The First Facility Management Blog

In October 2008, Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, PA moved into its new location in the city’s renovated Memorial Hall. The move capped a 32 year growth spurt for the museum, which opened in 1976 as a 2,200 square foot exhibit inside Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences.

Memorial Hall was constructed in 1876.

In preparation for the move, an $88 million restoration was undertaken on Memorial Hall, which is a National Historic Landmark. Built to serve as the Art Gallery for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 (The World’s Fair), Memorial Hall is the last major building remaining from that late 19th century event. After the fair, Memorial Hall reopened as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (later renamed the Philadelphia Museum of Art) until 1928 when that museum moved.

Memorial Hall remained open for smaller exhibits and was used for collections storage until 1956, when it was converted to a recreation center and headquarters for Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park Commission. In 1961, a basketball court was inserted in the west gallery, and locker rooms were built on the ground floor. In 1962, the east gallery was converted into an indoor swimming pool. By 2000, the building’s deteriorating condition led the Park Commission to seek a new tenant to restore Memorial Hall. Please Touch Museum signed an 80-year lease on February 14, 2005.

The newly renovated Memorial Hall

As an attraction for families with young children, Please Touch Museum offers an array of interactive, hands on learning opportunities. New exhibits, some old favorites, a collection of Philadelphia Childhood Treasures, and a century old Dentzel Carousel have been joined together in Memorial Hall to create a family destination resembling a  majestic storybook castle.

The Dentzel Carousel (for which a new Carousel House was built) originally operated at a Philadelphia amusement park. Its animal menagerie, which dates back to 1908, includes 40 horses, four cats, two pigs, two goats, and four rabbits. It is illuminated by 1,296 lightbulbs. It had been in storage for more than 40 years and was once in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. The carousel is on long-term loan from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

The carousel is lit with more than 1,200 lightbulbs.

In addition to interior renovations to suit the museum’s needs, the exterior of the 156,000 square foot facility was cleaned and updated to meet aesthetic and operational needs. Part of this process was to replace the structure’s 30 arched windows with a curtainwall product. The self-supporting windows measure 15’ wide and 30’ tall. Arches and other curved mullions were bent by Custom Manufacturing. U.S. Glass & Metal designed and fabricated all the windows in house and performed on-site installation. The firm also fabricated and installed the 20-foot sections of the octagon-shaped Carousel House, which has 20 rectangular windows and 8 arch-top windows, using YKK AP curtain wall.

Firms involved included architectural firm Kise, Straw & Kolodner of Philadelphia; general contractor (a joint venture of three Philadelphia builders) Daniel J. Keating Company, Bittenbender Construction, and McCrae Construction; construction manager Northstar Advisors of Ardmore, PA; window system supplier YKK Architectural Products of Austell, GA; glazing contractor, U.S. Glass & Metal, Inc. of Philadelphia; and metal bending service provider Custom Manufacturing Corp. of Bensalem, PA.

The expansion, renovation, and move were funded through a capital campaign operated by Please Touch Museum. Support was sought from individuals, foundations, and corporations through a number of sponsorship opportunities, including naming rights to the museum’s six exhibit zones, the building’s historic Great Hall, the new Carousel House, and others.

Rafael Viñoly Architects has designed the new East Wing at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), Ohio, which opened to the public on June 27, 2009. Its completion marks the opening of the first of three planned wings.

Rafael Viñoly Architects’ design for the new East Wing forms part of a seven year expansion and renovation project. The 139,200 square foot East Wing connects CMA’s original 1916 Beaux-Arts building and the 1971 addition by Marcel Breuer, creating new spaces for the presentation and conservation of one of the leading encyclopaedic art collections in the United States.

Double height special exhibitions galleries and an entrance lobby, located on the Lower Level, serve as the centrepiece of the two-story East Wing, while new galleries for the museum’s collection of 19th- and 20th-century European, modern and contemporary art, as well as the  extensive photography collection, are located on Level Two. The new wing also houses expanded offices and workrooms for the conservation department on Level One.

The CMA was built in 1916 by local architects Hubbell & Benes as a grand Greek revival pavilion, created as the focal point of a formal landscape designed by the Olmsted Brothers. However, subsequent additions, including an education wing by Marcel Breuer, obscured the rational plan of the original structure, presenting a disjointed, confusing warren of spaces. In 2001, Rafael Viñoly Architects won the commission to resolve these elements with an expansion and renovation program, creating a coherent sequence of galleries that accommodates projected growth and unifies disparate architectural vocabularies into a singular composition.

Rafael Viñoly Architects’ plan restores focus to the original 1916 building, conceiving it as a “jewel” set within a continuous ring of expansion space that includes the renovated Breuer building. Other later additions are being demolished to make way for a vast, indoor, sunlit piazza, topped by a gently curving canopy of glass and steel, around which the entire museum will be organized. The naturally lit piazza with its attractive landscaping will draw visitors into the center of the museum complex, a central meeting place as well as an event space for large functions.

New gallery wings to the east and west enclose the piazza and taper toward the 1916 building, where they culminate in fully transparent, glazed galleries and pedestrian bridges that permit unobstructed views of the sides of the historic pavilion. The stone cladding of the new gallery wings consists of alternate bands of granite and marble that modulate the two very different aesthetics of the 1916 and Breuer buildings. In this manner, the distinctions between “modern” and “historic” are preserved, yet integrated into a cohesive whole.

A two-phase construction process accommodates the museum’s fundraising schedule and allows continued operation (on a reduced basis) while the project is underway. The project is due to be completed in 2012.

(Photos: Brad Feinknopf)

Planners for the National Law Enforcement Museum in Washington, DC have announced an extended timeline and substantial cost-saving measures “to keep the project on track despite the very challenging economic times that our nation is facing.” The museum–the first in the nation focused on law enforcement–is a project of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF), a private non-profit organization dedicated to honoring the service and sacrifice of America’s law enforcement officers. Construction is slated to begin in Fall 2010 for the museum–which which will tell the story of law enforcement through high-tech, interactive exhibitions, historical artifacts, and educational programming. It is expected to be complete by mid-2013.

In 2000, the U.S. Congress authorized the museum to be built on federal land across the street from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, and required a start date by November 2010. The authorizing law requires the museum to be funded by private donations.

Craig W. Floyd, Chairman and CEO of NLEOMF reports that more than $37 million has been raised to date for the museum, but he said that the economic downturn has slowed the effort and the credit crisis has made it virtually impossible to borrow money at affordable rates for museum projects. “The credit market and the economy will revive, but the timing is uncertain, and we want to see our museum become a reality sooner rather than later,” Floyd stated. “The story of law enforcement’s extraordinary contributions to our nation needs and deserves to be told. We are going to make it happen.”

“The result of these modifications will be a high-tech, interactive, world-class museum exploring our nation’s law enforcement profession, at a much more affordable price in today’s difficult economy,” said Floyd. “These changes were necessary and fiscally prudent given the stark economic realities we are dealing with,” he added.

The museum will include a research center.

The new plan has the cost of the project reduced by $29 million; this is largely the result of moving off-site an entire level of administrative space intended for staff and scrapping plans to relocate a maze of utility lines that run under a portion of the land Congress has designated for the museum. In addition to lower construction expenses, the cost of operating the museum once it opens will also be reduced under the new plan.

The overall size of the museum will be scaled back from a four-level, 100,000 square foot building to a three-level, 55,000 square foot facility. “We recognized how hard it is to borrow and raise money in the current economic climate,” said Floyd. “So, we challenged our architects, Davis Buckley Architects and Planners, to develop a plan that would substantially reduce costs without impacting our overall mission, and they figured out a way to make it happen.”

In addition to the administrative level of the building, other areas to be eliminated or reduced include the cafe and atrium space. Two-thirds of the exhibit space will be retained under the revised plan, along with a theater, museum shop, and dedicated areas for education and research. The facility’s glass entrance pavilions and plaza will also remain unchanged. “We are committed to honoring the recognition opportunities that have already been secured by our generous donors, including all of our ‘Thin Blue Line’ and theater seat donors,” said Floyd.

(Rendering courtesy of Davis Buckley Architects and Planners)

The Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art is taking toilet homage to a new level. The organization has launched a Web site which displays a large selection of its collection of images of toilets taken at various art museums from around the world. Ranging from exclusive images of the Metropolitan, to the behind-closed-doors shots of the Hermitage to the decaying yet still flushing pictures of the Mongolian Art Museum (see below), this collection offers rich examples of the world’s museums best offerings.

Mongolian art museum toilet

The launch of this Web site is the first step in presenting the museum’s collection and is a long-anticipated turning point in its history. The museum was officially founded in 2005, and since its inception, staff have been collecting images from around the world. This collection is believed by experts to be the world’s largest and was built to showcase the forgotten art that can be found in every museum.

“This museum was founded in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 produced the sculpture Fountain and changed the way we viewed art,” stated Director Robert Schlemielle. “This piece essentially showcased that art may not be hanging in the proud walls of a museum gallery, but in the common objects and in even in the restroom. So today we launch this website asking some of the same questions about the current art establishment and its high brow art.”

The Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art has been an organization for the past three years. The collection features digital works by its hand picked staff and some artist renditions of the selected toilets. The Museum also sells a catalog, select clothing, postcards, posters, prints, and CDs.

Museum of Photography, Tokyo

So if you’re a facility manager of a museum or gallery, make sure to get the recognition you deserve for your fabulous restrooms. The official submission process includes sending an image to: submissions@artmuseumtoilet.org. Museum officials ask that each image be labeled with the name of the museum, the day the photo was taken, and the name of the photographer. All will be posted if the image is selected.