Montreal Architectural Review publishes That Dark Cabinet: Building the Morbid Anatomy Museum

The Montreal Architectural Review recently published Dean Robert Kirkbride’s article, That Dark Cabinet: Building the Morbid Anatomy Museum, which details the museum’s origins and creation. Designed by Dr. Kirkbride and his collaborator, Anthony Cohn, AIA, the Morbid Anatomy Museum embodied a convergence of architecture and anatomy, creating opportunities to exhibit the innards of a building that are typically obscured. Dr. Kirkbride, a specialist on cabinets of curiosities, reliquaries and memory chambers, worked closely with Director Joanna Ebenstein and the museum board to conceive the Morbid Anatomy Museum as a building-as-cabinet that displayed a collection of anatomical curiosities and celebrated artifacts, histories and ideas that fall between the cracks of high and low culture, death and beauty, and disciplinary divides. The museum hosted the kind of temporary exhibitions that very few larger museums can produce, drawing on private and public collections and calling on the scholarship and expertise of the greater Morbid Anatomy community. During its brief and bright existence, the Morbid Anatomy Museum ranked among the top museums in New York City and became a defining feature in the Gowanus neighborhood. Dr. Kirkbride’s essay retraces several circuitous yet interlacing storylines that culminated in the museum’s construction and considers how uncertainty and methods of inquiry such as the close reading of artifacts, buildings, texts and contexts, have fueled his practice and teaching, by informing such habits of mind as upstreaming.

For a downloadable pdf follow this link to the Montreal Architectural Review.

Image: Image of the Morbid Anatomy Museum ribbon-cutting