New Westminster Museum & Archives
The New Westminster Museum and Archives was moving to a new home in the Anvil Centre and required space planning, interior design, exhibition design, and architectural coordination with the base-building architects. Our team worked closely with the client to develop the exhibit themes, hierarchy, experience and content with the expressed goal of creating a flexible and engaging museum experience.
In addition to the client’s desire to communicate the general history of the City of New Westminster, our team went further to infuse personal relevance to a broad audience. The strategy approached content in physical terms, creating the experience of walking through a picture book, of seeing forward and backward through time with the use of large-format images, documents, and graphic ephemera. The history of New Westminster is co-incidental with the history of photography, therefore the Museum’s collection held rich storytelling possibilities.
Care was taken to create views to and through cases of objects, through child-sized crawl-through spaces with secret, embedded exhibitry, and from the juxtaposition of photos. Sensitive to the struggles of small- to medium-sized municipal museums to draw visitors, we focused on creating a clear and cohesive narrative, while designing experiences unique to the physical museum space, for example, the visual timeline that scales archival photography to nine-foot-high walls.
The two-sided exhibition title, Stump City, Royal City, challenges audience expectations of the Museum as “city PR voice”. By not only celebrating the city’s achievements, but also featuring the city’s challenges—a dichotomy of ups and downs that parallel individual human experience, a more compelling storyline and experience were developed.