Abstract
This thesis is a proposal of how technology can be used to augment the museum’s goals as a 21st century cultural institution. The automated warehouse typology, which uses mobile robots to transport items in storage around the warehouse is studied and combined with the museum typology to form a new reconfigurable museum which allows visitors to have greater curatorship over what they see in the museum. In many museums across the world, a huge percentage of artworks are kept in storage facilities, as museums frequently do not have enough space to show more artworks. Mobile robots, which are growing in usage to assist with logistical transportation issues such as in warehouses and hospitals, can assist in moving museum artefacts usually kept in storage to display, thereby increasing museum visitor’s access to a larger collection of artefacts, and also giving visitors more control over what they want to see. The proposed museum warehouse building is located in the Museum Planning Area of Singapore, where there are currently several museums, each with their own specialized collections, which can all also tap upon the museum warehouse as an artefact storage facility. The larger goal of the project is also to discover how a building can be designed to be more flexible and adaptable in nature, using the museum as a typology of building for starting investigations into changing needs and challenges.