City of Wonder

The National Museum Complex Master plan (NMCM) project is described as an urban project which accumulates various kinds of museums at an extraordinary scale. This project should start from a question on what is an essence of experiences which a museum deliver to people.
The essence of museum experiences can be defined in threefold issues: typology, experience, and unordinary objects.

1. TYPOLOGY
Cabinet of Curiosities

A prototype of museum is the cabinet of curiosities in Renaissance Europe. It is a human-scale structure which attempt to categorize encyclopedic collections of extraordinary objects in order to tell stories about the wonders. The cabinet of curiosities represent best the essence of museum typology.

2. EXPERIENCE
Unordinary encountering

To experience a sense of place that museums deliver is equivalent to meeting with unordinary worlds out of everyday life. Thus, in the new city of museum complex, it is significant to invite people to the world which deviates from routinely life.

3. OBJECTS
Wonder

People face with collections of extraordinary objects in the city of museums, experiencing sentiments of wonder. Institution of museum will be possible to work because of this wonder. This wonder possibly reinforces institution of museum to work. Therefore, people should be able to face with feeling of wonder from small objects to urban-scale space in the city of museum.

A city for museums utilizes spatial characteristics of “Cabinet of Curiosities” as a prototype for itself. At first, it attempts to generate the horizontal cabinet, scaling up it to urban one. Thus, the city can take the horizontal cabinet as a conceptual city framework for the museum city.

The framework which highlights partitioned room corresponds to the traditional museum plan where rooms are connected without corridors. A city of rooms. In rooms becoming a city, people face with objects and experience wonder. Thus, this rooms are called “Wonder-Room.”

The City of Wonder consist of the Wonder-Room and Programmed Strips which are systems of activating the rooms as a city.