Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display Review
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"Museums produced natural knowledge and were themselves architectural spectacles," writes Carla Yanni. "As such, they comprise a rich cultural site suggestive of interdisciplinary historical study." In Nature's Museums, Yanni brings together the history of architecture and history of science in an engaging study of how the Victorians approached the housing and display of scientific artifacts.
Focusing on the Oxford University Museum, the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art, and the Natural History Museum of London, Yanni explores how such institutions reflected varying, often contradictory concepts of nature -- from the handiwork of God to a resource to be exploited. She explains how the rise of museums accompanied and influenced the transformation of science from a "gentleman's hobby" to a paying profession. And she shows how the buildings themselves remain invaluable guides to the Victorians' ambiguous perception of the natural world. Through careful social and historical accounts of the buildings, their displays, and their reception, Yanni's work deepens our understanding of the emerging power of museums in Darwin's century.
"Piled high with bones and stuffed animals, natural history museums were the primary places of interaction between natural science and its diverse publics. Studies of the natural world (what we now think of as biology and geology) were changing and conflicted disciplines, and thus no single vision of nature emerged in the Victorian period. Consequently, architects could not devise any one distinctive building type... Nature's Museums analyzes how the architecture of selected natural history museums in Britain contributed to the legitimization of knowledge." -- from Nature's Museums
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