Period rooms: between exhibition space and living room, negotiating past and present

古代室是博物馆陈列的一种混合形式，它将私人室内装饰与公共文化相结合，旨在传达一种风格、一个历史时期或一个特定的地区或地点。房间起源于19世纪末的德国、瑞士和斯堪的纳维亚博物馆，然后在20世纪20年代和30年代在美国扎根，在那里，房间一直很常见，直到今天，房间是一种视觉文化的一部分，涉及室内设计和家居、历史的呈现和教学、国家建设以及性别问题。该项目的第一部分考察了美国古代房间发明期间的政治，并将探索作为历史性和现代性之间的枢纽的时代房间。它将针对时期房间的位置，谈判装饰和策展，家庭和公共形式的知识创造。通过比较两个博物馆，一个在美国，另一个在德国，第二部分的目的是解开艺术家和策展人处理时代空间的当代策略。该项目的目标是出版两本专著：其中一本计划作为增强型电子书出版，这样就有可能收录在对纽约、费城、芝加哥和马萨诸塞州剑桥博物馆档案馆进行的两次研究旅行中发现的各种材料和新来源。项目成果将在两个研讨会上展示和讨论，这两个研讨会的目标是古代室与家的关系，以及古代室在博物馆历史中作为跨国交汇点的作用。

The period room is a hybrid form of museum display that negotiates private interior decoration and public cultures of display aiming at conveying a style, a historical period or a particular region or locale. Originating in German, Swiss and Scandinavian museums at the end of the 19th Century and then taking hold in the US in the 1920s and 1930s where they are common until today period rooms are part of a visual culture addressing issues such as interior design and the home, the presentation and didactics of history, nation building as well as issues on gender. The first part of the project examines the politics of American period rooms during their invention and will explore the period room as a hinge between historicity and modernity. It will target the period room’s position negotiating decorating and curating, the home and public forms of knowledge making. By comparing two museums, one in the US the other in Germany it is the aim of the second part to unpack the contemporary strategies dealing with the period room by artists and curators. The objective of this project are two monographs: one of them is planned as an enhanced e-book, that will make it possible to include the heterogeneous material and new sources recovered during two research trips to museum archives in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cambridge Mass. The project-results will be presented and discussed during two workshops that target the period room’s relation to the home and the period room’s function as a transnational intersection within museum history.