Part of a series on Growing a museum
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| Louisiana Children's Museum City Park (Photo credit: City Park) |
When Louisiana Children’s Museum opened at its new location in City
Park New Orleans on August 29, 2019, it was a celebration of joyous connections,
a triumph of resilience, and a splendid gift to the area’s children and
families. Opening the doors also marked the 14th anniversary of
Hurricane Katrina which changed the Museum’s future.
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| Opening day at the cafe |
In early 2005, Julia Bland, then and
now, Executive Director of Louisiana Children’s Museum (LCM) invited me to work
with her and her staff on a learning framework. This was part of a larger
effort for LCM to strengthen its educational offerings and better serve children
and families in the greater New Orleans area.
With the framework completed in May,
the Museum planned to develop community-based programs for parents and children
and an extensive set of field trip programs for school groups. Hurricane
Katrina and the catastrophic damage it caused to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast
in August 2005, however, changed everything. As well as revealing new, urgent
needs across the region, the storm exposed deep and long-present challenges
facing children and families.
In a state and city known for being at the bottom of the
list for positive indicators for children’s health, well-being, and learning, more and better programs for children and families alone
would be an inadequate response. A bolder response was necessary, one that placed
children high on the list of community priorities including a major investment
in them and their futures.
For LCM, the opportunity to rebuild the greater New Orleans
area had a clear starting point: the region’s children.
Over the 14 years
between Katrina and LCM’s 2019 opening, the Museum continued to operate on
Julia Street in the Warehouse District. All the while, Julia, her board, staff,
partners, boosters, architects, and designers from across the country created a
new children’s museum for children 8 years and under, their
parents and caregivers. Located on
8.5 acres at the edge of the City Park lagoon, the 56,000 square foot museum, a $47.5
million project, was guided by a bold vision, a response to the realities and
challenges of living with water, and inspired by children’s potential.
A Bold Vision
A community thrives when its children thrive. Healthy,
cared for children who enjoy varied and developmentally meaningful early
experiences grow up to become responsible, caring adults. For this to happen,
however, communities must invest early in their children, especially in their children
who face multiple challenges and risk factors and limited opportunities.
A whole-hearted commitment to both the community and to
children set the new Louisiana
Children’s Museum on a course to become an
innovative social, cultural, learning resource for children and families. LCM
would do this by making joyous connections with and among partners,
ideas, children, and families. Along the way, it would find practices and
approaches that would make the deeper ideas of the project visible, spawn other
projects, and forge new connections.
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| Joyous musical and generational connections |
Early planning work began by cultivating collaborative
relationships with community partners and players who, like LCM, shared enduring
interests in children’s well-being. From grassroots community and civic groups,
higher education, healthcare, and formal education, these partners focused on
infant and toddler mental health, caregiver engagement, environmental
education, early literacy, culture, heritage, and the arts. As the project proceeded,
these partners contributed expertise, perspectives, and connections to new
audiences. These areas also helped shape the focus of 5 exhibit galleries: Play
with Me, Follow that Food, Dig into Nature, Make Your Mark,
and Move with the River designed by Gyroscope, Inc.
The exhibit design approach began in 2011 with a visitor
panel involving a dozen children, 5 to 10 years, their parents, and caregivers.
This form of qualitative research that engages the same visitors at multiple points
in the process brought children’s and adults’ perspectives into the project
early in a way that informed and inspired subsequent design direction and choices.
Using conversation, drawing, and photographs, the sessions focused on what was
fascinating to children in exhibits at Julia Street, how parents and caregivers
saw their child’s thinking and learning, and what was important and interesting
to children about water in their everyday lives.
Recognizing that these conversations and drawings brimmed with what children
notice and think, a practice of documenting children’s
drawings and words was integrated into the whole project. In some ways, children’s
words and drawings became the language of the project, expressed in experiences,
the architecture, gallery graphics and text, wayfinding, and LCM’s identity.
The building design also reflects the Museum’s
openness to the community and connections to the site. Designed by Mithun, a
Seattle-based architecture and planning firm, the skewed H-shaped building has two wings connected by a glazed atrium. Exhibits
occupy two floors of one wing. The other wing is free and open to the public. Its
programmatic spaces relate to health, early literacy, parent and teacher
resources. Its gift shop and cafe, Acorn, serve children
and families whether they are visiting LCM or City Park. A large shaded porch across
the building’s front both invites the community in and connects visitors with the
lagoon, nature, and the Park.
Living with Water
In a city that lives below sea level
and a project born of flooding, the new Louisiana Children’s Museum is designed
for water. Water,
its presence in the life of the city and its
children,
is integrated into the building, landscape, exhibits, programs, and messaging.
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| Photo credit: Webb Bland |
The building sits 5 feet above the ground, higher than the 4 feet that
flooded City Park during Katrina. Situated at the edge of the lagoon, the building appears to hover above the water. A bridge across the lagoon is one of the entrances to the Museum. When visitors cross the
water, they walk through an interactive fog sculpture by Japanese artist Fujiko
Nakaya that spills out from the edge of the lagoon shrouding it and the bridges
in a foggy, misty cloud every 30 minutes. A “floating classroom” rafts
across the lagoon providing a close look at the water and wildlife.
The Museum is
integrated into the local ecosystem. Its 47,000 square feet of outdoor exhibits
include an edible garden, toddler nature play area, and native Louisiana plantings. Water runnels channel
water around 26 mature live oaks spared during construction. A 15,000-gallon cistern
collects rain water.
LCM’s interest in growing a water- and environmentally-literate citizenry is apparent indoors as well.
In Move with the River, a
100-foot long water table follows
the Mississippi River from its headwaters in Itasca, MN through the Port of New
Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. Along its course, locks, dams, tributaries, and cranes
for loading and unloading cargo help make local and global connections about the
working river. In Dig into Nature, children continue investigating water,
its ways, and Louisiana’s ecosystems in exploring a wave tank, sedimentation
table, a pirogue, and bayou habitats.
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| Looking upriver from the Port of New Orleans |
While water plays a
prominent role in LCM experiences, it is part of a larger set of locally-inspired
and place-based experiences and relationships including food, music, art, and architecture.
In Make Your Mark, sounds collected from across New Orleans are
activated when a game pieces on a giant interactive chessboard moves. Children explore materials and art concepts in the art studio, the
architecture of the Museum itself, local architecture, and elements of a resilient
city.
In addition to featuring local musicians in the Jammin’ House and working with local artist Terrance Osborne on the shotgun house in Make Your Mark, Mr. Okra, a New Orleans vegetable and fruit vendor who sold from his truck while singing, is featured in Follow that Food. Besides Mr. Okra, bins of local produce, a grocery store, cafe, and family recipes for a traditional crawfish boil show how food connects family, friends, community, and the larger world.
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| Children's words and drawings invite adults to engage, play, care, and learn — in dialogue |
Perhaps the most local experience and joyous
connections, the relationship and interactions between infants and toddlers and
their caregivers, are at the heart of Play with Me. Observing their
child, following their interests in the Sensory Lagoon, or finding animals
hidden in the Cypress Tree, the adult-child connection is fundamental to the
experience. Across all of the galleries, “in dialogue” graphics introduced at
the entry to the exhibits wing, invite adults to notice, ask questions, talk, and
listen to create openings for their child’s interests and capabilities to shine
through.
Inspired by Children’s Potential
A strong image
of the child and their potential inspired LCM and its planning. Too often underestimated, children are, in fact,
inherently capable. They are active agents in their own learning from birth and
possess enormous potential. Valuing children’s natural curiosity, their openness
to possibilities, readiness to play, and capacity for relationships, LCM committed
at the start to taking
the wealth of children’s potential seriously.
Early in the
process, the planning team articulated an image of the child as:
• Caring and helpful
• Inquisitive and curious
• Imaginative and resourceful
• Engaged and playful
Prominent and
visible throughout the project, this
image informed design of exhibits and experiences, features of the building, development
of the site, and graphics. With an image of the playful child and an
understanding of play as essential to the optimal development of all children, play
is encouraged throughout the Museum in opportunities for child-directed play and
a rich array of loose parts. The caring station in Dig into Nature taps
into children’s natural capacity to be caring and helpful as they examine and tend
animals living in the park who have been injured. In fact, a firm belief in the
child’s capabilities and potential has allowed the Museum to present complex
and challenging issues related, for instance, to flooding, natural disaster, and
injured animals, in a positive,
playful context.
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| Children's drawings provide way finding and messages |
Documenting children’s words and drawings, in the visitor
panel and later projects, opened opportunities for the Museum to make children’s
potential visible to them, their parents, caregivers, and educators, and to one
another. Children’s words
and drawings inspired the approach to dual language gallery graphics including introductory,
instructional, and invitational panels. This approach is also direct evidence
of children’s capabilities and remarkable understandings. It allows visitors to
see the world through children’s eyes and brings additional meaning to the actual text and graphics that would otherwise be unlikely to be captured in adult words or photos.
Even in a project of this scope, small details and
gestures make big statements. At the entry of the building, four words writ large highlight the child ‘s capabilities to
Engage, Care, Play, Learn. Throughout
the building and site, children’s drawings are incorporated into wayfinding
graphics. Their drawings identify the bathrooms, designate stroller parking, accompany
people up the stairs. A child’s drawing of a crawfish completes the Museum’s
new logo. Each and every drawing is credited to the child who
drew it.
The new Louisiana Children’s Museum brims with joyous
connections that are helping to build a thriving local ecosystem for children
and families. Community partnerships that began early continue to grow. Varied
experiences support children’s joyous connections with their caregivers, play, place,
and nature. Multiple generations connect grandparents’ hopes and dreams for the
children of New Orleans in the quotes throughout the building.
Visit and see for yourself.
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| In Make Your Mark, a boy builds a children's museum and offers tours of City Park |
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| The Sensory Lagoon in Play with Me |
Teams: Gyroscope,Inc: master planning, exhibit design, graphic design; Mithun, architecture, interior design, landscape architecture; Waggonner & Ball, local architects; KubikMaltbie: exhibit fabrication; Studio Matthews: branding and wayfinding; Hands On! Studio: conceptual plan; Roy Anderson Corp.: contractor; Slover Linett: audience research; Vergeront Museum Planning: planning framework
Photos by Vergeront unless otherwise noted,
