Museum projects merge history, technology and unique design

From rigging a two-story artifact into an existing building to contending with construction site surprises (like a nuclear fallout shelter) to mastering the finer points of museum choreography, archival environments and goth gardening, museum construction challenges project teams to devise creative solutions to unique conditions and goals.

When Design Collective developed a renovation proposal for the South Car Shop at the B&O Railroad Museum, they took a big, calculated risk. Despite its popularity and acclaim, the museum faced some challenges due to its limited visibility and access.

Breaking with the museum’s master plan, Design Collective recommended excavating a large part of the site and moving the main entrance to the lower floor of the under-utilized South Car Shop.

That concept created opportunities for several dramatic design and functional improvements.

The South Car Shop “has these giant trusses. It has beautiful volume,” said Scott Vieth, Principal. “So, very much like when you walk into Grand Central Station in New York and ascend up into an amazing volume of space, you will come into the museum and go upstairs into this grand, huge space.”

The entrance design would also fix the museum’s “choreography problem,” Vieth said. B&O’s current entrance delivers visitors directly into the museum’s Crown Jewel — the Roundhouse. Consequently, many visitors never explore other parts of the museum. The new entrance will lead visitors past other exhibits, meeting areas and the museum shop before ending at the Roundhouse.

The design also addresses a goal of the museum, namely better connection with the adjacent Pigtown neighborhood.

“The museum has always had visibility and connection issues with the neighborhood and that’s inherent to what this site used to be. As a functioning railyard, it wasn’t looking for the community to come in,” said Brian Reetz, Principal.

Site excavation, the new entrance and other renovations (including the installation of a large rooftop sign in the tradition of Domino Sugar, Montgomery Ward and Natty Boh) will make the museum more visible and create obvious pathways to the entrance and parking.

Grading changes will give the public clear view of some historic trains parked onsite that currently aren’t visible. Exterior renovations will also provide the neighborhood with free, daytime access to a new amphitheater and landscaped area around the museum’s entrance.

“Opening the site up to the community was really important,” Reetz said, both to provide a public amenity and “to show off this great museum, encourage people to spend time in the area and attract development and investment.”

Dark inspiration

At the nearby Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in West Baltimore, designers and engineers have planned a $10 million, 15,000-square-foot renovation and addition project. In addition to creating an enhanced museum and a destination for Poe’s international following, the project is expected to become the centerpiece of the redevelopment of the Poe Homes — a historic, affordable housing development.

Creating an improved Edgar Allan Poe Museum, however, requires some unconventional thinking.

During the design phase, plans to add a second story to the museum were rejected in favor of a suggestion the museum expand underground instead.

“Poe is very goth, very dark so suddenly this idea of creating catacombs in the basement of the museum started to feel like the right thing for this project,” said Kristen Gedeon, Senior Associate with MK Consulting Engineers.

As an amenity for the museum and the neighborhood, the design includes “a beautiful outdoor garden space” but with a different style.

“There is something called goth gardening,” Gedeon said. “You use plants that have dark colors — deep reds and purples. We are really leaning into the darkness and moodiness of Poe’s work.”

Under the planned renovation, the museum will expand into four adjacent Poe Homes units for its first phase. Part of the building’s exterior will be veiled with a metal screen that includes words from Poe’s writing.

“The architects see the sculpture, the metal screen as a way to activate the street,” Gedeon added. “It will be an interesting transition from very traditional row homes to a more mid-century type of architecture in the museum.”

Incognito design

Not surprisingly, executing those unique and highly imaginative designs presents a world of challenges to construction teams.

Earlier this year, Hirsch Electric completed the electrical package for an 18-month renovation of the Jewish Museum of Maryland in the Jonestown neighborhood.

The project included the transformation of an exhibition arcade. The immersive space is lined with custom-designed display cases that combine materials from the museum’s collections with interactive technologies. The combination helps visitors engage with Jewish stories in dynamic and interactive ways.

The renovation also included construction of a new state-of-the-art audio/visual production studio and additional rotating gallery space to present exhibitions, serve as a black box theater and as multi-purpose program space.

Set in a 1990s building, the improvements “required a lot more electrical distribution to update everything and support the interactive systems. We did a lot of coordination with the cabinetry people to provide power and lighting in the display cases,” said Steve Grebe, Project Manager at Hirsch.

In addition to the challenge of finding ways to route new power through the building, crews had to complete work carefully to avoid disrupting museum staff onsite and avoid any damage to artifacts “especially when we were core drilling through floors and walls to run new conduits to new panels,” Grebe said.

Currently, Hirsch is working through the unique requirements its crews will have to meet when they start work at the B&O Railroad Museum this fall. New electrical requirements throughout the 50,000-square-foot renovation space are enormous.

“At this point, the design has over 100 conduits running from the electrical room into the building to feed everything,” said Sean Daniels, Division Manager.

“Everything” includes power to the new exhibition hall, classrooms, meeting room, archives, exhibition hall, museum shop, main entrance, exterior lighting (especially throughout the amphitheater), new rooftop HVAC equipment and a high-end lighting package that, alone, is valued at over $1 million.

“We’re learning that there is a certain look the design team wants. The best way to describe it is incognito,” Daniels said.

Wires, conduit and other infrastructure need to be hidden within concrete floors or a “floor sleeper assembly” beneath the new floor being installed on the second story. That requirement compelled Hirsch to begin extensive BIM modeling of the project to identify challenges early and coordinate installations with other subcontractors.

Daniels is also plotting out how his crews will install the sophisticated museum track lighting on the second floor. Crews will have to suspend each fixture from a trapeze structure 30 feet above the floor.

“I need to get a lift that supports that work but doesn’t have enough weight to damage the new floor,” he said. “Right now, that looks like a tow-behind aerial lift.”

Wrestling with history

For the York County History Center project, Lewis Contractors had to overcome heavy duty challenges. Built in the 19th century as an Edison Electric Light Company steam plant, the York, PA facility continued to generate electricity until the 1950s and steam until the 1970s.

“It was once a coal-fired steam and electrical generation plant, with some heavy infrastructure that was integral to the structure itself, so there was certainly something very daunting in the task of transforming this place into a next-generation history museum,” said Tyler Tate, President of Lewis Contractors.

Considerable environmental remediation had occurred before Lewis arrived onsite but the company still had to contend with some major site challenges.

“Obviously, one area that we couldn’t see was below the floors and the structural floors, originally intended for heavy loads, had varying elevations and thicknesses,” Tate said. “Borings and core drillings can only tell you so much on a site with such complicated history where multiple buildings were built and demolished, and where large installations of equipment were put in, upgraded, pulled out, and replaced.”

Site work uncovered a multitude of surprises— abandoned elevator pits, voids where substructures for old equipment had been laid and later removed, and a train track that once supported carts bringing coal into the plant.

As the construction manager at risk, Lewis also had to address the unique demands of transforming the interior of a 19th century steam plant into a modern, welcoming community history museum. One of those demands emerged from the fact that York County’s history is largely a history of manufacturing. Lewis had to deliver exhibit spaces and environmental conditions that would support both very intricate items and large, industrial products.

One of the products destined to go on display was one of the first commercial ice-making machines in the United States, an A-Frame Ammonia Compressor that was built in 1904 and was two stories high, Tate said.

“Early in the project, we created a knock-out panel that was temporarily shored, so that when the contractor was ready to move the machine inside, we could remove parts of the building without damaging the structure,” he said. We had also created a special foundation to set it on and rigged it in using specialty cranes.”