Detroit Public Schools Children's Museum Exhibits

The DPS Children's Museum's investigation into museum curatorship and exhibit design initiates the advent of a new and innovative pedagogy.  The notion of an educational institution initiating a didactic environment through the blending of exhibit within the classroom experience is a pioneering effort wrought with intellectual potential.  Blessed with a diverse and significant collection of cultural, scientific, and historical artifacts, the museum speaks to an educational process of immersion, rather than erudition.  After 84 years, the pedagogical model employed remains uniquely distinctive and progressive.  The biomorphic exhibit, designed to display the museums past, present and future, derives its formal character from the immersive educational process of dissection.  Visitors can be expected to view, sit within and interact with the many facets the exhibit reveals through a variation of incisions within the skin.  The exhibit endeavors to inform and provoke thought as a semiotic manifestation of the DPS Children's Museum story.

A series of exhibits were developed to provide a flexible rotation of the museum’s 100,000-item collection in various themes.  Clear boxes, visible from multiple sides allow objects to be presented in totality.  Objects are presented devoid of a spatial orientation, and are objective in their display.  Rather than having a preconceived notion of what front is, the exhibit allows for individual interpretation of what top, bottom or sides actually are.  The 'dufflepud' wall is a linear themed exhibit suitable for small items, vertical elements and textiles.  Clear boxes are inserted into the wall at varying elevations, particular to viewpoints of children.  A late programmatic development, the desire to use the gallery as event space, required the 'dufflepud' to be flexibly located. Generally the wall is situated at a point within the center of the space as an organizer for linear circulation.  The initiation of a suspended track and glide system above the wall forms a more intimate space against the wall on the south side.  To reclaim this area as part of the event space, the 'dufflepud' slides against the gallery wall with the artifacts still on display on the north side.  The implementation required easy mobility that can be accommodated by unlocking two casters and sliding it in either the expanded or compressed position in seconds.

-Photography by Laszlo Regos

Participants On This Project

• inFORM studio Architectural
  

  inFORM studio

  235 E. Main St. Northville MI 48167

  Role: Architectural

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