OF ALL the things our kids enjoyed about our family’s annual weeklong summer vacations in Quebec City, their favorite was a small museum. Its official name was “Musée du Fort’’ — the museum of the fort — but we always called it “the diorama.’’ You sat in a darkened room looking down on a topographical model of 18th-century Quebec — houses, churches, trees and hills, frigates on the St. Lawrence River, regiments of tiny blue- and red-coated soldiers. A slide show on the back wall told the story of the long French and English struggle for possession of the city. You jumped whenever some startling little effect would take place on the diorama: a red signal flare shooting up from the ships on the river, a volley of shots crackling out between the lines of toy soldiers arranged on the green-painted Plains of Abraham.
The perfect spirit of an old museum
EDITORIAL | Opinion
Our great fear, from one year to the next, was that the diorama would change. It wasn’t broken - but still, they might decide to fix it, make it bigger, flashier, more interactive. Or scrap it altogether in favor of some new exhibit that would be bigger, flashier, more interactive. But year after year, the diorama was the same: the soldiers, the puffs of smoke, the moment when the French-accented narrator, intoning a long list of strategic military locations, ended with “ . . . and on to Quebec, the neck of the bottle,’’ a line whose solemn portentousness made us laugh.
Museums are always reinventing themselves. The news is full of dramatic expansions and re-openings. In Boston, new wings at the Gardner and the Museum of Fine Arts. In New York, additions to the Morgan Library and MOMA. The Cleveland Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the British Museum - all have recently undergone major building projects. Leading architects create new buildings that talk eloquently to the old buildings. Critics come and write articles. The public comes to see what all the fuss is about and, ideally, keeps coming back to see special exhibitions as well as items that the museum has been able to take out of storage and display in the new gallery space.