The Lincoln Gallery model (top) at the scale of 1/2 inch = 1 foot. The columns are 7 inches high. Notice the yellow pencil in the foreground. The actual Lincoln gallery (bottom) during installation at 1 inch = 1 inch scale. These columns are 14 feet tall. Photos by Mike Edson.
Down the hall from my office is a room full of highly detailed scale models of every SAAM gallery in the museum. The models began taking shape two summers ago. They’re made of wood, fabric, plastic, and of course foamcore and hot glue—these last two being the stock-in-trade of model makers and architecture students everywhere. Every work of art is reproduced to scale; someone looks up the dimensions as they grab a thumbnail image from our collections database, does some math, and makes a scaled-down color print. (Sometimes three-dimensional objects are represented by solid boxes with little pictures of the work glued to each side. If a case or pedestal was designed with CAD, scaled-down versions of the drawings will show up in the model.)
I’m astonished at how close the model shown above came to representing the actual space, but as everyone here can tell you, in the end all visualization tools are just approximations: it takes a design and curatorial team a long time working with a gallery to really be confident that their projections and predictions will work as intended in the real world. Once the gallery walls are painted and a few artworks get hung there is always a surprise or two and it’s not uncommon for somebody on the team to find something that needs to be changed. I’ve been a part of projects (not here, I’m happy to report) where we’ve re-hung entire exhibitions because a wall color wasn’t quite working out.
The truth is that even after the models and the meetings and the on-site tweaks the exhibitions will look totally different when the spaces fill with people. How do visitors circulate through the building? Have we presented the right amount and type of interpretive information? How do the galleries look at different times of day, or different times of year? Do the sequences of galleries and juxtaposition of objects engage the viewers and convey the meaning the curators intended? Museums are complicated public places loaded with layers of meaning and nuance, and we won’t really know the answers to all these questions until months after the first visitors pass through our doors.
