Exhibiting Voids: Displaying Migration and the Role of the Built Environment

A crucial yet still under-investigated aspect of representing histories and memories of migration in museums is the connection between exhibition design, contents and spaces. The building, indeed, not only provides a venue for the museum – that is to say a more or less historically meaningful context that frames the exhibits – but also affects the impact of the exhibition and the intellectual, aesthetic and physical engagement of the audience with it. By comparing two different immigration museums – the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, both in New York City and both located in historical immigration sites – we seek, in this contribution, to reflect on the role of the museum’s architectural context as an element of the display in immigration museums. We will do so by combining our own diverse yet complementary approaches as an architect (Lanz) and a museologist (Whitehead) respectively, building on our previous research on migration, identity and place-representation in museums.