Museum as heterotopia

"This is in many ways the essence of the Heterotopia outlined by Foucault in his work ‘Of other spaces’ (1967). If a Utopia is a non-place, outside of the bounds of real-time and real-place, that cannot be pointed out on a map (Heaven, Shagri-La, Valhalla, The happy hunting grounds, Hell, Elysian fields) Then a heterotopia is a real-time, real-space human construction, that can pointed out on a map but that is in someway outside of human tangibility and perceptions of time, space, geography. Foucault himself gives the key example of a Heterotopia as the Museum. Foucault describes the modern museum as “the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes… a place of all times that is itself outside of time.” (Foucault, 1967) The museum seeks to dissolve notions of time and geography by creating a non-place (or at the very least a metaphysical space that is beyond place) A space where experiences may be had in the present and in-situ of a real-location manifesting the experience, but where those experiences are not ‘of that time’ and often geographically misplaced. " NOTE: This quote was found through Yahoo! search engine on another blog, archived on the University of New South Wales server. Author unknown, refer to link below.