EM1 Master Design Studio – „UNBOXING THE (WHITE) CUBE: Multivalent Spaces for the MuseumsQuartier Vienna“
“You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.”
Gertrude Stein, letter to Alfred Barr, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, undated.
What is a museum? A temple, a box, a framework, a network – does art still need architecture at all? Stein’s statement identifies a conflict that persists to this day: art encounters an institution that collects, categorises, archives, and conserves.
Unboxing the (White) Cube means opening up the enclosed neutral box of the exhibition space – its geometry, its social codes, and its monofunctional use. Spatially: through porosity in plan and section, sequences of proportion, tectonics, and atmosphere, through thresholds, niches, and poché. Programmatically: by overlapping exhibition, production, and everyday life rather than separating them. Institutionally: through a museum that opens up its codes – access, behaviour, and belonging.
THE CONTEXT
The field of contemporary art has undergone a fundamental transformation over recent decades: artistic practices, innovative media, formats and modes of expression, curatorial concepts, participatory formats, alternative forms of ownership and funding, and new modes of interaction between art, audiences, and the public have evolved rapidly. In contrast to this dynamic development stands the architectural typology of the museum, which, since its establishment as a Western cultural concept in the nineteenth century, has in many respects proved remarkably resistant to institutional change.
On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the MuseumsQuartier Vienna (MQ) – one of the world’s largest art and cultural districts, situated at the intersection of the historic Fischer von Erlach imperial stables and the defining new buildings of the late 1990s – this design studio undertakes a speculative re-examination of this urban ensemble. Against the backdrop of current artistic, architectural, societal, and technological questions, the site calls for a radical typological and spatial transformation.
The studio understands the MuseumsQuartier not as a completed, heritage-protected ensemble, but as a multilayered urban, volumetric, and sociocultural field. The task is to rethink and negotiate the current tensions between public urban space architecturally, the diverse ways in which the public occupies and uses the site, highly frequented circulation routes, contemporary museum typologies in the context of current artistic production and changing curatorial practices, immersive display culture, and the constructive and ecological imperatives of building within existing structures.
THE TASK
The box is not the outcome of this studio. It is the beginning.
The task is to design a new museum for contemporary art within the MuseumsQuartier Vienna – as a speculative yet precise intervention into, or extension of, the existing fabric. What is sought is not simply another formal variation of the museum, but a spatial thesis on what a museum can be today.
The design must therefore operate simultaneously inward and outward: inward, addressing the museum typology itself, its spaces, thresholds, sequences, and curatorial conditions; outward, addressing its relationship to the existing fabric, the MuseumsQuartier, and the city. The existing MQ is not a neutral building site but a source of resistance, resources, and materials for the design.
Unboxing becomes a design method. Existing orders may be opened, superimposed, extended, undermined, or recomposed. What matters is not maximum openness, but the precise definition of spatial conditions that enable different forms of art, public life, and appropriation.
Within this studio, the museum is examined on two distinct levels: as a building with its inherited typology and as an institution embedded in an expanded contemporary sociocultural context. The outcome of the studio is an architectural space.
The following questions are central to the design:
Curatorial Interfaces & Typologies:
What qualities must exhibition spaces possess in order to accommodate analogue, large-scale installations as well as performative, digital, and time-based forms of art? What porous, adaptive, and atmospherically differentiated spatial sequences can provide alternatives to the White Cube?
Existing Fabric & Urban Permeability:
How does the intervention engage with the historic and late-modern building structures – through extension, transformation, vertical addition, or subterranean intervention? What new routes, visual axes, thresholds, and public interior spaces emerge?
Polyvalent Spaces & Temporal Adaptability:
How can openness emerge from diversity rather than neutrality without becoming arbitrary? Which tectonic and spatial parameters make a primary structure open to appropriation – accommodating changing programmes, times of day and seasons, and shifting publics, from exhibition use to non-commercial spaces for the city?
The theoretical point of departure for this question is Herman Hertzberger’s concept of the “inviting form” (Polyvalence, Architectural Design 84/5, 2014, pp. 106–113). The aim is to develop an assemblage of different, specific spaces whose openness emerges not from neutrality, but from the richness of the possibilities they offer.
Institutional Opening & Social Catalysts:
How does the building mediate between the interiority of the exhibition space and the highly frequented courtyards of the MQ? What can complementary programmes contribute – open studios, workshops, laboratories, archives, residencies, and freely programmable interstitial spaces?
HOW WE WORK – METHODOLOGY AND DIGITAL–ANALOGUE WORKFLOWS
At the core of the methodology is a close interplay between digital design tools and physical conceptual models.
Why work both analogue and digitally? Because neither medium is sufficient on its own. The digital model computes, varies, and manages complexity – but it does not test space, assembly, light, atmosphere, and scale. The physical model does exactly that – iteratively, but more slowly.
Models are therefore not retrospective representations of the design, but autonomous design tools. A digital study is tested through a physical artefact; the artefact, in turn, generates new questions that feed back into the digital process. Spatial prototypes emerge through rapid cycles between the two media: digital, physical, digital, and so on.
The design develops as an iterative, volumetric design process. Spatial prototypes and models, sections, plans, and renderings remain in continuous feedback with one another. Nothing is discarded after a phase, and no one starts again from zero. Each iteration revises and intensifies what already exists, gradually translating it into space, structure, construction, and material. Individual interests are continually combined with the studio’s input. Invent your own hybrid workflow.
WHAT IS THE OUTCOME? – STUDIO STRUCTURE AND OBJECTIVES
The studio is structured as an experimental design laboratory. Its objective, however, is the development of an architectural building whose individual conceptual layers – typology, function, programme, volume and space-defining elements, structure and structural system, circulation, façades as boundaries between interior and exterior, material systems, and so forth – are clearly defined and legible in the final submitted drawings and models.
As a foundation, students will analyse relevant examples of contemporary museum architecture and curatorial spatial concepts. Through initial spatial propositions, iterative digital design processes, physical model studies, and continuous, sustained work in section and plan, students will develop both an independent, critically grounded position on questions of contemporary architecture and a spatially and typologically innovative museum design with multivalent qualities.
STUDIO KICK-OFF
Monday, 5 October 2026, 14:00 — Zoom
Bring one question to the kick-off: What is a museum – and what could it be? Regular studio sessions: Every Thursday, 13:00–18:00 — Online or Seminar Space, i.sd