Repurposing Spaces

After a year of hard work, we at the Placer County Museums just cut the ribbon on our new state-of-the-art Archives and Collections Facility. Our job in exhibits was to make the entryway a small museum. The big problem we needed to overcome was the fact that the facility was built in WWII as part of a military hospital, and that we were the latest in a seventy-year-long line of tenants who had repeatedly repurposed that space.

The last tenants to use the space was the County Clinic which left the entryway in an unsurprisingly clinical state. It had everything: low ceilings, plexiglas safety windows, and a very utilitarian feel.

Since we couldn’t change anything structurally, we needed to figure out how to make the room feel more inviting. We figured that giving it a job to do would be the best course of action. Since the technical function of the room was to be a hallway that leads to the two different parts of the building, we decided that we needed to start with some really fun directional signs.

We went with a painted stripe around the room and hand painted ye-olde-style mortise cuts of hands pointing you to what you’re looking for. The paint went a long way to soften the feel of the room and make it more inviting than your average clinic lobby.

Due to the shape of the room and the many low windows and counters we were really limited with our options for putting in display cases. Not only that, the lighting was so poor that if we put in a floor case, the bottom of it would be too dark to see anything. Also, big rectangle display cases would add yet more right angles into an already overly boxy room.

One of the main requirements of the cases was the ease with which the contents could be changed out, as one of the ways we were going to be using them was to showcase newly collected objects. The purpose of this was to combat the “Indiana Jones problem” where people don’t want to donate objects that will just go into a warehouse and may never see the light of day again. To achieve these goals we decided to build some exhibit cases out of old suitcases and bolt them to the wall.

Each case contains a different group of artifacts which highlights a different part of our collection as well as the different focuses of our collections policy.

This trunk with a WWII soldier’s effects is a touching story about a local lieutenant who died in Italy. This is a story that we may never have been able to tell since WWII is not a topic we touch on in any of our museums. The text also talks about how we are going to use this space to exhibit newly acquired objects.

The case below showcases newly acquired objects from an event that happened this year. It also talks about our new Contemporary Collections Program that outlines a new procedure for collecting objects from modern events. This is to give museum workers of the future materials to work with when interpreting the story of today.

The final case is an exhibit of women’s accessories from yesteryear featuring photos and objects from our collection. It also contains a prompt for donating to our collection.

In addition to the entryway we were asked to number the padlocks on the public/volunteer lockers in the hallway. We decided that that wasn’t really a fun job so we came up with the idea to use photos from our collection instead of numbers.

While not as easy as using numbers, it definitely has a more playful attitude to help combat the utilitarian feel of the building.

Going by the enthusiasm and interest in the new exhibits, expressed at the grand opening last week, I’d say on the whole it was a pretty huge success.