Brooklyn Museum Visitor Experience

Bringing the city into the museum, this project is one that dissolves the boundaries between an institution and the outside world.

Museums across the country are focused on accessibility, rethinking their role as bastions of high culture and striving to become public spaces for engagement and cross-cultural exchange. We joined up with the Brooklyn Museum, a century-old institution located within a diverse cross-section of Brooklyn, to explore this challenge. Tasked with re-envisioning the museum’s lobby space and overall visitor experience, we sought solutions that would offer new flexibility for diverse programming, bridge digital and physical interfaces and transform the entryway into an amenity-rich public space for the neighborhood at-large.

To anchor our design intervention, we developed a suite of flexible and modular components—information desks, directories, ticket bars, benches and interactive kiosks—designed to offer optimal program support for the diverse array of activities that take place within Brooklyn Museum’s lobby area.

Distributed throughout the entry sequence, these pieces enable continuous reconfiguration, flexing to accommodate huge crowds and performances, as well as the slower pace of visitors trickling in throughout the week. Ticket bars and desks are no longer static objects, but instead are designed to be re-positioned rapidly in response to the museum’s evolving needs and events.

We incorporated common materials with a color palette that unifies the components and helps provide an increasingly seamless flow from the museum’s entry plaza on to the galleries beyond. A series of eight mobile benches integrate color-coded power outlets and USB ports, encouraging visitors to charge mobile devices such as phones, cameras and tablets.

With this project, we leveraged a tactical, intervention-focused approach to transform a private space into a community resource. This theme continues to intrigue us and we’ve continued to explore it across a variety of sectors, from commercial workspace to public libraries to retail storefronts.

Client

Brooklyn Museum

Location

Brooklyn, NY

Scope

21,000 sq ft

Completion

2015

Photography

John Muggenborg

Collaborator

MTWTF