The Museum After the Monument

Historically, museums have borrowed from the language of power. Monumental steps. Heavy doors. Vast atriums. Controlled thresholds. 

“These gestures are intentional,” Balinda notes. “They prepare you for a certain kind of experience.” 

The comparison he reaches for is telling: a bank vault. A cathedral. Spaces that signal reverence and control at the same time. 

Architecture can protect, but it can also intimidate. 

When we speak about trust in cultural spaces, we often mean security - climate management, fire suppression, controlled access. These are obligations. But Balinda is more interested in something quieter: whether a space makes you feel held. 

Not watched. Not processed. Held. 

There is a difference between a building that safeguards objects and a building that encourages relationships. Museums, he argues, have often prioritised the first. 

The strange ritual of accumulation 

At one point in our conversation, Balinda zooms out so far that the entire premise of the museum becomes unfamiliar. 

“We accumulate objects,” he says. “We remove them from their original context. We freeze decay. We store ninety-seven percent of them out of sight. And then we invite the public to come and look at a small fraction through glass.” 

When described this way, the ritual feels almost abstract. 

Why do we do this? 

The question is not anti-museum. It is structural. If the core of the institution is accumulation and containment, then architecture will inevitably serve that logic. Large, centralised, energy-intensive buildings. Singular destinations. 

But what if that model is no longer the only one? 

Crowd gathering Maps

Beyond the single point 

Balinda is sceptical of the idea that the future lies in ever larger, ever more technologically ambitious museums. Technology matters - digital twins, energy modelling, integrated systems. His own practice works extensively in that space. But he warns against designing buildings that are obsolete by the time they open. 

“By the time you finish construction,” he says, “the world may already have shifted.” 

Instead, he proposes something more distributed. A network model. 

Rather than one monumental structure attempting to serve everyone, imagine smaller, agile nodes - culturally specific, locally embedded, digitally connected. Structures that can adapt, mutate, respond. Buildings that coexist rather than dominate. 

The metaphor he reaches for is biological rather than architectural: a neuronal network. 

In this model, the museum is less cathedral and more ecosystem. 

Technology as tool, not spectacle 

Technology, he believes, is both overestimated and underused. 

On one hand, immersive installations and digital overlays can quickly become gimmicks - impressive for a season, dated the next. On the other, digital infrastructure has the capacity to address one of the museum’s structural problems: invisibility. 

If most collections remain in storage, digital systems can offer access without physical strain. Not as replacement, but as extension. Visibility without exposure. 

The challenge is to let technology support the building’s logic rather than dictate it. 

“Good architecture has always been adaptable,” he says. “That hasn’t changed.” 

Power and prestige 

Museums have long been political instruments. Presidential projects. Statements of civic pride. Signals of global ambition. 

That hasn’t disappeared. 

“There is always a relationship to power,” Balinda says carefully. “That is not new.” 

The question is whether new museums are being driven by a renewed understanding of social responsibility, or by the older logic of prestige. Often, the architect enters the process late, when the momentum is already set. The brief exists. The location is chosen. The wheel is turning. 

In those circumstances, the space for genuine rethinking can be narrow. 

Balinda’s response has been to move upstream - engaging earlier, working on feasibility studies, trying to participate in the framing rather than just the execution. It is slower work. Less visible. But, in his view, more consequential. 

The museum as church 

At one point, Balinda compares museums to churches. 

Not in a theological sense, but in ritual. 

People gather. They move through space in a shared choreography. They approach objects like relics, paintings, artefacts, with a kind of reverence. They leave altered, or at least intending to be. 

The building frames that experience. 

But rituals evolve. Congregations reduce. Meanings shift. 

If museums are the new churches, then they face the same question religious institutions face everywhere: how to remain meaningful without becoming hollow monuments. 

Bank Museum

Identity, layered 

Balinda’s thinking is shaped by biography. Born in Burundi, educated in Belgium, working across Africa and now based between South Africa and France, he resists singular definitions. 

Identity, he argues, is layered. Contextual. Moving. 

Architecture should reflect that multiplicity rather than flatten it. 

Large, singular statements can struggle to accommodate competing narratives. Smaller, layered spaces may do better. Not by abandoning conservation or scholarship, but by loosening the grip of monumentality. 

A pause, not a rejection 

Balinda does not argue for the end of museums. He argues for a pause. 

A reconsideration of scale. Of intent. Of who the building is really for. 

The next era of museum design, he suggests, will not be defined by spectacle or by size. It will be defined by whether institutions can shift from being containers of objects to being facilitators of encounter. 

Trust, in this context, is not achieved through heavier doors or thicker walls. 

It is achieved when a space feels open enough to enter, flexible enough to change, and honest enough to question itself. 

The monument may remain. 

But it will no longer be the only form.