Both The Met and the American Museum of Natural History have displays of objects from the Pacific region. What I found interesting were the similarities and differences between the two display approaches – in one museum the objects are presented as works of ‘art’, whereas in the other they are presented as ‘artefacts’ of culture.
An overview of the Oceania gallery in The Met.The Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples in AMNH
The AMNH exhibition looks considerably older than the display at the Met, and the one in the Met is definitely lighter, more airy and spacious – both in respect to the space itself and the density of objects on display. But there are similarities in the colour palette used in both with the dominance of a light, slightly grey blue (ignoring the red-earth inspired colour scheme of the Australian display to the right of the AMNH picture above).
AMNH display cases – a more traditional approachDisplays at the Met – more open and with a greater attention to the aesthetic.
Of the art museums I visited in the United States, The Met was the only one to have dedicated any appreciable space to art from the Pacific region. It turned out there was a reason for this. The Met had acquired the collection of the erstwhile “Museum of Primitive Art” that had been founded by Nelson Rockefeller in association with Rene d’Harnoncourt in 1957. (The museum closed in 1974). These items were part of this so-called “primitive art” collection, along with items from Africa and the Americas. This term betrays a cultural legacy that gave me pause to ponder.
Plaque on display at The MetCoincidentally, I’ve been reading about Rene d’Harnoncourt’s influence on exhibition design in a recent article[1]. He was director of MoMA from 1949-1967, and in the 1940s was responsible for taking new approaches to display of art, in particular items from the Pacific. He introduced varied colour schemes, theatrical lighting and a decluttered approach to case layouts in a way that both borrowed from and influenced shop window displays. His work was influential in positioning such objects as works of art, rather than just ‘ethnographic curiosities’. He was also interested in creating a market for Pacific art.
Meanwhile, over on the other side of Central Park, the AMNH takes a more anthropological view of its collections. Rather than works of art, the same sorts of objects are shown as representative of a culture. In these displays, the purpose is more to show the ‘archetype’ objects rather than the more pure aesthetic approach of the art museum, even if the objects are pretty similar to untrained eyes such as mine.
AMNH grapples with its own historical legacies in the way that it depicts ‘other’ (i.e., non-Western) cultures. Some of the displays seemed anachronistic in their depictions and terminology. They are presumably products of their time and I can’t imagine displays such as these being conceived today.
A human diorama of ‘pygmies’ in the AMNH
There was something about this that range a vague bell at the time, and later I realised I was recalling Bal’s 1992 critique [2] of the AMNH’s ethnographic displays and the historic cultural assumptions upon which they were based. While that paper is now two decades old, it looks like many of the displays described in that paper haven’t changed radically in the intervening period. It was interesting to re-read the article, now having some knowledge of the spaces it describes.
[1] Foster, R. J. (2012). Art/Artefact/Commodity: Installation design and the exhibition of Oceanic things at two New York museums in the 1940s. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 23(2), 129–157. doi:10.1111/j.1757-6547.2012.00178.x
Yes, yes, I know – I visited some of America’s most popular museums at the height of summer. If there was one thing I was going to have to contend with, it was crowds.
Crowds at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, attempt to catch a glimpse of ‘The Starry Night’ by Van Gogh
For those museums that are not at the top of every summer holidaymaker’s ‘must see’ list, the issue of too many people probably sounds like a happy problem to have. But not necessarily. The summer high season may well bring in valuable income, but all that crowding and queuing can lead to a less-than-satisfactory visitor experience – not to mention the maintenance costs associated with having hundreds of thousands of feet and fingers interacting with your building and your exhibits.
Now I should point out that I’m not very good with crowds and I’m an impatient queuer. Being short means I find it hard to navigate large numbers of people because my head is at shoulder height of many of the people around me. This physical characteristic combines with the psychological uncertainty that makes waiting in line torture at the best of times. In these circumstances I guess it was inevitable that some museums would have me in a twitching, toe tapping mess before I even crossed the lobby. At some point I decided to put this enforced waiting time to good use, and notice how well site signage was working under these very trying conditions.
Multiple desks, multiple lines, multiple signs
I arrived at the American Museum of Natural History just before opening time, and a fair few number of people had already begun to congregate on the front steps. The first bottleneck was having to clear security (In more or less every American museum there was security screening of some sort as you entered. An unfortunate sign of the times.). The next step was then to work out which ticket line was the right one to join. AMNH is one of the venues in the New York City Pass scheme (excellent value btw), which is meant to give you express entry although is sufficiently popular that in many cases it just means you get to join a shorter queue rather than walking right in. Security guards directed us to the right, and immediately to the right was a desk. But this wasn’t the right desk (still not quite sure what that desk was but the people behind it gave us vague onward directions), and it was a bit of a challenge to find where the right queue was and where it started.
The lobby of AMNH shortly after opening time. The green banner shows where the front of the line is, but where is the back?
As it turned out, the back of the queue was marked, clearly enough, by one of those standard signs you fit to tensabarriers. The problem is, there were sufficient number of people that this sign was obscured by people the majority of the time.
Ah – the back of the queue! It took a while for this sign to become visible among the throngs.
It really needed to be positioned a lot further back into the lobby than it was, or be reinforced by additional signage closer to the entrance. I encountered this issue on more than one occasion, where tensabarrier signs were positioned in such a way that they were obscured by people as the crowd overflowed beyond the anticipated area.
Now as I said at the outset, I was visiting in peak periods when visitor management strategies were being tested to their limit. So I don’t want to come across as too nit-picky about this (and I don’t mean to single out AMNH either). However, with that number of people arriving all at once, even the slightest bit of ambiguity or confusion is likely to make the bottlenecks even worse. So for me it was a reminder that our signage strategies and visitor sight lines should be tested under all circumstances – what makes sense in the relatively calm periods when we often plan signage may be far less obvious at peak times.
I recently visited the newly re-vamped Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. One of the recent additions to the visitor repertoire is the MCA Insight smartphone app, and I thought I’d give it a go.
The MCA Insight home screen
Choosing the ‘Explore’ option takes you to a clean and easy to use interface that lets you look for specific works or see a map of the gallery. It uses the Museum’s wi-fi to locate you so can also select the option for it to only show works that are near you. This works most of the time but in some cases it got a bit confused due to the location of gallery walls – sometimes you were physically near something you couldn’t actually get to.
The “Explore” screen
If you were looking for something in particular, you could use the app to locate it in the gallery. If you were already nearby the work this was helpful, but the lack of gallery labelling or signposting of locations beyond the level number and the location of walls could make it difficult if you were using this as your principal way to find your way around.
The location of a work on MCA Insight
As you walked around, the Insight app gave you more information about the works. In most cases it was nothing different from the label, but it was often easier to read the text on your phone while standing back to take a work in, rather than having to peer at the text on the wall. Overall I found the app quite easy and fun to use.
An example of a label on the MCA Insight app
I was a bit underwhelmed by the follow-up though. On the way you were able to collect works to add to ‘My Gallery’. Then, if you enter your email address, the app promises to send a record of your visit. I think I was a victim of my own expectations here – I was expecting to receive something akin to what you get with MONA’s “O”. This sends you a wireframe model of the route you actually took through the museum as well as the artworks you selected. I was looking forward to seeing my meandering route through the museum rendered in 3D. However, what I got was a straightforward list of the works saved in My Gallery (mine is here), along with some additional details about the works and the artists. This was good enough (except in the cases where the only additional information was the page where you could purchase a $49.95 catalogue), but I was a bit disappointed because of my loftier expectations. I think it would be better if MCA re-worded how they describe the ‘record of your visit’ so that it’s a better description of what is actually offered by the app.
This is the title of the guest post I’ve just written for the Museum 2.0 blog by Nina Simon. I’ve long been a fan of the blog and it’s exciting to be able to make my own small contribution to it.
The blog post is part of a series called the Blueprint book club – a series of reactions to the book Blueprint, the story of the Dutch Museum of National History. This project to build a new national museum was cancelled in 2011, and this book is a way of recording the plans and vision of the project from its inception to its demise. My take draws parallels between the Dutch museum’s fate and the slightly shaky early history of the National Museum of Australia.
There will be more instalments by other guest contributors over the coming days and weeks. So why not have a read and contribute?
The Queensland Museum on South Bank has just re-opened after being closed for refurbishment for a few months. Since I happened to be in town, I thought I’d drop by and have a look. More on the museum as a whole in a later post – for this one I’ll concentrate on the Bouncing Back from Disaster exhibition about the Queensland floods, which devastated many parts of the state just over a year ago.
As the one-year anniversary has only just passed, it is a very recent event that’s still fresh in everyone’s memories. The exhibition focused not just on what happened, but the resilience of the people who picked up the pieces and moved on in the wake of the disaster. Australians who followed the event on the news will remember this resilience embodied in Queensland Premier Anna Bligh’s emotional “We are Queenslanders” speech:
And in the exhibition we get to see a facsimile of her handwritten notes from that day:
Graphic about resilience including Anna Bligh's notes from her famous "We are Queenslanders" speech.
This is very much a story-led, not an object-led exhibition. There is a great selection of images and dramatic footage of rescue efforts. The relatively few objects are everyday items that had been retrieved during the clean-up. I found that there was an understated power to these objects:
A mud-caked record player retrieved from the wreckage
A sizeable portion of the exhibition is dedicated to a space where visitors (many of whom would have been directly affected by the floods) are able to share their stories (I blogged about the role of museums in sharing these kinds of community memories at the time):
Part of the wall that people could stick up their own experiences of the floods. Note the exhibition has only been opened for a couple of days and there are already a considerable number of contributions. The writing table is to the right and the wall continues to the left of this image.
A poignant personal story of survival and loss
The design of the exhibition is evocative of the ‘rebuilding’ theme – the exhibition panels are mostly bare plywood attached to vertical timber supports, with construction fencing and plastic sheeting used to enclose certain spaces (see above). The design of the graphics (white text and straight lines on a blue background) looks like it is intended to represent the blueprints of a rebuilding project – but this is just a guess on my part. Overall the design fits in well with the story being told.
However, I found the exhibition sections that attempted to put the flood disaster into broader scientific context (i.e., natural disasters across geological timeframes) a bit out of place. For me this was primarily a story of human experience and this alone was strong enough – it didn’t need to be placed in a planetary context. I wonder what the rationale for including this additional content was: To show that this was not an extraordinary event in the global scheme of things? That life on Earth has adapted and responded in the face of disaster since time immemorial? Maybe something a little less remote from living memory and human experience may have been a better choice if this was the interpretive intent (e.g., the cleanup of the 1974 floods in Brisbane).
One absent story (assuming I didn’t miss it) was the experience of the museum itself during the flood – the South Bank precinct was certainly affected and the museum presumably had to make efforts to ensure collections weren’t damaged or lost. Perhaps this ‘inside story’ was more of interest to people like me and my visiting companion (another museum person of sorts). But even so, making the museum part of the story (instead of just the reporter of it) may have added another dimension to the exhibition – the museum is as much a part of the community as any other public institution. As such, it shares our achievements and challenges.
Back in August, en route to the UK on holiday, we broke up the journey with a couple of days in Singapore. A new addition to the landscape since last time I was there (early 2009) was the ArtScience museum, which is part of the Marina Bay Sands development.
Marina Bay Sands complex with the ArtScience Museum in foreground (image from homedit.com)
It’s a landmark building by celebrity architecht Moshe Safdie, which opened in February 2011 (so still pretty new when we visited). The design was inspired by a lotus flower but it also gets called ‘the welcoming hand of Singapore’, with a total of 10 ‘fingers’ extending from the centre.
Regular readers will know that I have my doubts about ‘statement’ museum architecture. And I was wondering if this one was going to be a navigational nightmare. But surprisingly, it isn’t – mostly because the majority of exhibition space is actually below the lotus / finger structure, essentially at basement level. But before I get into the exhibitions, I’ll give an overview of the museum building itself.
Like several other Singaporean attractions (the Singapore Flyer springs to mind), the building seems geared up for high-throughput crowds. (Given our Singapore stopovers seem to always have us visiting attractions in the middle of a weekday, I have no idea the extent to which these crowds actually materialise.) Operationally it feels more of an ‘attraction’ than a ‘museum’ too – your entry ticket is priced according to the number of temporary exhibitions you decide to visit, and your ticket only gets you into each exhibition once.
The intended visitor flow is ‘waterfall’ style – i.e., you are encouraged to start at the top and work your way down through the 50,000 sq.ft. of exhibition space. At the top is the smallest level with only three gallery spaces; immediately below that is the Upper Galleries that run in a loop through all the 10 ‘fingers’. Each of the 10 spaces link together like pearls on a string. It’s one-way traffic and you enter and leave at the same point, limiting disorientation (and it doesn’t feel unduly constraining but it would depend on the exhibition I imagine). Two floors below the Upper Galleries are the main exhibition spaces and the museum shop (the lobby is sandwiched between these two levels).
The 'finger' structures in the Upper Galleries offer some unusual display opportunities.
Running through the centre of the whole building is the ‘Rain Oculus’, which collects rainwater from the curve roof and channeling it into a pool that is used as the water supply for the rest rooms. Water flows fairly constantly (before I figured out what was going on I thought it was raining outside).
The top floor, inside the tips of the tallest ‘fingers’, is the only permanent exhibition space: Art Science – a journey through creativity. This is divided into three separate spaces: Curiosity, Inspiration and Expression. The exhibition is intended as an introduction to the concept of ArtScience showing it as a manifestation of human creativity. The spaces are sparsely populated and, writing this several months later, my lasting impression is of gobos, lighting effects and projections, along with a couple of touchscreen interactives. Because it sets itself up as an introductory space, I was expecting these concepts to be more explicitly linked to in the rest of the exhibition spaces. However, this didn’t really happen as the rest of the gallery spaces are essentially given over to hosting touring exhibitions brought in from elsewhere (this is what is on now).
Unfortunately, the museum website seems to live in an eternal present and does not link in any obvious way to information about past exhibitions – thankfully, Wikipedia has stepped in to fill this gap. When we visited there were three touring exhibitions: Dali – Mind of a Genius; Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds; and Van Gogh Alive.
Dali – Mind of a Genius
I’ve been to Dali exhibitions before (Liquid Desire at NGV in 2009 and as part of a Surrealism exhibition in the Pompidou Centre in 2002), so I thought I was familiar with his work – in particular his paintings and films/animation. So for me, the surprising part of this exhibition was the number of bronzes on display (an element of Dali’s work I hadn’t seen before) as well as his forays into furniture design and the decorative arts.
One of Dali's bronzes
There were several versions of the infamous ‘Melting Clock’ motif (if anything a bit too much really!) although I thought this use of a wall of regular clocks distorted by fairground mirrors was a cute touch to finish off the exhibition:
Regular clocks rendered Dali-esque by fairground mirrors
Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds
This exhibition was about the mysteries surrounding the wreck of a ninth century Arab trading dhow, found in the Java Sea. Laden with Chinese ceramics, the wreck is proof of a maritime trade route between China and the Middle East from the era of the tale of Sindbad the Sailor.
The scope and significance of what was found on the wreck was interpreted well, along with the concept that such a find inevitably raises just as many questions as it answers. The exhibition was quite dark so I don’t have any good photos, but the website linked to above is very comprehensive. It says that the exhibition is set to tour until 2015, but no additional venues are advertised yet.
Van Gogh Alive
I was expecting this to be a fairly conventional exhibition of Van Gogh’s works (perhaps a tour from the Van Gogh Museum I’d visited in 2000) so at first I was a bit taken aback to be in a large space surrounded by tall projector screens showing Van Gogh’s work and photographs all synchronised to a classical soundtrack. But once I got over that I was able to enjoy this immersive experience (that is hard to describe but maybe these still renderings and this Youtube video gives you a bit of an idea):
It was an exhibition space you moved in rather than through – you could sit anywhere in the space and have essentially the same experience. For some reason, on the day we visited it looked like they were using the usual exit door for both entrance and exit, so it means we didn’t see the interpretive panels explaining the concept until we were just about to leave (and we almost missed it entirely).
So in conclusion? It was a pleasant and interesting way to pass 2-3 hours away from the heat and humidity of mid-day Singapore. Given the unconventional shape, the building is not as visitor-unfriendly as you’d first expect. However, at the moment at least, it feels more like a sophisticated exhibition hall than a museum with its own mission and identity.
Exhibit Files is a website designed for exhibition designers and developers to share their experiences, mostly though posting case studies of exhibition projects they’ve worked on, or reviews of exhibitions they’ve seen.
It’s been running for about 4 or 5 years now, and while originally there was a strong science centre focus (it was developed under the auspices of the Association of Science-Technology Centers or ASTC), there are now case studies and reviews of a range of different exhibit types. For instance, I recently added a version of my Saatchi Gallery review on the site.
There are nearly 400 case studies and exhibition reviews on Exhibit Files to date. Anyone can register and add their own case studies and reviews to the collection. The case studies are particularly helpful as it’s a rare forum for exhibition developers to share the lessons they’ve learned from past projects (with the hope that others won’t make the same mistakes!). The reviews are also a great armchair ride of exhibitions from around the world, that we’re unlikely to all get a chance to see.
To the exhibition developers among you, I encourage you to sign up and share your expertise and experiences.
The other day, as I was trawling the net for images of the good, bad and ugly of museum lobbies and signage (for an upcoming presentation), I found this excellent blog – Please Be Seated: visitor comfort in museums and other public places. It is hosted by Beth Katz and Steve Tokar, who set out to:
. . . promote and discuss the idea that comfortable museum visitors are happy visitors who are more likely to enjoy their visits and more likely to return. Thus, museums and other public spaces are better and more successful in all ways when they provide basic comforts including (but not limited to) good seating, readable signs and labels, lounges and other areas of visual and psychic relief, and navigable restrooms. Our intent is to analyze museums and other public spaces in terms of comfort, a word we use inclusively to mean visual, aural, intellectual, and emotional comfort as well as physical comfort for a wide range of humans of all ages and types.
The blog is well illustrated with a wide range of examples (it looks like they are all US examples, but the general idea is universal) and covers topics such as lobby layouts, orientation signage, disabled access and public spaces. As I touched upon recently, I believe attention to these details can make or break a museum visit.
The Please Be Seated blog is one for the bookmarks list of anyone interested in the visitor experience.
On my recent trip to the UK, I managed a quick visit to the newly refurbished National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Our visit was on a Sunday morning at the height of the Fringe season, on our way to meet some friends for lunch. Having somewhere we had to be, combined with the fact that one of our group was only five months old, meant that realistically this was only ever going to be a lightning trip. Consequently, this review will be of first impressions and a critique of what I did get time to see.
According to this blog post by museum commentator Tiffany Jenkins, the refit took three years and £47 million. It’s proved popular, with visitor numbers passing the 100,000 mark less than a week after opening. Exhibition spaces were certainly beginning to fill up by the time we left.
Arrival and Entrance
One of the changes they have made is to the way visitors enter the building – rather than scaling the prominent steps, you now enter via an adjacent street-level door (although once inside the building it feels more like a basement than an entrance statement).
The steps to the original entrance, with signage pointing to the new entrance. (Photo from Tiffany Jenkins' blog, see link above)
In her review Jenkins criticised this move, observing that many visitors gravitated toward the more prominent original entrance and missed the new entrance completely. To be honest I’m still in two minds about what I think about this myself – on the one hand, the street-level entrance was much easier to negotiate with a baby stroller, and I can see the rationale for having an entrance which meets universal access requirements. On the other hand, changes to navigation that go against the grain of usual expectations can be disorienting and counterproductive. It will be interesting to see how this settles in – the photo above shows how the steps have already been adopted as an informal outdoor gathering and relaxation space now that they don’t have to deal with volumes of visitor traffic. If this new purpose settles in and gains currency over time, then the street-level entrance could easily become ‘the new normal’*.
Once you pass through the basement you reach the central atrium of the original grand hall – this is where the original entrance would have taken you. This has been left quite open and minimal with only a few key objects – this works well as a space where you can make the psychological transition from ‘street’ mode to ‘museum’ mode. Most of the exhibition spaces run off this central space; this aids visit planning and site orientation. It could do with a bit more seating though:
The central atrium, National Museum Scotland
Exhibitions
We started our visit in the Natural History area, and having a limited time budget this was one of the few galleries I managed to look at properly. (Later I broke away from the group so I could have a whistle-stop tour around more spaces and get more of an overall sense of the place.)
In the animals exhibition, displays were organised by characteristics of animals, eg. flight, adaptation to climate extremes, locomotion, size. This allowed interesting comparison of different animals’ adaptation to their respective environments and ecological niche. These displays were generally well grouped and signposted, so it was clear why certain animals had been placed together.
Overview of the animals exhibition, National Museum Scotland
The introductory signage in each exhibition space gave a good, simple overview of the intended interpretive goal:
Introductory text to "Animal World"
However, while I generally liked the succinct and well-layered interpretive text, I think it erred too much on the side of brevity. For instance, in many cases I was left wondering where certain animals were from, and whether they were extinct or abundant in the wild. Such information was all but absent, which struck me as a real gap (particularly as we are used to thinking about animals in terms of where they are from; the displays were not organised by habitat so there wasn’t any conceptual ‘anchor’ in this respect).
There were a few tactile displays, such as this one which allowed you to feel and compare the difference between horns which were made of bone, tooth or keratin:
Tactile display, National Museum Scotland
Next to the Natural History galleries were the spaces dedicated to World Cultures. These were arranged by theme, allowing you to compare and contrast how different peoples around the world approach common aspects of human experience. I watched an interesting video about different wedding traditions, and found a Ghanaian coffin shaped like a Mercedes Benz both fascinating and disconcerting.
Regrouping in the museum cafe afterwards, my partner expressed disappointment that he had not seen anything particularly Scottish during his visit, given that we were meant to be in the country’s National Museum and all. It’s there, but unfortunately the Scottish history and culture displays are tucked away in an adjacent wing. This extension was probably built in the 80s or 90s, but in the layout of the refurbished museum it is a fair way off the beaten track and it was almost by accident that I found it at all. I’m not sure what the original intent was, but in its current configuration it is a confusing rabbit-warren of dead-end spaces.
The old 'new' part of the National Museum of Scotland - I wonder if this building was conceived and designed from the facade inwards, leaving a legacy of spaces which are less than ideal as exhibition areas.
Few visitors seemed to make it this far, and there was a noticeable thinning of visitor traffic compared to the galleries surrounding the main atrium.
The interior of the museum extension. From this vantage point I could see more exhibition space than I could figure out how to find.
As I said before, I probably only had an hour or so to look around and I’m sure there’s plenty I missed. Plus I never bothered to pick up a visitor map which may have made the extension easier to navigate.
Has anyone else visited NMS either recently or before the refurbishment? What were your experiences?
*Incidentally, I noticed that the National Gallery in London faces a similar dilemma. They have taken the option of maintaining both the original grand entrance as well as a newer alternative at street level. However, the signage was ambiguous and it wasn’t immediately obvious that the street level entrance actually *was* a proper entrance (as opposed to an entrance just for schools or tour groups), so we ended up needlessly lugging our suitcases up the main staircase.
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?
