sense of nationalism may be responsible for the tendency in European museums to emphasize the unchanging nature of folkways. Often these institutions focus on subtle differences among regional cultures, using formal analysis of folk pottery, clothing, and-most visibly-houses