Museums with a Mission

An Exhibit Is an Experience

Designing a space that is functional, interesting, and beautiful is a difficult challenge in itself. Museum exhibits have the additional burden of explaining complex ideas in a way that allows people to absorb them quickly and easily. "People don't learn by reading a textbook standing up," Appelbaum says. So RAA's designs allow visitors to experience the idea that an exhibit seeks to describe. In the Natural History Museum's Hall of Biodiversity, for example, RAA recreated a section of the Amazon forest. The display uses latex molds of intricate leaves made from real flora, a wildlife soundtrack, and replicas of nearly two dozen varieties of trees to bring the forest to life. Hidden projectors cast an image of a watering hole onto a screen behind the trees, which gives the scene depth and realism.

The Hot Glass Show at the Corning Museum features expert glassblowers at work in the foreground. At the back of the exhibit, visitors can see crystal glassware being made in an actual factory. "Part of the beauty of Ralph's work is that he never underestimates visitors' intelligence," Cassetti says. "He brings complex ideas to life in ways that stimulate people's curiosity. Here, they feel the heat of a 2,100-degree oven. We've rewritten the script for the Hot Glass Show dozens of times, each time adding more detail and information in response to visitors' questions."

A Safe Place for Social Learning

Conveying information is a formidable mission; enabling understanding is even more difficult. How does RAA help visitors grapple with a mind-boggling number like 6 million or comprehend an abstraction like the scale of the universe? The answer goes to the heart of the museum experience: by showing as well as telling.

In the newly opened Hall of the Universe, for example, a sphere 87 feet in diameter provides a reference point for the size of the observable universe. A walkway that wraps around the sphere lets visitors view objects of different size -- from a golf ball to a basketball to a hulking globe -- to show how heavenly bodies compare in size: How big is Earth compared to the universe? Which is bigger, the sun or the moon? "We were trying to help people contemplate the question 'How big is the universe?'," explains Eliot Hoyt, 32, a content coordinator at RAA who works with the Museum of Natural History. "You can't do that by just spitting out a bunch of numbers that no one can visualize."

In the tour of the Newseum, in Arlington, Virginia, a museum of media and the history of journalism, one of the last stops is the Video News Wall. Measuring 126 feet by 10.5 feet, the wall is a seamless display of breaking news from satellite feeds around the world. On the ground floor, below the wall, are the day's front pages from 70 of the world's newspapers. The display bombards visitors with a forceful message: Around the globe, the media delivers a daily deluge of powerful information that connects and changes the world -- without demanding that anyone read a single word of it.

To Appelbaum, this kind of learning by doing -- delivering a message by enacting it -- is the ultimate success. "Museums are often described as secular temples," he says. "But museums are actually safe harbors where people are able to express a unique body language -- one of pondering, thinking, and marveling. All museums have a sense of shared social experience that is a pleasure to see because it rarely happens in other public places. It took us 20 years to get people to recognize that these institutions don't just happen. They are, in fact, highly managed, highly packaged, highly orchestrated, carefully written, and obsessively designed. We are committed to that kind of social learning."

Cheryl Dahle (cdahle@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer. Visit Ralph Appelbaum associates on the Web (www.raany.com).