Experiences of historic house museums in Portugal and Brazil: Lives, Places and Memories
Historic house museum, Housing Architecture; Memory; Museum
Architecture; Museography.
The research is focused on the theory and practice of design regarding historic house
museums. It is based upon architectural studies on both museums and housing, tied to
concepts regarding poetics of space, morphology, perception, as well as the relationship
between practical life and imaginative memory. As a museum, the studied typology
needs to imprint, within the exhibition environment, practices that lead it to be an
institution of preservation and learning. In this sense, the main challenge perceived in
house-museums is to transform a residential building, with its objects and memories,
into a museological institution responsible for preserving, educating, communicating,
and other intrinsic actions. The research question emerges from the gap perceived in
historic house museums research: how do architecture and museography influence the
perception of a historic house museum as imaginative memory? In this research, the
relationships between form, image, exhibition spaces and housing spaces, as well as the
public interaction with such aspects, cause reflective considerations about housing
architecture and museography design. Thus, space can be considered a form of
language, essential to the understanding of the intimate life there portrayed. The initial
hypothesis is then to identify the architectural elements that, alongside museography,
enable the communication of a given imaginative memory for a house-museum. The
research has been developed with mixed methodological procedures, with tools and
instruments of analysis and interpretation that allowed a broad understanding of the
phenomena, their sense and meaning, through a process of interactive and
simultaneous steps. To this extent, we have selected four historic house museums as
case studies (Fundação Amália Rodrigues Casa-Museu, Fundação Medeiros e Almeida
Casa-Museu, Fundação Ema Klabin Casa Museu e Casa Guilherme de Almeida),
researched within a framework that encompasses: Context (life and place), Space and
form (visual and morphological analysis), Use and Perception (interviews with
working staff and visitors). The data gathered were cross analysed, allowing the
development of parameters confronted with the revised state of the art. The conclusions
rediscuss the problem initially stated, suggesting ways to rethink housing poetics and
imaginative memory within the process that changes a house into a historic house
museum.