Hello,

I would like to make a request to the helpful folks of Museum-L.

I am the interim deputy director for a state owned museum that is
undergoing a very large capital improvement project.  In fact, our existing
museum is being replaced by a new 60,000 sf building.

Because we are a state agency, we have some interesting constraints on our
project. An important one is that the architecture firm for the new
building was chosen with little input from the museum and has no experience
designing museums. The firm, however, is competent and well-respected…and
anyway, there’s nothing we can do to change it.

As part of the planning for the new building, we hired a consultant to
create a “building program,” which was intended to show the architect the
museum’s vision for the future building.

The final report from the consultant was informative, but it seems to have
raised far more questions than it answered. Much of the blame is ours.
Because we’ve never specified a new museum building before, we put a little
too much trust in the consultant and weren’t specific enough in defining
his scope of work. As a result, he gave us exactly what we asked for, which
isn’t particularly useful.

We don’t have the time or money to engage this or any other consultant to
help us communicate our needs to the architect, who frankly doesn’t know
what questions to ask. In summary, we’re kind of boiled in our own pudding
here, and people are starting to shout at each other.

What I think might help us is if we take the work the consultant did and
revise it into a better building program document to give to the architect.
I’ve searched a few libraries to find any published examples, but have come
up empty. I was sort of hoping that the Smithsonian museums might have been
required to put theirs in the archives, but I haven’t located them yet…

Finally, my request:

Do any of you have examples of excellent building programming documents
that you could share? Do you know of any links or locations of publicly
available building programming documents? Any good books or resources on
building programming for museums that you’ve read?

Any and all help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Robb Teller

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