The designer Calum Storrie has just published a book called The Delirious Museum.[*] His starting point is the belief that the museum should be a continuation of the street - as easy to enter, as amusing to pass through. This concept is possible in Britain where we have no museum charges, but the notion that streets have a lot in common with museums - and that the pleasures and interest streets offer may be greater - has a history which parallels that of Modernism. The delirious museum Storrie assembles in his imagination runs together the domain of objects caught in the museum net and that of objects which still float free. Primary texts are those in which Baudelaire and Benjamin describe the flâneur's disengaged observation of the city's unfathomable complexity.

LRB 9 February 2006 | PDF Download