The house in Fresno where Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winning American-Armenian novelist, playwright and visual artist William Saroyan spent his final years is set to be converted into a house museum. Having as a given that the volume of Saryoan’s literary and artistic legacy, his role within his time and social, historic setting is overwhelmingly elaborate to be appropriated into the physical dimensions of one of the four houses the writer inhabited and steering clear of traditional constructs of a house museum, since November of 2016, we’ve set a conceptual roadmap of innovative ideas that formulate a holistic representation of Saroyan’s life.
Design Concept
The research orientations that were explored attested the advancement of knowledge we have of Saroyan’s life and of his universe. Not only does it turn out that very little is known about Saroyan, but the existing information remains, to this day, very much scattered.
The museum is inscribed in one of the houses in which lived Saroyan, the scenographical concept transforms the original spaces as it tries to reflect the duality of Saroyan’s identity.
From the inside, the house is completely dematerialized, deconstructed in order to immerse the visitor in Saroyan’s interiority. The visitor can thus grasp, at random, a diverse range of digital data held within the inner walls and referring alternately to his personality, character, memory, imagination, influences, pastimes and Armenian roots which tinted his writing.
Greeting the visitor, Saroyan himself is present in the heart of the museum in a holographic form. The author offers to guide the visitor’s attention through these walls of data, opening windows of content interpretation, reintroducing unity within the digital library.
