Preserving Original Architecture
I’ve always had an interest in how museums housed in old historic buildings and homes or in otherwise historic structures use/highlight the space, and in some cases work around it when creating their exhibitions. I’ve seen exhibits that ignored crown molding, beautiful wall details, and original wood flooring by simply building over them. “Stained glass window? It doesn’t go with our theme, let’s put a case in front of it.” I understand wanting to create an exhibit to look a certain way, but there is something to say for giving a knod to where the exhibit is and a respect for its history.
Today we visited Brooklyn Historical Society’s site at DUMBO. The day’s speaker and special project director as he described himself, Paul Pearson explained how the space that the exhibit now inhabits and the surounding spaces used to house various factories, was a center of bustling commerce, a transportation terminal, and artistic and activist center.
The exhibition itself did a great job of working around and highlighting exposed wood beams, stone walls, and the like while telling stories of what happened in that location years ago. It would have been a shame to ignore the original structure, a waste really. My favorite part of the exhibit wasn’t anything created by exhibition designers, but the carvings I came upon in the vertical beams and on the huge lynch in the middle of the exhibit. While studying the wood itself I came across the initials F.H. with the date 6/2/52 as well as hashmarks and mathematical equations that were most likely carved when someone needed to count how many bags of rice needed to be filled to make a profit or fill an order, or to simply say “I was here.” I asked Paul how decisions were made of what to conserve and what to do away with. He said that his team tried to preserve what they could if it had historic value, meaning if it added to the story they were trying to tell. These markings did and I’m so glad that they were cleaned, conserved, and left as a valuable storytelling tool. It brought the history to life.
