Happy holidays from the Exhibit Designer
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Build Boston: Touring the MFA
Guest Post // Writing and photography by Katelyn Mayfield, an exhibit designer at Christopher Chadbourne & Associates in Boston. She has a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. In her spare time, she makes handstitched books.
After a private tour of the Museum of Fine Art’s new Art of the Americas wing, given by architect Adi Toledano of CBT Architects, I now feel certain that Boston has a world class museum. The tour was given prior to the wing’s grand opening as part of Build Boston. We got up close and personal with the details since almost no one was around, except security guards and last minute glass case cleaners.
My first response in the galleries was to the artifact display cases. These cases were undeniably eye-catching, like no other. The glass was crystal clear, completely devoid of prints of any kind. When standing on one side of a case, I could see perfectly through it and into cases beyond because of the impeccable clarity. The sleekness of the cases also succeeds in hiding complex mechanics, as described in this article. All 200 cases in the new wing were designed, manufactured, and assembled in Milan, Italy by Goppion Museum Workshop before they were shipped to Boston for installation. Goppion has also created display systems for the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and the Crown Jewels of England, among others, so high quality craftsmanship is a given. And once I got past the perfection of the cases, the artifacts inside were not so bad themselves!
Sir Norman Foster along with Foster + Partners was the Design Architect and creative masterminds of the new wing. Our guide, Adi, kept repeating, “Foster wanted ‘everything to line up’”, meaning everything had to be flush. Foster gets what Foster wants. He was knighted in 1990 and won the Pritzker Architecture Prize for his entire portfolio in 1999, the most prestigious international prize awarded in the field of architecture. He was also awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1994. I think he is worthy of dictating every detail, as he did in this project. No detail was overlooked and all components work harmoniously. It was the responsibility of CBT, the local architect of record, to design the actual details that accomplished this harmony. For me, highlights were the “landscape corridor,” the day-lighting strategies, and the details that made “everything line up.”
Names on the wall
Donor names on the wall of the TSMC Lobby of the Strata Center, MIT.
Reminds me of the gallery titles at the Denver Art Museum.
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Mock-up
And they built a mock-up of an interactive kiosk from foamcore and an iPad.
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Don’t touch the walls
MASS MoCA has some of the most fair, nicely worded, “don’t touch” signs I’ve seen in an art museum. Can’t argue with handprints.
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Today’s my birthday
That’s right. An entire year of The Exhibit Designer. Just shy of 100 posts. More than 11,000 page views.
TED is ONE today!
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Samurai, Samurai
“Samurai in New York” at the Museum of the City of New York
through November 7
Exhibition and graphic design by PSnewyork. NY Times review, here.
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The Say Something Poster Project
Heads up! The Say Something Poster Project has announced the call for entries for its 2010 poster design competition. Here’s an opportunity to “use poster design to say something that will inspire, motivate, and educate teenage kids.” The Poster Project benefits The Home for Little Wanderers, an incredible non-profit child and family service agency—the ten winning posters will be permanently installed in their facility—AND it’s a clever concept for creating a design competition. There’s no barrier to entry (other than your own talent) and if your entry makes it to the semifinal round, the resources to produce your poster will be provided to you.
Online voting begins November 15, so get on it!
Oh, and I’m designing the exhibition, so this post is 100% related to exhibit design.
Above graphic by Chris Piascik.
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Habitats, dioramas, gremlins…
Museum of Science, Boston
They’ve quietly redesigned the graphics in their New England Habitats exhibit. Direct print on solid wood, matte varnish. Nice.
(Apparently, there are gremlins painted into some of the diorama backdrops. I’ve never noticed this, but now must go to the museum to confirm, immediately.)
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State of Deception
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has a special/temporary exhibition “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda” that I’d like you all to see. (I know I have a stellar track record of posting about temporary exhibits after they’ve closed, but not this time—“State of Deception” is open through December 2011.) The exhibition, by the museum’s description, “reveals how the Nazi Party used modern techniques as well as new technologies and carefully crafted messages to sway millions with its vision for a new Germany.” There are books, posters, newspapers, and photos to look at, archival sound recordings to listen to, and films to watch. There’s a lot to take in, but the exhibition does a great job of leading you through and presenting its themes clearly and succinctly.
I was drawn in by the compelling design of the exhibit’s graphics. I liked the modernist layouts, which reminded me of Die Neue Typographie and Jan Tschichold’s work during the mid–late ‘20s. [Fact(?): Tschichold was arrested by the Nazis for his “un-German typography.”...If you're interested in being led astray by the internet: do some research into Nazi Germany’s changes in typeface doctrine. One day it was Völkism, the next it was Modernism.... Interesting stuff.]
I also liked that each graphic is unique—if you look closely, the torn paper and painting texture is all custom done. An interesting thing the designers did was to change the lengths of the secondary and label-level text panels to fit the length of the text. With a relatively small exhibit like this, it works well, though it would certainly be difficult to control for in a larger exhibit. But here it made every panel seem intentional and thoughtful. A lot of care was put into these graphics, and the effect is quite beautiful. I wanted to read every single label.
I also recommend that you spend some time with the exhibition’s accompanying website, if you make it to the exhibition in person or not. It is rich with information and the website design ties in well with the exhibition design.
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