MIT Museum Exhibitions

MIT Museum Exhibitions — IADA 2023 award

MIT Museum Exhibitions received Platinum Winner recognition at the International Architecture & Design Awards 2023 in Showroom Exhibit. Project status, design team and credits are listed alongside the presentation.

About the project

Housed for over two decades in a converted warehouse, MIT’s Museum’s educational mission, collections, and community programming had outgrown their facilities. The construction of a new campus in Kendal Square provided the opportunity to create a new multifaceted cultural institution with more than five times the exhibition space as well as other facilities for workshops, lecture, and events.

The scope includes four permanent exhibition spaces each over 4,000sf and a changing art gallery of 1,500sf located on two floors. Three of the spaces have a specific narrative based in a specific scientific discipline and the fourth displays signature items from the museum’s collections telling stories of pivotal moments in discovery from MIT’s history of innovation.

The director asked that the galleries each have their own display concept, materiality, and spatial layout related to the curatorial premise. What links the different spaces is a strong visual coherence backed by highly resolved detailing and a consistent graphic overlay.

AI Gallery
The irony of artificial intelligence is that it inspires new perspectives on human intelligence. The display armature alludes to the internal structure of computers. When you arrive, the field of vertical steel posts seems impenetrable field, yet once you enter the field, the simplicity of the plan with clear circulation paths brings you through a clear story of human and AIA collaboration. Visitors. Have the opportunity to write a poem with an AI. They can draw a simple face on a screen and be shown a life-size active film of how the computer’s black box uses neural networks to decipher the image. And other areas allow people to understand the potential of social companionship and recognize the risks of deep fake.

Collections Gallery
MIT is not a place so much as it is a unique collection of exceptional people. The gallery features a display of hundreds of inventions along a 90-foot long wall. The casework is rear illuminated and the wall itself is made of translucent material. Animated diagrams show the visitor how these objects work. The gallery layout features a series of specific themes each displayed on platforms that have an articulated structure that invites exploration and allows for change over time.

Exploration Gallery
Whether encompassing global issues, ventures into space, or efforts to improve our daily lives, stories told in this exhibit showcase the process of discovery that sits at the heart of MIT. Explore a wide array of models and actual artifacts that talk to discovery, from the galaxies to nanotechnology.

Life Sciences Gallery
Focusing on “Gene Culture” this gallery explores technological advances in the field of genetic discovery and the ethical and moral questions that arise the manipulation of life. The gallery incorporates both dramatic breakthroughs technologies and artworks—witty, provocative, absurd, and profound—that prompt us to consider our future - now.

Studio Joseph

Studio Joseph is an integrated practice focused on architecture, exhibitions, and community spaces.