Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Architect: Leslie Martin. Image: Jarrod Haberfield

With Jarrod Haberfield - Tuesday 8 November 7:30pm

The notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk – the total work of art – was devised in the mid-1800s by composer Richard Wagner but quickly became synonymous with an approach to interior design in which built-in and decorative elements of a room combine to create an autonomous whole. In the many years since, our adherence to this ‘ideal’ of autonomy has, with fashion, waxed and waned in popularity. In the parallel world of museology, we saw in the early twentieth century the birth of the ‘white cube’ gallery idiom that remains prevalent to this day – an idiom that presents each artwork not as part of a cohesive whole but instead as a pristine, standalone entity that we are taught is best enjoyed in the total absence of distraction.

This talk will see architect and scholar Jarrod Haberfield sharing his ruminations on how we engage with art in the highly personalised and visually distracting world of the house-museum, compared with the rarefied, distraction-free world of the institutional art museum. Where does the art look best? And which offers an optimal mode of engagement? Jarrod’s thoughts, drawn from his doctoral research and extensive travels, may surprise you.

Jarrod Haberfield is an architect, educator and scholar with abiding interests in architecture and museology – specifically the pressure that art and its display might exert on our conception of buildings. An investigation into the ways in which art and architecture relate to and influence each other is at the heart of his current doctoral research into the emergence of the house-museum as a hybrid architectural type.