Historic house museums and their change of use: searching for balanced building performance: a case study in São Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

A house museum has its own particularities, presenting many challenges in terms of conservation of the building itself and its surroundings. This article aims to present integrative methods that can be adopted by museum managers and teams to monitor the building performance of a historic house museum. An exploratory study was carried out using Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE), a multi-methods non-invasive application, at the Ema Klabin historic house museum in São Paulo, Brazil. This approach analyses qualitative and quantitative aspects of the environments to evaluate their performance and the context in which they operate, including the point of view aired by researchers/evaluators, other experts, and regular users. Summary charts and maps regarding diagnosis and recommendations were developed to demonstrate the results achieved with these methods. They are the result of cross-sectional surveys, providing input to aid decision making and developing possible guidelines for future projects with similar characteristics.

Keywords

• Historic house museuns
• Museuns
• Post-occupancy evaluation (POE)
• Building performance