Museums, we are often told, are the medium of our age. No less was this true of mid-Victorian England, where museums and their manifestations became the expression and embodiment of the age. Recent years have seen much new work dedicated to the role of the museum in assimilating the expansion of Europe, the collecting passions of the Renaissance, and the scientific preoccupations of the Enlightenment. There are now many useful books on great collectors and collections, and on the role of museums in conserving and cataloguing ancient and modern cultures. Museums are highly responsive to interdisciplinary treatment, and appeal as much to historians of popular culture as of polite learning. But until recently, few have begun to read in detail our leading museums - and particularly the Victorian natural history museums - as architectural ``texts'' - at once everyday and commonplace, yet such masterful expressions of ``nature'' on display. This is such a reading, and as such, is greatly to be welcomed.

Carla Yanni, an historian of art and architecture, sets out to examine the architectural history of four nineteenth century natural history museums - the Jardin des Plantes and the Muséum d'histoire naturelle in Paris, the University Museum in Oxford, the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art, and the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. However, what begins as a series of stories of buildings and people soon becomes a history of power and meaning, in science and in the significance of the science museum, as the material embodiment of codified, canonical, secular knowledge. As such, the buildings speak to the universalism of science. What is more remarkable is their local and contextual diversity. If we trace lines and explore spaces, we may find different messages - the Jardin des Plantes celebrates diversity and order, a creation and an emblem of political power; the University Museum, ordained within living memory of the Oxford Movement, showcases the grace of nature; the Edinburgh Museum speaks to spectacle and practicality; while the neo-Romanesque arches of the Natural History Museum in London speak to the great cathedrals of Europe, and to the role of science as a counterpart to religion. The fact that none of these came about by civic sentiment wishing simply to have a ``building,'' is obvious; but that none happened easily is equally impressive, the more so as they all speak to tensions between architectural norms and rival schools of thought.

Ambitious in its design, the book works well on three planes - the history of architecture, the history of science, and the relation of one to the other, in what may literally be read as a process of ``constructing knowledge.'' In this process, nothing was value-neutral. But can any museum claim to be objective, via its architecture? The Oxford Museum's cloister, and the statue of Adam over the gable of the Natural History Museum, left no one in doubt of their higher meaning. By the same token, no one seeing the Crystal Palace could infer from that ferrovitreous masterpiece anything less than adoration for manufacturing and trade.

Prompted by Yanni's analysis, what emerges from reading such buildings as texts is an appreciation of the uses of architecture to arbitrate between interpretation and ``design,'' and to produce compromises which speak to a given time and place. Museums of objective iron, stone and glass became highly specific tools used to define and rule an unruly nature, and to signal human political agency and control. Inside their spaces, objects participated in the construction of their own categories. Such facts were, as Yanni shows, explicit and …