For Climate Museum Launch Project
Canal St. & Broadway, NYC
The Climate Museum sought to expansively reconsider designs for their first location and align museum functions with a climate change concept.
Through our discussions, we identified the core need to empower visitors to realize their social power and enable them to take Climate Action. To enable this transformation in the visitors, the museum had to embody inclusion, climate awareness, and multi-generational fun.
As a result, the traditional museum brief transformed into a field lab. The Climate Action Field Lab’s park format encourages public through-foot traffic through the museum itself. The exhibition strategy relies primarily on social programming and activities supported by two-dimensional display. The functions of the museum were made transparent and inclusive through a residency for role models for climate action (such as industry specialists). In this capacity, roll models collaborate with artists and each other to continually produce exhibition content and directly engage the community. Residents live on site in apartments above the mobile outreach workshop and work in blue cube open studios. Each studio is complete with a community creativity space for including visitors as collaborators.
The talking circle amphitheater hosts large talks within a symbolic megaphone roof structure with views across the entire field lab.
A commercial kitchen provides creative space for designing and cooking community barbecues inspired by exhibition content. Yellow curving walls intersect small activity zones allowing for display of print and digital supporting content.
The iconic color form and primary colors gives the Climate Change Museum high visibility in lower Manhattan. The open air format and ground level programming conserves infrastructure investment.