Fair Play, the fourth Freedom Forum pop-up exhibit

My last post was about experiencing museum exhibits in-person when the museums themselves are closed due to Covid-19 precautions. Habitat is located outside (I shared some photos of it in the snow, but it’s really lovely to see when the weather is nice) and here’s another example, located inside, of an outside-the-museum museum exhibit.

Fair Play: Athletes Speak, Assemble, Petition for Freedom just opened at Dulles International Airport and Ronald Reagan National Airport. It’s the result of a partnership between Freedom Forum (the Newseum) and the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority; the fourth in a series designed by Christine Lefebvre Design.

If you’re in the DC area, it’s easy and free to see the exhibit at Reagan Airport!

And here’s how. If you’re driving, park in the Terminal A lot. I prefer to park on Level 5, close to the elevator access. Take your elevator all the way down, to Level G. From there you’ll follow the signs to Terminal A, on moving walkway after moving walkway … until you arrive at and take the escalator up to Level 1. There, you’ll turn LEFT (the signs will say Terminal A is to your right and Terminals B and C are to your left, but trust me: turn left) and you’ll almost immediately find yourself in Terminal A’s historic lobby. There it is, up above.

You don’t have to go through security, and if your visit is less than an hour, parking is free. (You can also get there by Metro.)

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the graphic design for this exhibit was font selection. Fonts were expressly chosen from the work of underrepresented type designers — we looked at typefaces by people of color, women, and LGBTQ people — before we ultimately settled on three typefaces by Black designers that also fit the sporty aesthetic of the exhibit. The typeface used for large headlines is called Bayard, named after Bayard Rustin, organizer of one of the most powerful expressions of freedom of assembly: the 1963 March on Washington. (Making it also fit strongly with the subject matter of the exhibit.) Inspired by protest signs used in the march, the typeface was created by Tré Seals, a Washington, DC-area designer. The other typefaces used in the exhibit are Jubilat and Halyard, by Black typographer Joshua Darden.

I hope you get a chance to see it!

Lazy Love at the Biodôme

I was in Montréal for just shy a week and spent a few hours at the Biodôme — it was so much fun! I have plenty to share of the rest of the museum, but to dip my toes back into blogging after (ahem) plenty of time away, here are some photos of the temporary exhibit/art installation, Calme Aimant (Lazy Love).

Within the low, glass-walled enclosure, sloths slept inside their cocoon-like nests, hanging from artistic interpretations of trees — the trees were wrapped in braids and painted in monochrome — while a couple tortoises tottered around. Sheer white fabric panels hung from the ceiling, rippling slightly as people passed beneath them.

The exhibit invited guests to have a seat and enjoy a few moments of quiet contemplation. A quiet soundscape played from speakers hidden within the sofas — the speakers are the balls with red felt flowers — and fabric books told the sloths’ story.

Lazy Love was our last stop at the Biodôme, and it was a lovely, relaxing, quiet moment to end on. I am sorry to report that the exhibit closed last week, so a bientôt, sloths.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 18 September 2015.

Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design

Back in November I took a trip to Warren, Vermont for a shoot with photographer Michael Tallman at the Archie Bunker House. When you hear “Vermont” and “architecture” your thoughts might not wander much beyond old red barns, but look up Prickly Mountain — the “anti-establishment utopia” of contemporary architecture. The Archie Bunker House is in that neighborhood of modernist homes, and really incredible. The shoot was a blast, and I promised David Sellers, the owner and architect of the house, that I would visit the Madsonian, his industrial design museum up the road.

I ran out of time during that trip in November, but a few weeks ago I made good on the promise, returned to Vermont and paid a visit to the Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design in Waitsfield. The temperature outside was somewhere between 0 and 5 degrees, and inside, the museum wasn’t much warmer, but still my friends and I had a great time touring the museum with Mr. Sellers himself as our tour guide.

The museum has an Industrial Designers “wall of fame,” an assortment of chair designs, vintage advertisements torn straight from magazines and pinned to the walls …

… lighting, a Mason and Hamlin organ, and a 1934 DeSoto Airflow coupe …

… an automatic pencil sharpener, Polaroid cameras, and many, many more examples of vintage and antique industrial design. Most everything on display had a personal story attached, such as this menu from the ocean liner SS Normandie. A couple donated it to the museum after their visit — they had honeymooned on the ship in the 1930s and kept the menu as a souvenir.

The layout of the exhibit was strictly utilitarian, with minimal to no explanatory text or graphics and the bones of the building which housed it on display. One bit of clever exhibitry I liked was the use of retractable extension cord reels for spot lighting. Need to move something around? Just screw in a new hook.

The Madsonian currently has an exhibit of classic toy designs, featuring model airplanes and trains (including the two biggest model trains built), an original Mr. Machine, and a toy cement mixer which a kid could use to mix actual cement. The toy’s fatal flaw was user error — most surviving examples are welded inoperable by dried cement.

If you go, be sure to grab a sandwich and a Sip of Sunshine afterward, at the Bridge Street Butchery (now closed) across the street.

Thank you to Michael Tallman for all photographs and to Dave Sellers for the museum tour!

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 1 March 2015.

I Want to Design this Exhibit: Banned Books Week

While scooting through downtown yesterday I saw these great big graphics on the side of the the DC Public Library on G Street.

I like the red blocks — they make me think of classified documents and redacted memos. Since the graphics had so successfully caught my attention, I was bummed to learn that I have missed Banned Books Week 2014 and its associated events. But I have enjoyed designing a little temporary exhibit in my mind ... books to flip through, excerpts printed large. I imagine someone reading one and saying, “really?! Charlotte’s Web??” and discussions about First Amendment rights and censorship.... Next year?

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 3 October 2014.

The News 08.16.12

A compilation of design-related web finds.

The Google Web Lab at the Science Museum in London | Designing for Accessibility: MoMA’s Material Lab | Harvard Medical School’s “Training the Eye” course | SEGD is hosting a symposium, “The Art of Collaboration” (link no longer available) in Raleigh October 4–5 | The last day to see the Terracotta Warriors in North America is August 26 in Times Square | The National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia now offers free admission for their first floor gallery | Why the Museum of Broken Relationships is so great (it’s not just the name) | 100 Toys that Define Our Childhood — vote for your favorites for a new exhibit at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Voting ends tomorrow, August 17 | Places that Work: U.S. Botanic Gardens | Spiders Alive! at the American Museum of Natural History (NY Times review) | Are some fonts more believable than others? and How to explain why typography matters | I’ve been pinning obsessively over on Pinterest.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 16 August 2012.

The News 05.01.11

A compilation of design-related web finds.

Creating Material Lab at MoMA | Design to Preserve by the Cooper-Hewitt | Coming soon to the Mall? National Women’s History Museum Makes Another Push Toward Existence and National Latino Museum Plan Faces Fight (hint: probably not) | “Jurassic Park meets Buckminster Fuller” — a zoo that imagines a reunited Pangea | MoMath, the National Museum of Mathematics in New York, is raising funds | Vertical Urban Factory at the Skyscraper Museum in New York (slide show here) | Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War at the Canadian Centre for Architecture | The World’s Largest Dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History looks amazing (slide show here; I love photo 3!) | La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Mexican American cultural center in LA, “screens in a public alley space that both bring the stories out of the museum and draw passersby into the experience.” More in this article from GOOD | The National Museum of American Jewish History opens in Philadelphia | Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center opens in Skokie (review and slide show) | The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles (review and slide show) | The MBTA steps up its “See Something Say Something” campaign, and in Boston’s North Station:

AND an upcoming opening!

Conner Prairie Interactive History Park is opening a new exhibit, 1863 Civil War Journey: Raid on Indiana, in June. Part theater, part living history museum; the interactive experience is centered around a recreation of a Civil War-era town complete with homes, a general store, and a schoolhouse. As part of the Christopher Chadbourne & Associates team, I designed the graphics located in the schoolhouse, where the lessons of the park are pulled together.

I designed a tabletop graphic for a touch table that houses three monitors. It’s meant to appear as though it were strewn with historic maps and military tactical manuals. I also designed a flipbook that holds background information about the park’s characters, in the style of a scrapbook; and a large “chalkboard” wall graphic inspired by Civil War broadsides and illustrated with a map and hand lettering. These were fun graphics to design, geared toward families and school groups.

Post updated in January 2021. Broken links have been replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 1 May 2011.

The News 02.17.11

A compilation of design-related web finds.

The realities of renovating the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, CT after it was hit by a tornado | The winner of the PaleoArt Prize in 3D art for “achievement in ... depicting or sculpting paleontological subjects and fossils” | China asks the Penn Museum to return all artifacts from its Silk Road exhibition | The New York Times, on scalies | Winners of this year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects program asked local businesses and nonprofits what materials they needed, then designed the courtyard space to incorporate those materials, with the intention of donating them at the end of the summer | An exhibit of tattooed arms in Paris | And another, of dismembered dandies, in Sweden | South African printmaking at Boston University’s 808 Gallery | Edward Gorey at the Boston Athenæum | Tangible Things at Harvard | The Charles Hayden Planetarium in Boston reopens after a $9 million yearlong reconstruction | The Museum of Arts and Design’s new Center for Olfactory Art | The reopening of the American Museum of the Moving Image; inaugural events continue.

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 17 February 2011.

The News 06.23.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

Sometimes it seems like there really is a museum for and about everything. Name a topic, and I bet you can find an obscure museum dedicated to it. Tractors? Barbed wire? Plastics? Architectural models? Chinese shadow puppets? Battlestar Galactica? | Natural history exhibits opening this summer, in no way exhaustive: Whales at the Museum of Science, Boston (they offer a museum admission/whale watch ticket combo); The Deep at the Natural History Museum, London; Race to the End of the Earth, about Arctic explorers, at the American Museum of Natural History; the AMNH’s Climate Change exhibit moves to the Field Museum in Chicago; Age of Mammals, a “a postmodern diorama” in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles’s newly restored 1912 building | This photo of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum’s collection of thousands of birds is just great | A Micro Museum for the Design of and with Typography; Typopassage Vienna is inside the Museumsquartier in Vienna and open 24 hours a day, every week of the year. (Curious; who’d be there at 4am?) | Shape Lab, an interactive educational space for families. Who wouldn’t want to play there? | The British Museum and Wikipedia’s unusual collaboration.

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed or replaced. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 23 June 2010.

2009 AIGA BoNE Show wins (another!) award

Exciting news: a project I worked on last year, the 2009 AIGA BoNE Show, has taken home another award!

As the exhibit designer, I worked with BoNE Show co-directors Jeff Stammen and Brandon Bird, to step up and shake up the biennial, Boston-based awards show/exhibition. It was a nearly year-long process to put it together and our goal throughout was to create something engaging and memorable. In the end, the feedback was glowing — everyone who went had the most fun at the show’s opening last June* — and we won a couple of design awards to boot.

In September, we received an AIGA (Re)designAward for Sustainable Design; the awards recognize social responsibility and environmental sustainability in design. We were one of 25 winners in 2009.

And last week at the 2010 SEGD Conference, we were honored with an SEGD Design Award, in the “Lot With a Little” category.

*Some blog post mentions: Common Content | Hart-Boillot | MIT Press | Pinkergreen | South of the Sahara

But — you ask — what exactly is this BoNE Show?

The BoNE (Best of New England) [Design] Show is a biennial competition, exhibition, and fundraiser to benefit AIGA’s Boston chapter. Our theme for 2009 was Community. While the primary purpose of the exhibition was to showcase the 49 winning design pieces, the planning team (myself included) also wanted the experience to engage, educate, and help designers to feel more connected to their design community. One aspect of that was re-branding the BoNE Show into B(oNE) — as in “be one” — with the tagline, “One Region. One community.”

Thirteen local designers, design firms, and artists were commissioned to build large dimensional letter sculptures that together spelled out AIGA B(oNE) SHOW. (top photo) This became a centerpiece of the exhibition, and the letters were auctioned off at the opening reception.

My goal was to create an exhibition that would celebrate the competition winners and also the New England design community as a whole. To push the Community theme, I created an infographic wall about the AIGA in New England, including chapter sizes, locations, and other basic information.

A second infographic wall — B(oNE) Show Deconstructed — provided a glimpse into the creation of the exhibition, including statistics about the designers who entered work in the competition and the designers who won recognition.

Another area of the exhibition gave visitors the opportunity to share their ideas of what it takes to “B” a great designer — by contributing to a wall of B (fill-in-the-blank) speech-bubble directives. Some were earnest; others humorous.

I sourced environment-friendly and local materials, with the help of my design team. Graphics were printed with UV-curing ink on recycled chlorine-free kraft paper, at a printer located five miles from the gallery — or they were drawn by hand. Discarded furniture taken off the street, piles of cardboard collected from area businesses, an old door and a roll of twine found in a garage: “trash” that we salvaged and put to good use. The designs integrated mechanical fasteners and non-toxic glues. And to describe the “greenness” of the project for visitors to the exhibit, we created the Green Lounge, which was painted entirely in green, even the furniture. We used Old Fashioned Milk Paint — it's earth- and people-friendly, and manufactured nearby in Groton, MA. The Green Lounge also featured a slide show of past award winners to pull together BoNE Shows past and present, and add another element of Community.

The biggest undertaking for the exhibition were the displays for the winning entries. We repurposed roughly 50 wooden shipping pallets collected from around the Boston area. These were deconstructed into planks, then planed and reconfigured into custom display fixtures — shelves, platforms, and frames — each designed to highlight the unique elements of the winning entry it held.

More photos of the exhibit here, and of the opening night here.

I’m going to take advantage of my blog/soapbox to also thank the many, many people who volunteered their time and helped put together the show: event photographer Christian Phillips; carpenter Mark Laning, Matt White of Dirk+Weiss (A/V), Melissa DePasquale (print design), Rochelle Ask, Colleen Baker, Rachel Boothby, Kimberly Cloutier, Luke Garro, Ben Gebo, Lee Gentry, Justin Hattingh, Andrea Kulish, Joe Liberty, Mike Mai, Cedric Mason, Julie Ogletree, Juliana Press, George Restrepo, Jason Rubin, Shaona Sen, Andrea Shorey, Drew Spieth, Sarah Tenney Stammen, Jason Stevens, Ken Takagi, Mende Williams, and Andrea Worthington. Thank you also to the AIGA Boston board — especially Suzanne McKenzie and Tracy Swyst — and the most excellent people at CCA, who were never-endingly supportive of Jeff and I as we in effect worked a second full-time job (they wrote this lovely news release about us) and our friends and families who had to deal with us in the duration. And here it is, our SEGD award:

Post updated in January 2021. Broken links have been fixed or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 17 June 2010.

Bathroom humor

“Headlines that don't mean what they say and corrections that admit truly embarrassing errors” — in the restroom at the Newseum, Washington DC.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 6 June 2010.

Angularity at Denver Art

The Denver Art Museum’s new (c. 2006) Hamilton Building will make you do the Angle Dance, guaranteed.

Not one of the building’s planes — floor, wall, or ceiling — is parallel or perpendicular to another. Consider that for a moment.

Studio Libeskind’s design is meant to evoke “the peaks of the Rocky Mountains and geometric rock crystals found in the foothills near Denver,” an idea the exhibit designers ran with. Suspend your disbelief and peaks and rock crystals can be found everywhere — in the artwork hung directly onto skewed walls and the sculptures tucked into odd spaces where acute and obtuse walls meet.

You don’t actually have to suspend your disbelief to appreciate the angularity brought to aspects of the exhibit design, such as the display cases in the gallery of African art.

I’m not crazy about the light fixtures — they’re big and distracting! — but otherwise, the cases are intriguing and beautifully highlight the artwork and objects on display.

The dimensional letters used for gallery names are pretty incredible. The letters’ faces are perpendicular to the floor, and the depth, top-to-bottom, varies to meet the angle of the wall. I love the beautiful shapes and the shadows they create.

As for the art itself, I was surprised to find that I enjoyed the gallery of post-1900 Western American art (it’s not a genre I’d usually leap to explore). I also liked this installation by Sandy Skoglund.

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 20 May 2010.

The News 04.13.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

Grab a Museum Discovery Pass next time you’re in New York for 2-for-1 admission to seven of the city’s smaller, more specialized museums such as the American Folk Art Museum or Asia Society Museum | A green consulting company gains extra LEED points by effectively turning their office into an indoor jungle | The National September 11 Memorial & Museum announced that it will receive $2.29 million from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and released renderings of the exhibit design (renderings link no longer available; instead, an opinion on the building’s architecture) | MoMA’s upcoming design and architecture exhibition, Talk to Me, to explore “the communication between people and objects,” won’t open until next July, 2011 but in the meantime follow the exhibition blog | Esther Stocker’s installations, discovered via BLDGBLOG | Also seen on BLDGBLOG: Pulse Room, from 2006, an “interactive installation featuring one to three hundred clear incandescent light bulbs, the brightness of which was controlled by an interface and sensor that could detect the heart rate of participants” | And another light installation: UVA: Speed of Light is an immersive laser-based light installation and sound experience in London, up through April 19 | Endangered animals built from Legos by Sean Kenney for the Philadelphia Zoo exhibit Creatures of Habitat: A Gazillion-Piece Animal Adventure.

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed, replaced, or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 13 April 2010.

The News 03.30.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

The Future is Collaborative from the Center for the Future of Museums; a call for libraries, archives, and museums to share resources | The MoMA blog has chronicled the development of the museum’s newest exhibition, Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, since November. ArchDaily has a descriptive article about the projects on view | Across the Atlantic? Another show about sustainability, Sustainable Futures, just opened at Design Museum London | Once you start to explore the Museum of Online Museums (review) just try to stop | The Art Handling Olympics, “a combination roast, ‘Jackass’-style stunt extravaganza, and excuse to drink a lot” | The Regent’s Place Pavilion in London looks beautiful in photos | I saw these sliding shelves and thought, hm ... add descriptive labels or an interactive prompt, and you’ve got yourself a nice display case. Or maybe I just see “museums” everywhere.

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed or replaced. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 30 April 2010.

Philagrafika

Philagrafika 2010 is a Philadelphia-wide festival and exhibition of contemporary printmaking. The festival is divided into three components: The Graphic Unconscious is the core exhibition that features the work of thirty-five artists, from eighteen countries, in five art museums and galleries; Out of Print is work created by five artists who were paired with historic Philadelphia institutions; and Independent Projects is a variety of exhibitions organized by other institutions throughout the city.

Additional programing — films and such — supplemented the exhibitions. I like that this festival is all over the city (it was obviously some undertaking), and I really like the title treatment (photo above) and festival map and guidebook by Philly-based Smyrski Creative. Quite nice.

I visited The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, part of the Graphic Unconscious exhibition, and saw (and loved) Regina Silveira’s Mundus Admirabilis, an installation wherein a domestic setting is invaded by common pests to invoke biblical plagues and comment on the “plagues” of contemporary society. You can read an interview with Regina Silveira on the Philagrafika blog, here.

Lucky Philadelphians, able to take their time exploring the entire festival, at least for another two weeks (it ends April 11). I wasn’t able to spend nearly enough time with it.

Post updated in Jan 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 29 March 2010.

The News 03.02.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

Design Museum Boston (update: now simply, Design Museum) is all set to pop-up in the window of an abandoned storefront near you | A video tour of the “Biology Range” at the New York State Museum, where they keep their preserved biological specimens | The Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart has the World’s Largest Artificial Tornado inside; the ventilation system draws in smoke from the building and sends it up and out an exhaust vent | Another German museum, another car museum: exploded views from the Porsche Museum (also in Stuttgart) and the Harley Davidson Museum (in Milwaukee) | If cars are not your thing but exploded views are, you might instead enjoy one of an Etch A Sketch | Multiple Shadow House by Olafur Eliasson at the Tonya Bonakdar Gallery in NY: “The individual lights are all different colors, but they create white light when they all blend on a single wall. As visitors walk in front of the light sources, that hides certain colors — thus freeing the rest to reveal themselves as colored shadows.” | The One Day Poem Pavilion “demonstrates the poetic, transitory, site-sensitive and time-based nature of light and shadow.”

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken link has been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 2 March 2010.

Mathematica, the Eames-designed exhibit

The legendary Charles and Ray Eames are perhaps best known for their design of a certain lounge chair, but let’s not forget their architecture, print design, photography, film, textiles — and exhibitions. During their career they designed more than a dozen, of which only Mathematica: A World of Numbers ... and Beyond — from 1961! — is still on view.

Three versions were created and two of them remain open to the public: one at the New York Hall of Science and the other at Boston’s Museum of Science. Update: There is now a third at The Henry Ford Museum.

Probability, Topology, Boolean Algebra, Geometry, Calculus, and Logic ... I don't feel particularly moved by any of those, but inarguably this exhibition, with all its quirks and charms, makes math accessible and interesting. I have been to it a number of times, and it’s usually packed with people happily learning about mathematics and engaging with the interactive exhibits.

The photos above are of my favorite part of the exhibit: the case about projective geometry. I like the colors of the geometric shapes, the way that the pieces are held in position by Inspector Gadget-like hinged poles, and the grid on the bottom of the case. The graphics perched on black blocks are simple and handsome.

The photo below is of another element in the exhibit that I like: math-related quotation panels overhead, playing nice with the track lighting frame.

Mathematica is successful as an exhibit about math, but more importantly, from an exhibit-design standpoint it is an incomparable artifact, a fascinating time capsule of an exhibit designed during the 1960s.

I’m a sucker for retro graphic design, but I have to say that I don’t like the illustrations. They’re cute and fun, I suppose, but they annoy me.... I ... hate them. There, I said it.

I also don’t like that some parts of the exhibit look as though they were pasted together for a high school statistics class presentation. Picture below, on the right: I'm talking to you. This encased collage is deadly boring and it’s often skipped in favor of the fun hands-on interactives, which are fantastic.

The other part of the exhibit that doesn’t do it for me is the math history wall. I have heard it described as wallpaper, or an art piece. The black and white bars do create a graphically interesting pattern, but then the wall is cluttered up with other bits of browning paper and artwork.

The capitalized, justified serif font used is extremely difficult to read, if you were inclined to try. It makes me dizzy. And yet the darnedest thing: people do sometimes read it. (I have no idea....) Another (obvious) issue with this wall is that the timeline ends in 1961, and the MOS’s solution, a poster, is not well integrated. NYSCI’s solution, an interactive monitor, is a better one, at least in theory. (I haven't been to the New York Mathematica to see it firsthand.)

I like the “probability machine.” The full text reads: THE T/HEORY/OF PR/OBABI/LITIES/IS NO/THING/MORE/THAN/GOOD/SENSE/CONFI/RMED/BY CA/LCULATION. :LA/PLACE/1796

Balls fall from above and form a bell curve. Simple, elegant — and if the text is a little wonky, it does force you to read it over a few times to understand, maybe making you internalize its message.

I feel like quite the curmudgeon with my criticisms of Mathematica. The exhibit is nearly fifty years old, after all — it’s miraculous that it still exists. And despite its literal dustiness, it is an exhibit beloved and cherished by many, a vintage exhibit that allows us to step back in time to experience firsthand a 60s era exhibit full of the Eames’s joie de vivre, fun, and humor. I think any designer would agree that that in itself is pretty cool.

If you have been, what do you think?

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed or replaced. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 16 February 2010.

The News 02.09.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

“...The abandoned Tremont Street Subway tunnel, which runs underneath Boston Common ... becomes a network of underground cultural venues, including a theater, a cinema, art galleries, and a ‘media-infused trolley museum.’” From the winning proposal for the SHIFTboston Ideas Competition | How Different Types of Museums Approach Participation, from Museum 2.0 | Aquarium Design: Top 10 Trends, from ObjectIDEA | Easy=True (link no longer available) | Museum admissions tabs: part ticket, part souvenir; Tag, You're It! | ExhibitFiles has launched a new “Bits” feature | A Parallel Image light installation at Transmediale, the festival for art and digital culture in Berlin; “an electronic camera obscura ... media-archaeological, interactive sculpture.” Your guess as to what that means is probably better than mine | “Four days into the show, sufficient personal injury had been incurred — with ambulances being called in and a first aid unit being erected inside the Tate — that the Director, Norman Reid, decided to close the exhibition.” Neo Classic at the Tate, 1971.

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed, replaced, or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 9 February 2010.

Visit the Ether Dome

Here’s something to do in Boston if you’re looking for an under-the-radar, quick-hit-of-history experience: visit the Ether Dome at Mass General. The Ether Dome was the hospital’s original surgical operating amphitheater and in it, on 16 October 1846, the use of ether as an anesthetic was first publicly demonstrated by dentist William T.G. Morton and MGH Chief of Surgery John Collins Warren. More info in the Wikipedia entry.

Unless in use for teaching, the Ether Dome is open to the public daily, 9am until 8pm. (Update: Hours are now Monday – Friday, 9am – 5pm.) I find it crazy, and love, that this place is open nearly anytime for anyone to explore. When I went, late in the afternoon on a Sunday, I had to call Security to unlock the door. I had to call Security a second time to ask how to turn on the lights. But then — wow! It is a little eerie, and very cool.

The space has been restored to how it looked when it was built, in the early 19th century. (If you’re curious to learn more: The Ether Dome: The restoration of an icon.) Inside you will find an Egyptian mummy, a statue of David, an anatomical skeleton once used for teaching, and a couple cases of antique surgical equipment. There are the seats used by doctors of yore, impossibly steep, with name plates attached to the backs, and that beautiful copper-plated, skylighted, dome.

There are old photographs and documents in the stairwell (look for the photo of the Bulfinch Building, home to the Ether Dome, from when it used to sit directly on the bank of the Charles River; the building is now about a quarter mile from the bank).

In the artifact cases, there are a few, brief, typewritten labels — but little overall in the way of interpretation. There is a text panel by the entrance to the Dome, and one resting at the feet of the Egyptian mummy. I’m glad I did a little bit of research before I went.

On the left, Dr. Warren’s seat:

I'll let you in on something I discovered: if you stand about where I was standing to take that photo (in front of the seats), make noise and listen for the acoustic effects.

Below is a contemporary painting of that famous surgery, created for “Ether Day 2001,” and here is an article about the reenactment staged for its creation. I put up my full set of Ether Dome photos on flickr, here.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed, replaced, or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 18 January 2010.

A yarn about yarn, at the American Textile History Museum

Update: The American Textile History Museum closed permanently in 2016.

The American Textile History Museum in Lowell, MA — grandly reopened after a $1.5 million renovation — is home to “the most significant collection of historic textile items in the Americas, possibly the world.”

I went with a couple of friends not knowing what to expect, and we ended up having a great time exploring the historic machine shop-turned-museum’s labyrinthine rooms and passages. The permanent exhibit is Textile Revolution: An Exploration Through Space and Time, and from what I understand, it is a huge improvement and expansion from the museum’s previous offerings.

There were so many things in this museum to become enthralled with: bales of raw fibers, bolts of fabrics, spools of ribbons, tapestries, clothing, looms, weaving and spinning machines, fabric printing tools, photographs, documents, and now (I believe this was part of the expansion), examples of modern textiles, like those used to make swimsuits, bicycles, astronauts’ uniforms, even planes.

The exhibit labels are extremely simple; to the museum’s credit, they are not themed — lord knows that could have turned ugly fast. There were some instances of type use I did not like at all but I’ll let them slide because of my overall enjoyment of the museum. And I like the label system more now that I've taken another look at photos of the visit — the black boxes have grown on me. The black bands reminded me of NY subway signage. The low-budget mounting system worked: the labels, printed on paper, are easily replaceable but still look nice behind plexiglass.

I loved studying the boxes of indigo cakes and jars of powdered dye. Those jar labels, and their chemical structure drawings — how neat are they?! I’d happily go back.

And here are a couple pictures from the temporary exhibit, Changing Landscapes: Contemporary Chinese Fabric Art. On the left is a detail of the gorgeous The Season of Fluorescence by Chen Yanlin, and on the right, a beautiful old counterpane (bedspread).

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken link has been replaced with an archived URL, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 11 January 2010.

Exhibit in a brewery

The Long Trail Brewery in Bridgewater, Vermont has a self-guided brewery tour/mini exhibit. It consists of four reader rails along the sides of a catwalk above the factory floor.

The rails are moderately interesting in their descriptions of Long Trail’s brewing process, types of beer, and design of the factory layout. The diagrams are pretty well done. I liked the illustration of the workers pouring hops into the brewing vats, and bottle caps into the ... capper vats. And they made the effort in having a little exhibit, right?

The best part of the brewery is their collection of old beer cans:

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 26 December 2009.