Hadwig Kraeutler: Otto Neurath. Museum and Exhibition Work: Spaces (Designed) for Communication

”Museums of the future [...] ought not to be as I would like to have them, but as the visitors and users would want them if they knew what makes a museum.” Otto Neurath’s vision in 1933 of the future development of the museum as a public space, and as a pedagogical and social project, gives a good idea of why he is often mentioned in handbooks on the history of museums. But considering the rapidly growing number of studies since the 1970s of Neurath as a philosopher, economist and sociologist – the literature on his many exhibition projects is still very small. These projects and his writings on museums have usually been treated as a slightly anecdotal part of his career; a separate, straightforward and practical undertaking, only indirectly linked to his supposedly more serious and theoretical pursuits. The exception is the fairly large literature on ISOTYPE, the standardised graphic language for visual education, developed in the latter half of the 1920s at the “social and economic museum” in Vienna. However, rather than analysing ISOTYPE as an integrated part of Neurath’s many-faceted museum project, these studies have mostly treated the exhibitions as a given, as the historical circumstance for the birth of a new kind of graphic design.