Encyclopedic plateaus.

Plan of the Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton, 1851

The huge glass and steel structure of the Crystal Palace is built by Joseph Paxton to shelter the 1851 London World Fair, where the state of the art in science from around the world is brought together for the first time. The building is organized along what Mari Hvattum and Christian Hermansen call the Axis of Progress.

Entering the Crystal Palace though the south transept, the visitor encountered a twofold starting point; the beginning of the exhibition itself and the "point zero" of human civilisation. From South to North along the central transept of the palace he would progress through various degrees of "primitiveness" — from Tunis, through China and the Middle East, to India, Turkey and Egypt. The developmental line continued in the main nave, where the visitor was led, east to west, from the new world, through the European coninent, and finally to the conceived culmination of the exhibition and culture alike — the industrial products of the British Empire. The Great Exhibition was a carefully choreographed exercise in progressive historiography.

in Tracing Modernity: Manifestations of the Modern in Architecture and the City, Mari Hvattum, Christian Hermansen, Routledge, 2004

Here, space and time are compressed into one single narrative, where (non-Western) contemporary societies are understood as primitive steps of human evolution. Rather than of a geographic journey, the experience proposed to the public here is one of a time-travel. There is no Other, only different degrees of accomplishment.

Diagram plan for the Ideal Museum, According, to Wikipedia, Gottfried Semper, Mainz, 1852

A very similar diagram is proposed by German architect Gottfried Semper (1805-1975) for his Ideal Museum. Attentive observer of "primitive" societies, driven by the idea that Art, rather than witnessing a cultural evolution, synthesizes an evolution of techniques, he outlines his Ideal Museum as such : pieces are grouped by medium, each group along a evolution axis that would go from the periphery to the centre of the museum, from the less developed technique. Here as well, time and space are compiled into one single narrative, with the least concern for cultural contexts.

The universal collection would form a great comparative matrix in which the artefacts were arranged not according to chronology of aesthetic value (the most common criteria for museum classification at the time), but according to the four primordial techniques of making, and their corresponding "elements". The section comprising textile art, for instance, would begin with the simplest wickerwork, expand to more defined textile products, and culminate in the metamorphosed motif of Beklidung in its different guises" […] The "complete and universal collection" was meant to provide a comprensive overview of human making. It would be not simply another museum but a complete encyclopaedia of human culture : a system of axioms by means of which a science of art could be established."

Encyclopedic plateau, Plan of the LACMA, OMA, 2002

Not far, in some respect, from the above mentioned modernist universalist fantasies, the encyclopedic plateau proposed by OMA for the LACMA in 2004 is yet divided in four geographic/thematic stripes, each of them separated from the others by deep circulation trenches, and organized along its own timeline (History), at is own speed. Through transverse paths, visitors are invited to experience diachronisms and synchronisms in the collections.