Bologna Museum-Lab | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026

Bologna has a long industrial and academic history, being the site of the oldest university in Europe – the University of Bologna, founded in 1088. Once the centre of silk production and textiles for its advanced canal systems, it eventually fell into crisis towards the end of the 18th century. However, industry was revived through a focus on knowledge and education, sparking a new industry in mechanical manufacturing and food packaging. This project proposes a Museum-Lab that stores university collections for nearby university museums. The derelict industrial site located on the outskirts of Bologna will become the new space for academic researchers from local academic institutions to interactively study and classify incoming artefacts in a public-facing collection. The public audience is invited to view collections interactively by encountering them not as simple objects, but as a process.

Design Project 1 A VR application, made using Unreal Engine 5, tracked bodily motion and speed during a LiDAR scan. Resulting point clouds were distorted based on movement qualities to visualise the relationship between space and perceived time.

How do you view museum artefacts? In the context for the programme, the app had been adapted to record subjective viewings of museum artefacts found across UCL’s collections, identifying positions of high attention and low attention across the model

Plan Drawings

Section

Final Film Formed from the transposition of artefacts to Bologna from UCL’s campus, the Museum-Lab describes the collective yet subjective viewing of objects in museums. From object, to subject, to site, a space to store local university collections is created.