US-based exhibition designer Mark Walhimer recently conducted a survey of exhibition costs – the results are here, based on 59 responses. For those of you interested in benchmarks of exhibition costs (i.e. quantifying the length of a piece of string!), this will be an interesting read.
Now while the responses may not be representative of the museum sector as a whole, there are some particularly noteworthy points:
- There is more than an order of magnitude of difference between the lowest cost and most expensive exhibitions. Prices range from $25/sq.ft. to $600/sq.ft (roughly $270 – $6450 / sq.m). Having costed up exhibitions myself, I wonder whether these prices all include the same thing. (I can’t imagine the lower price range includes the full interior fit-out of a space and can only guess that the flooring, lighting, etc doesn’t change or isn’t included in these budgets, only the specific displays)
- Science centres are the most expensive exhibitions – there were no science centres below $100/sq.ft. and this category included the most expensive exhibits at $600/sq.ft. Most fell somewhere around the $300-$400 mark. This is no great surprise as science centres tend to have more interactive exhibits and immersive elements which are expensive to design and build.
- Children’s museums were the cheapest, with all of the exhibitions being at or below $250/sq.ft. Children’s museums have a lot of interactives too, but maybe these fall more into the ‘cheap and cheerful’ category? Also children’s museums tend to have exhibits more spaced out (based on my anecdotal experience anyway), so this might reduce the cost on a per sq.ft. basis.
- History museums fell somewhere in the middle, ranging from $50-$400 per sq.ft..
There are also figures for breakdowns of in-house versus contracted design and construction, and design costs as a proportion of the overall budget.
The survey results overall are distilled into a pithy snapshot:
The average 6000 square foot History Museum, Science Center, Children’s Museum and Traveling exhibitions are $204 per square foot with 17% spent on research, design and exhibit development.
That translates to around $2195 / sq.m. (I feel more at home in metric territory), or a ballpark of around $2000/sq.m. This seems to be an incredibly sticky ballpark figure, surprisingly resistant to time or units of currency. I remember GBP2000/ sq.m. being the ‘rule of thumb’ costing that was regularly used in the UK – over a decade ago! Then when I came back to Australia 4 years ago the same ballpark of $2000-$2500 / sqm still seemed to most people to feel about right as a costing guesstimate. Now it seems that it still holds true.
So why are exhibition design costs seemingly resistant to currency changes and inflation? Or are they? (Let’s face it, it’s a somewhat arbitrary midpoint in a VERY broad spectrum). Perhaps the costs of certain types of exhibits have gone down (software and IT hardware in particular). Maybe 10 years ago was a bit of an aberration (millennium fever and all), and things have calmed down a bit since. Or have exhibition developers got more savvy about extracting the most out of every dollar of the budget?
