New Westminster Museum and Archives

Relocating to the Anvil Centre, the New Westminster Museum & Archives was designed as a “walkable picture book” of civic history. Moving beyond standard exhibition design, PUBLIC transformed a vast collection of archival photography into a scaled, nine-foot-high visual timeline that allows visitors to look forward and backward through time. The narrative, titled Stump City, Royal City, eschews traditional civic boosterism to explore the raw dichotomy of the city’s challenges and achievements. To ensure a multi-generational experience, the architecture integrates child-scaled tunnels and secret “crawl-through” galleries, offering a discovery-led journey for younger visitors. By blending space planning, immersive graphic ephemera and artifacts, the design creates a flexible, engaging environment that shifts the municipal museum into a place of personal relevance.