Buildings in use - Guildford Museum

Design
I have chosen Guildford Museum as my final building for this assignment  because I wanted a subject where there are problems with the design, to contrast with the previous buildings where the internal design is generally fit for the intended use. Furthermore, as a member of the Friends of Guildford Museum, I am familiar with these shortcomings and the plans to remedy them.

Guildford Museum - exterior

Guildford Museum is a municipal museum founded in Victorian times that occupies three buildings: a 16th century merchants house, an extension to the merchants house built to provide an exhibition hall shortly after the museum was founded, and an adjoining Georgian town house. The current interior arrangements were established early in the 1960's and only minor changes have been made since then. The exhibition areas are spread across the lower floor of all three buildings. The top floors of the 16th century house and the Georgian house are used as offices, work rooms and a specialist library.
There are several difficulties with these arrangements:-

• Most of the exhibits are displayed in a warren of small rooms which makes it difficult to display the objects in an attractive way.
• The exhibition space changes level in each building with a staircase in between making access difficult for some visitors.
• Most of the displays have been unchanged since the 1960s and comprise a mixed bag of objects from the county of Surrey without a coherent narrative. Some items are not displayed as well as they should be, many of the displays are showing their age, and there is no use of technology to enhance understanding of the items.
• The museum is in a side street which is little frequented by the public. 

The borough council has a development plan for the museum which would create a new entrance from the popular Guildford Castle grounds at the back of the museum and would provide lift access to all floors. The interior of the 16th century house would be restructured to open up the space for exhibits by removing partitions that are not part of the original structure. The Georgian house will be used for the office and work spaces. A new permanent exhibition will be introduced with a coherent theme "The History of Guildford". Unfortunately, even if the planning and funding go smoothly, this development will only take place in the second half of the decade.
Photography
In addition to the technical issues, photography of the interior of the museum presents a significant creative challenge: how to convey pictorially the complex of small rooms and the drab, old fashioned displays?
I made an initial visit without a camera to decide whether the museum could be a potential subject. I noted a number of potential views of the interior which might work photographically. I returned a few days  later  with my camera and tripod to take a first batch of photographs. Having reviewed these to consider how these fitted my purpose, I returned to the museum with another shooting list of potential shots and angles.
This is a situation where I wondered about using the device of taking pictures of selected parts of the interior to symbolize the larger scene. This device is used extensively in the photo layouts of the "Hip Hotels" books by Herbert Ypma.
Example of page layout from Hip Hotels France (published by Thames and Hudson 2001)

The Hip Hotels France book describes 24 stylish hotels across France. For each hotel, there is an article of 4-8 pages, comprising one or two pages of text, together with some excellent photographs. Most show the interiors of the hotels, but there is typically one or two views of the exterior of the hotel and its location. I could find no credit mentioned in the book for photography and I guess that Herbert Ypma himself may be the photographer as the style for each location is very consistent and distinctive. The sleeve notes disclose that the author is the founder of the award winning magazine Interior Design which probably accounts for the predominance of interior views.
In the museum, I took a number of photographs of individual display cases, objects and corners of rooms which I thought portrayed the time worn character of the place as well as having visual interest. However, when it came to selecting a couple of final images for this assignment, I found that the pictures of individual items that I had taken did not work as well as the room views for the purposes of this assignment. I think that this device would work if I were to combine several images into a single picture, rather like the four images combined in the Hip Hotels example shown above. I felt that producing multiple image pictures was outside the realms of the current assignment.  
Image 1

Museum display room: bike, tiles and other stuff

Nikon 18-200mm lens at 18mm: Iso 400 f7.1 for 1/15th second
This is a view of one of the principal exhibition rooms in the museum. I had discovered that it is generally better to have something reasonably close to the lens to add visual interest to the foreground in these pictures. Hence in this case, I chose a viewpoint where the bicycle features prominently on the left hand foreground. There is a large display case of blue and white tiles filling a significant part of the frame. This is intentional, as this case dominates the room. The perspective lines lead the viewers eye through the doorway through which two other display rooms can be seen. A visitor can be seen in the furthest room.
Image 2

Case containing objects from Gertrude Jekyll collection

Nikon 18-200mm lens at 18mm: Iso 400 f7.1 for 1/4th second
This is a view of one of the permanent exhibits, a glass case containing items bequeathed to the museum by Gertrude Jekyll, a famous garden designer and collector of rustic furniture and objects in the 19th and early 20th century in Surrey.
I chose a viewpoint through this ancient doorframe, primarily because this minimizes reflections in the glass of the case. In addition, this provides a frame to give depth to the picture and it shows some of the structural timbers of the building.
This is an example of old fashioned display in the museum. The glass case is almost 2 metres square containing items of furniture and a variety of small items. It is only possible to see the items near to the glass with any clarity as the interior of the case is relatively dark whereas the surrounding room is relatively bright as it has an external window. Furthermore, reflections on the glass make looking inside even more problematic.
I was interested to contrast this display with a similar item at the Garden Museum, near Lambeth Palace in London. As part of the Garden Museum's permanent exhibition, they have Gertrude Jekyll's work desk. This stands on a low plinth with no glass case or other protection. There is a sign warning visitor thats the historic item should not be touched, but it is otherwise possible to examine it as closely as you want. Small items such as hand tools were displayed at the Garden Museum in shallow glass cases so that the items could be seen at close distance.
Style of prints
I have processed and printed both these images in colour to show the interior Guildford museum in the best manner: as good as, if not slightly better than they would seem to a visitor to the museum itself. The processing included minimizing colour casts from the mixture of daylight and artificial light and adjusting exposure levels to lighten some of the dark areas.
I considered the option of making monochrome prints of these photographs. This would emphasize the dark historic atmosphere of the photographs:-

Low key monochrome version of image 2

I also wondered whether go a step further and produce an "Instagram" style antiquated look version?

Antique look version using a Silver EffexPro preset

 However, I did not feel it was appropriate to use these techniques. Whilst it would be feasible to produce some dramatic looking photographs, these would not be a fair representation of the museum as it actually is. A person might be convinced by such photographs initially, but they would soon realize if they visited the building that reality was different. I do not want to misrepresent the situation significantly either way.