Plants Are Up to Something

• Museum: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Focus: Botanical Garden

• People who worked on this: Gordon Chun Design, Design, Ironwood, Fabricators, Jim Folsom, Director of the Botanical Gardens, Kathy McLean, Design Consultant, Katura Reynolds, Exhibition Assistant and Illustrator, Kitty Connolly, Conservatory Project Manager

• My role: Exhibition Developer

• Description and goals

  Plants Are Up To Something is a 16,000 square-foot exhibition full of spectacular plants and interactive exhibits.
  Our big idea: Use your scientific skills of observation, comparison, measurement, and analysis to understand the amazing things that plants do. AKA: “real plants, real tools, real science,” or “plants are up to something.”

• Development process and challenges

  A few big ones:
  1) living collections, that change, grow, and die without warning
  2) 100% humidity combined with scientific equipment (videoscopes, microscopes, meters, etc.)
  3) our commitment to using real plants and real tools has required a great deal of perseverance, and while we have a high-maintenance exhibit, we find the trade-offs have resulted in a successful and unique experience for our visitors, one that really foregrounds plants and how extraordinary they are

• Lessons learned, mistakes we made (and what we did about them)

  Looking back, these seem like the most important things we’ve learned:

  (These are all based in direct experience, and many of them required multiple attempts and hand-wringing to achieve. I can add more on this later if there’s interest…)

  •be bold enough to try new things
  •form a small team that is responsible for most major decisions
  •come up with a big idea that foregrounds your collections, helps limit content, and has clear implications for the visitor experience
  •create & use exhibit criteria (questions like: “What is the particular concept being communicated in this exhibit? Would this exhibit be better as a book or a program?”)
  •collaborate with your designers & fabricators
  •prototype like mad and make changes based on what you learn
  •seek advice
  •design in flexibility
  •design for a range of experiences
  •decide what’s most important & fight for it

• Exhibition Opened: October 2005

• Traveling Exhibition: No

• Location: San Marino, CA, United States

• Estimated Cost: $1,000,000 to $3,000,000 (US)

• Size: Over 10,000

• NSF Funding: Yes, Grant No. ISI-0125750

• Website(s):  http://www.huntingtonconservatory.org

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