Scaling to Fit
Scaling to Fit
December 26, 2019 by Taylor Studios
The soft bellows of duck-billed dinosaurs sound in the distance as the
herd browses on twigs and leaves. Birds sing in the trees. The scene is
peaceful, until the T. Rex arrives. With jaws agape, it charges over a rocky
outcropping, and the duck-billed dinosaurs take off running. This time, they’re
lucky; they all escape.
You’re at the Field Museum, in Chicago. The T. rex in the animation you just watched, and whose skeleton looms above you, is , the largest and most complete T. rex specimen ever discovered. A star of the field museum since the specimen debuted in the Stanley Field Hall in 2000, Sue has recently moved to a renovated space.
Sue the T. rex in the renovated Griffin Dinosaur Experience.
Chicago Museum Exhibitors Group
The exhibit design team that worked on the new Sue exhibit had a lot of weight resting on their shoulders as they decided how to display the story of Sue. I was able to hear about some of their process at the latest (CMEG) meeting. Museum and exhibit design professionals from Chicago and the surrounding region met at the Field Museum on a Thursday evening to tour exhibits, including Sue’s new home, and listen to presentations. The theme of the night was “Scaling to Fit,” a key concept when creating a new exhibit or altering an old one. You don’t want a cramped room that visitors can hardly move in, but you also want to take full advantage of the space you have. This concept was a key part of the story of Sue’s new home.
Sue’s New Home
Sue stood in the Stanley Field Hall for 18 years. I remember visiting the
Field Museum many times as a kid and pausing to gaze up at Sue when I first
arrived. But, my gaze would quickly fall back down to the colorful map in my
hands. There were winding exhibit pathways to explore, games to play, dioramas
to peer into. How much time could you spend staring at a single fossil anyways?
At the CMEG meeting, exhibit developer Susan Golland described the many advantages of Sue’s new space. Instead of your attention being drawn every which way, you have a moment of quiet and preparation before entering the exhibit. You walk out of a large gallery containing many different dinosaur fossils, and into a smaller hallway. Images of an ancient forest cover the walls. It is dark, dense, and green. A bold graphic draws your attention.
The bold red letters of SUE direct you into the T. rex’s new exhibit space.
You turn to the left and you are in the domain of Sue.
Sue’s skull is kept in a separate case to make it easier for researchers to access it. The case also gives additional space for reader rails sharing information about the scientific discoveries that have been made from studying Sue’s skull.
First, you meet Sue’s head. Kept in a separate case for easy access,
Sue’s cavernous skull used to be in an upstairs landing, separate from the rest
of the skeleton. This is another advantage that Sue’s new space offers:
everything related to Sue can be kept in one place instead of scattered
throughout the museum.
You walk forward, past graphics explaining the uncovering of Sue, and a
fun quiz game testing your knowledge of T. rex trivia, until you meet
Sue’s skeleton. It fills the space, the head almost brushing the ceiling. In
the 7-story-tall Stanley Field Hall, even Sue seemed small. But now, the size
of the skeleton is dramatic. Sue could swallow you and not even have to chew. Every
ten minutes or so, a video begins. Shapes and colors are projection mapped onto
Sue’s skeleton as a voiceover describes what’s real and what’s cast, what bone
deformations were caused by injury or disease during Sue’s life, and which from
the arduous process of fossilization. A video like this would have been totally
lost in the bright, noisy Stanley Field Hall. Here, it has a profound effect.
When I visited the exhibit with family on a regular museum day, visitors
clapped at the end of the video.
Moving past Sue’s skeleton, you see the world of a T. rex.
Overlapping screens play a repeating animation of the Cretaceous world Sue lived in.
In the Stanley Field Hall, Sue was taken out of context. Now, visitors meet
Sue along the path of the Evolving Planet exhibit, right at the spot in
the timeline of life on earth that a T. rex would have lived.
Overlapping screens display detailed animations of Sue hunting
duck-billed dinosaurs amidst a cretaceous landscape. Still further back, behind
the screens, is a long case filled with all of the fossils that were dug up
along with Sue. There are crocodiles and turtles, birds and tiny mammals. Above
the case is a mural depicting all of that varied fauna at home in their
habitat. Susan Golland explains that none of these fossils were new to Evolving
Planet, but before they were paired with Sue they were often overlooked.
Now, they can shine.
Not everyone loves Sue’s new exhibit. Some people miss Sue’s iconic
presence downstairs. They feel like Sue is now hidden away in a dark little
room. While Sue is less of a museum mascot now, from an exhibit perspective I
think Sue’s new space is much more successful. It focuses and immerses the
visitor, tells a completer and more cohesive story, and places Sue within the
context of both its own time period and life on earth.
Sue’s transition from the Stanley Field Hall to the Griffin Dinosaur
Experience demonstrates how much the space you have available impacts the kind
of exhibit experience you are able to create. It reminds us to always ask: “are
we scaling to fit?”