Yale University Art Gallery

Phase 1 Pre-COVID 19: Research:  During the first half of the term, students gathered end-user feedback by conducting a workshop with museum stakeholders, visitor interviews and on-site observation. Based on this research, each team identified a design challenge posed by a selected space in the museum, that could be reimagined to meet the needs of a targeted group of underserved end-users. The results were critiqued by museum stakeholders at the midterm review.

Phase 2 Post-COVID-19: Design: During the second half of the term, each team developed their proposals. Students were given the option to consider how their interventions might register the impact of the pandemic when the museum reopens. Teams presented their projects to YUAG stakeholders at a Final Review conducted over Zoom.

Opportunity: Reimagining storage as an interactive amenity that engages a wide spectrum of differently embodied visitors.

Proposal: Lockive invites visitors to display their belongings in transparent and translucent bins that call into question the distinction between three types of museum storage – lockers, archive, and glass display cases as well as the blurred boundaries between three disciplines – fashion, product design, and decorative arts. Three sizes of rotating stacked acrylic cases are fully accessible to visitors of different heights and abilities. The cases rotate around a metal pole, which reinterprets Louis Kahn’s modular “pogo” display panels. 

Sustainable Access

Rebecca Commissaris, Gabriel Huerta & Luka Pajovic

Challenge: Many visitors find it difficult to access the lobby elevated above street level: Kahn’s original staircase is hidden behind a blank stone wall. The ADA retrofit solution—a separate elevator entrance that can only be operated by a security guard—results in long wait times and stigmatizes people with disabilities.

Opportunity: Replacing the existing staircase with a single entrance experience accessible to all visitors in a way that also addresses two related issues: storm water management and the transformation of the existing barren streetscape in front of the building into a sustainable shaded plaza.

Proposal: Replacing the existing stair with a gentle ramp that invites everyone to circulate around a landscape amenity: a stormwater retention basin channels water gathered from the museum’s new heat-absorbing green roof. New porous paving and indigenous trees absorb street water and provide shade, transforming the perimeter sidewalk into a welcoming public space.

Bridging Bodies

Malcolm Galang, Shikha Thakali, Peng Ye and Ashton Harrell

Challenge: Exterior: The elevated entrance, accessed via a staircase located behind a black stone wall parallel to the street, is inaccessible and difficult to find for pedestrians. A separate ADA elevator entrance operated by a security guard, isolates and marginalizes people with disabilities and results in long waiting times for parents with strollers. Interior: Sex-segregated bathrooms and lockers are cramped and difficult to find.

Opportunity: Create a legible route that links the Chapel Street entrance with the rear Sculpture Court through a sequence of modest interventions designed to welcome all visitors, including non-Yale affiliated museum goers, people with different forms of mobility, and people who are concerned about virus transmission in a post-pandemic world.

Proposal: The main entrance, relocated to York Street, is treated as a bridge suspended over the sunken sculpture court. The bridge leads visitors through a glazed climate controlled vestibule equipped with automated hand sanitizing stations that allows them to cleanse before entering the main lobby, visible behind Kahn’s black mullioned curtain wall, now celebrated as a post-war work of art. The new lobby consolidates a reception desk, lounge with comfortable intergenerational seating, lockers and a multi-user all-gender restroom equipped with privacy stalls and communal motion activated sinks. The lobby overlooks a dramatic double height space animated by new café with outdoor seating in the courtyard, that can be reached from the sidewalk via an exterior ramp.

Neurodiversity: Multi-sensory Garden Pavilion

Taiming Chen and I-Ting Tsai

Challenge: The museum lacks a calm place for people suffering from museum fatigue and mobility challenges as well as those on the autism spectrum who suffer from sensory overstimulation, including children who visit with school groups.

Opportunity: A Multi-sensory Pavilion directly accessible from the lobby creates a calm interior destination for intergenerational visitors to relax and recharge while activating the surrounding landscaped courtyard.

Proposal: The pavilion’s symmetrical circular shape provides a senses of stability, orientation and focus while referencing Kahn’s interior cylindrical concrete staircase. On the interior, tactile acoustic materials and adjustable natural and electric lighting creates a haven for autistic people as well as individuals seeking respite from noise, crowds and bright light. Memory foam lines the floor and walls, creating an echo-free environment that invites visitors to assume different postures. A louvered ceiling evenly distributes glare free natural light emitted through clerestory windows. The outer face of the drum has indentations to form seating nooks and display niches that activate the courtyard, now landscaped with indigenous plants.

First Impressions: Discovering the Sculpture Garden

Katharine Blackman, Milo Bonacci, Pricila Chavez Lara

Challenge: The Sculpture Garden is an underutilized and difficult to find amenity.

Opportunity: Revitalize link from Chapel Street to the Sculpture Garden through a sequence of modest interventions designed to welcome all: museum goers and non-museum goers, people with different forms of mobility, and people who are concerned about virus transmission in a post-pandemic world.

Proposal: The project offers a menu of improvements via an interactive website which serves two functions.  First, it provides an ongoing archive of the project, illustrating both our research and a selection of design, policy and programmatic recommendations intended to create barrier free access to the Sculpture Garden.  And second, the website provides a virtual venue for the public to participate in the planning of the Gallery, by contributing their own experiences to the research, and offering ideas for other possible interventions.

Website Directions: This website is organized in line with our vision of the Gallery “PRE” and “POST” implementation of First Impressions interventions. "PRE” documents our team's analysis of the museum's existing entry sequence which was largely conducted prior to the pandemic. “POST” offers imagined opportunities to improve the route, taking into account stakeholder feedback obtained during a post-pandemic workshop. In each mode, hovering the mouse over a space allows website visitors to view our analysis and proposed solution.

LINK TO WEBSITE

Post-pandemic Lobby Wayfinding

Mianwei Wang, Kate Meissner, Caroline Kraska, Audrey Hughes

Challenge: Scattered English language signage causes disorientation, bottlenecking and crowding for museum visitors, including first time, disabled and non-English speaking visitors. The museum needs to rethink the lobby entry sequence to adapt to visitor pandemic concerns once the museum reopens.

Opportunity: Gather and analyze end-user feedback to generate design and policy suggestions for improving lobby wayfinding, circulation, layout and hygiene.

Proposal: Prior to the pandemic we observed and interviewed lobby users. During the pandemic, we distributed a survey to architecture and art school students asking them to identify places in the lobby that needed to be considered due to their pandemic health concerns. We tabulated our research using two kinds of visual tools, graphs and body maps illustrating lobby hotspots, ie. sites that visitors found to be targets of virus transmission.

Based on our analysis, we propose the following design and policy recommendations for when the museum reopens: 1) Correlate relationship between space, activity, number of occupants and time of day. 2) Focus on areas of primary concern (the elevators, bathrooms, and lockers) as well as areas of secondary concern (front door, reception desk and lounge seating). 3) Create a clearly defined, sanitary circulation path using multi-lingual signage evenly distributed throughout the lobby that avoids crowding and allows social distancing. 4) Disinfect spaces and monitor number of visitors.

Binary Space: Integrating YUAG Collections with Digital Technologies 

Robert Coombs (School of Art), Michael Gasper, Alicia Jones, Kelsey Rico

Challenge: COVID-19 reinforces the need for museums, like the YUAG, to develop websites that allow visitors to make virtual as well as actual visits to the museum.

Opportunity: An interactive website that encourages users to creatively engage with the collection from remote locations and within the gallery when the museum reopens. The app is multi-sensory and multi-lingual, equipped with audio-visual capabilities that allows a wide range of people including those with mobility, visual and hearing sensitivities to obtain legible information about the museum collection.

The app also incorporates tools like digital 3-D models of YUAG’s gallery interiors and augmented reality that allows visitors to curate and mount virtual and actual exhibitions remotely or in the physical space of the museum. For example, users can visualize selected works of art to be displayed in their own homes, or curate virtual exhibitions at the museum that can be shared with others.   

Targeted audiences include the:

• Yale community comprised of students and faculty (especially from art history, school of art, graphic design.)

• International art historians and curators. 

• People who are anxious about visiting the museum: this would include potential first time visitors, the larger New Haven community, and people on the autism spectrum.

Browse Collection: Unrolled Gallery Elevation, Explore Collection across Time, Space & Culture 

Augmented Reality at Home and in the Gallery