Interpretation Centers: speaking on site

Fundamental to the museum institution is the notion of the collection, and the corresponding preeminence of curation. Artifacts, whether artistic, historical, ethnographic, or natural, are extracted from their native context, presented as objects in their own right, while also standing as authority for the curators' representation of that native context. 

Reversing the figure-ground relationship of the museum , the interpretation center brings architecture out into the world. It is little architecture in a big world, directed not to encapsulating the world but to operating in it, not to explaining the world but to preparing the visitor to descend into a direct experience of a part of it, on its own ground. 

Centre d'Interpretation Bourg de Pabos
Gaspe, Quebec 
Atelier Big City

The exhibition spaces of the building are continuous with the architecture of the building as a whole. Interpretive material predominates, and inhabits the architecture of the building directly, occupying the same space as the visitor.

At Bourg de Pabos, only the most rudimentary remains exist on the archaeological site, and abstract landscape devices are necessary to give a minimal physical sense of the Bourg. In attempting to resolve the problem of settling the terrain of the site, the solution was a linear building pattern scaled to match nearby infrastructure rather than the scattered architectural remains.  

Construction contains mostly exterior space, enclosed areas are minor in scale and provisional in placement. The industrial materials, galvanized steel and highway signs and flake boards, are deployed more than detailed, providing the construction with a robust contemporary vernacular in common spirit with the crude architecture of the absent settlement. 

The center is positioned in direct visual dialogue with the archeological site, its huge panels acting to direct and conceptualize views to the remains. The intense color and large-scale graphics of these panels remain legible from among the ruins, providing the reassuring presence of interpretation for the visitor wandering the site of the mostly invisible Bourg.