Spatial Orders of Memory and Knowledge. Architectural Schemes for Collections in Early Modern Sweden

Spatial Orders of Memory and Knowledge has contributed new perspectives on how collections and scientific practices were underpinned architecturally in Sweden in the second half of the seventeenth century. The main hypothesis was that the architectural arrangements were devised as tools to support memorisation, learning and research. To uncover such intentions, the project compared architecture made to hold and exhibit works of art, scientific instruments, specimens, dissected bodies, living plants, antiquities, etc. with inventories, catalogues and formulations by scientists, for instance in diaries and letters. The project gathered primary sources and existing research on prominent patrons of architecture, art and science - Queen Christina and her court in Stockholm and Uppsala and leading noblemen - and scientists like Olaus Rudbeck the Elder at Uppsala University. The Swedish material was also re-construed anew in relation to recent research on scientific practice and architecture on the continent, especially in relation to the development in the other Nordic states - Denmark-Norway and Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp. The project has contributed new understandings in the history of museums, history of knowledge, history and theory of architecture and historical memory studies. It has demonstrated the close relation between the development of novel architecture for research and teaching - Kunstkammern, anatomical theatres, libraries, botanical gardens etc. - and the elaboration of scientific method, classification, inventorying and other knowledge technologies with their roots in rhetoric and dialectics. The project has also substantiated arguments for that the institutionalisation and systematisation of Nordic museums began as early as the mid-seventeenth century. With interdisciplinary methods the project has produced analyses across research in art history, architectural history, intellectual history, history of science, history of knowledge, memory studies, rhetoric, history of the book and libraries, university history and historical studies in botany, anatomy, archaeology, numismatics, technology etc. The studies have been based on substantial archival material from archives in Uppsala, Stockholm and Copenhagen, digitised publications from the seventeenth century, site surveys of existing buildings and visits to museums with relevant institutional or collection history. A study trip was made to Leiden, since the university there was the most important international institution for higher education for Swedish scientists and scholars in the period and an important provider of impulses. A project symposium gathered 17 North-European participants in Uppsala and Skokloster to exchange experiences of early modern culture of science and collecting. The project has testet out new interdisciplinary methods and demonstrated the relevance of thinking multidisciplinarily and interdisciplinarily in order to provide better understanding of the cultures of knowledge in the early modern Nordic countries and the role of architecture.

Prosjektet gir ny kunnskap om den tidligste utviklingen av museumsvesenet i Norden - dens teknikker, teknologier, arkitektur og praktiker, og at den nordiske utviklingen stod på nivå med eller bidro til den europeiske utviklingen. Resultatene kan ha betydning for museumsinstitusjoner i de nordiske landene og for forskningsfeltet museologi. Prosjektet viser dessuten på at avgjørende influenser for arkitekturutviklingen ikke kom fra arkitekturteori uten fra tidligmoderneteori som hadde sitt utgangspunkt i blant annet retorikk og dialektikk. Dette kan ha innvirkning på hvordan vitenskapsarkitektur forstås innen arkitekturhistorie og for historieskrivingen av arkitekturteori. Prosjektet vil ha en viere betydelse for felter som idéhistorie, kunnskapshistorie, vitenskapshistorie, kulturhistorie, og for tverrvitenskapelige problemstillinger knyttet til disse.

The project examines three architectural schemes for collections in early modern Sweden against the background of intellectual developments and similar building projects in Europe, and it hypothesises that they are conceived as cognitive devices supporting memory and learning. Ensembles of rooms devised specifically for the storage and display of books, artwork, scientific instruments, natural specimens, etc. are studied in relation to similar, and often model, schemes overseas, whether built, planned, or drawn up in treatises. The project addresses prominent and wealthy patrons of architecture, art, and science, who operated in a European cultural sphere in which practical and Hermetic theories of memory and knowledge played an influential role. The study draws on studies of theory, archival research, and site studies of three architectural schemes for collections: one at Skokloster Palace, built 1654-1668 for statesman and military commander Carl Gustaf Wrangel, one in Drottningholm Palace, constructed from the 1740s to the 1760s for Queen Louisa Ulrika, and one installed in the 1780s in Stockholm Palace for King Gustav III and, after his death, reopened as Kongl. museum in 1794. Central to the project is to analyse the orders of memory and knowledge that underpinned the schemes and how they came to materialise in the architecture of cabinets, libraries, and galleries. The study asks how they are related to individual ambitions or to societal and cultural contexts, and it assesses the presumed cognitive advantages. Addressing the totality of the scheme as a sequence and an ensemble of rooms and room types, the project analyses the role of the architectural scheme for optimisation of memory resources. Combining the study of architectural form with the study of the intellectual concerns that influence their conception, the project develops new theoretical readings of schemes conceived as devices for learning and education.