Over recent decades, many museums, galleries and historic sites around the world have enjoyed an unprecedented level of large-scale investment in their capital infrastructure, in building refurbishments and new gallery displays. This period has also seen the creation of countless new purpose-built museums and galleries, suggesting a fundamental re-evaluation of the processes of designing and shaping of museums.

Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions examines this re-making by exploring the inherently spatial character of narrative in the museum and its potential to connect on the deepest levels with human perception and imagination. Through this uniting theme, the chapters explore the power of narratives as structured experiences unfolding in space and time as well as the use of theatre, film and other technologies of storytelling by contemporary museum makers to generate meaningful and, it is argued here, highly effective and affective museum spaces. Contributions by an internationally diverse group of museum and heritage professionals, exhibition designers, architects and artists with academics from a range of disciplines including museum studies, theatre studies, architecture, design and history cut across traditional boundaries including the historical and the contemporary and together explore the various roles and functions of narrative as a mechanism for the creation of engaging and meaningful interpretive environments.

Part I: Narrative, space, identity; Introduction;
1. Imaginary museums: what mainstream museums can learn from them: Rachel Morris;
2. Staging exhibitions: atmospheres of imagination: Greer Crawley;
3. Writing spatial stories: textual narratives in the museum: Laura Hourston Hanks.
4. Athens, London or Bilbao? Contested narratives of display in the Parthenon galleries of the British Museum: Christopher R. Marshall
5. This magical place: the making of Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the politics of landscape, art and narrative: Suzanne MacLeod;
6. Narrative space: three post-apartheid museums reconsidered: Nic Coetzer;
7. The museum as narrative witness: heritage performance and the production of narrative space: Jenny Kidd;
8. Beyond narrative: designing epiphanies: Lee H. Skolnick;
9. Place, time and memory: Stephen Greenberg;
Part II: Narrative, perception, embodiment.
10. Scales of narrativity: Tricia Austin;
11. City as museum, museum as city: mediating the everyday and special narratives of life: Dorian Wiszniewski;
12. Narrative transformations and the architectural artefact: Stephen Alexander Wischer;
13. Architecture for the nation's memory: history, art, and the halls of Norway's national gallery: Mattias Ekman;
14. Arsenic, wells and herring curing: making new meanings in an old fish factory: Sheila Watson, Rachel Kirk and James Steward;
15. Accessing Estonian memories: building narratives through game form: Candice Hiu-Lam Lau.
16. Narrative landscapes: James Furse-Roberts
17. Narrative environments and the paradigm of embodiment: Jonathan Hale;
Part III:
18. Narrative space: The Book of Lies: Paola Zellner;
19. Productive exhibitions: looking backwards to go forward: Florian Kossak;
20. Incomplete stories: Annabel Fraser and Hannah Coulson;
21. In the museum's ruins: staging the passage of time: Michaela Giebelhausen;
22. Meaningful encounters with disrupted narratives: artists' interventions as interpretive strategies: Claire Robins and Miranda Baxter.
23. Where do you want the label? The roles and possibilities of exhibition graphics: Jona Piehl and Suzanne MacLeod
24. The narrative of technology: understanding the effect of New Media artwork in the museum: Peter Ride;
25. The thick present: architecture, narration and film: Samantha L. Martin-McAuliffe and Nathalie Weadick;
26. A narrative journey: creating storytelling environments with architecture and digital media: Tom Duncan and Noel McCauley