Projects

Storyline Studio has been selected to conduct a major renovation of Microsoft’s five-year-old Retail Experience Center. This facility is an immersive training and demonstration showroom in Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft’s retail partners from around the world come to learn about upcoming product releases and new retail sales solutions. Always nice to have work in your own backyard!

After a competitive award process, the city of Big Timber has been selected as the future home of the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center.  This is a project that Storyline Studio has been involved with from the early planning stages, and now we are ready to get back in the saddle!  The selected site is on Interstate 90, just a stone’s throw from Yellowstone National Park (by “big sky” standards, anyway), and includes extensive acreage along with an existing building. We’re looking forward to visiting Big Timber in late June, for a two-day charette with Helena-based Slate Architecture to begin envisioning the next phase of the project.

Storyline Studio has just begun work on a traveling exhibition about Captain James Cook and his journey to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. A joint project of the Anchorage Museum, the Cook Inlet Historical Society, and the Washington State Historical Society, this exhibition will present a ground-breaking exploration of the important but often overlooked northern leg of Cook’s third voyage in 1778. With global climate change having recently opened up a true Northwest Passage in the Arctic, the story of Cook’s fateful last voyage has become more relevant than ever.

Sometimes exhibition design takes you to places that you never expected — like collecting seaweed, shells, and other random tidal deposits from Jefferson Head beach in Indianola. That’s exactly what Bill Smith and his pickup truck did during the last week of 2011, along with some Suquamish Museum staff and board members. Together they gathered and preserved more than 50 gallons of material, sitting in the trays and red buckets you see here in the back of Bill’s truck. What’s it for? You’ll get to see … if you come by the museum after it opens in its new location later in 2012.

We’re quite proud to announce that The Suquamish Tribal Museum has selected Storyline Studio to plan and design the permanent exhibition to be installed at their brand new museum and arts center. The Suquamish Tribe is a very important Coastal Salish people who were led by Chief Seattle, famous for the speech he delivered in 1854 during treaty negotiations with the U.S. Government. The new museum building, designed by Mithun, is currently under construction with plans to open in the second half 2012.

The Royal BC Museum in Victoria has just awarded Storyline Studio the interpretive planning contract for the upcoming renewal of their Human History galleries. We’re looking forward to getting started!

We’re excited to announce that Storyline Studio has been selected by the National Cave and Karst Research Institute to design the permanent exhibition at their new headquarters in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The Institute is a joint non-profit corporation involving the National Park Service, the City of Carlsbad, and the State of New Mexico through the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Their newly-constructed research center is a 17,000 square-foot multi-purpose facility, with most of the ground floor dedicated to public use and education, including a bookstore and classrooms. The exhibit galleries are intended to complement and extend the experience that visitors have at the nearby Carlsbad Caverns National Park, and we’re looking forward to helping make that happen!

As though the Annenberg Foundation doesn’t have enough projects underway, they’ve launched a new one this year for developing countries like Ethiopia and Tanzania that are in desperate need of clean water.  It’s called Pitch:Africa, and it’s a design for an innovative water harvesting system housed inside a “street-size” soccer pitch that can be built in local villages.  The Foundation asked Storyline Studio to produce a multi-media slideshow “pitch” to help convince potential project partners to climb on board. Goal!

The staff at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center have been inundated with questions from visitors about the Annenberg Foundation project that is expected to break ground next door in a few months. So Storyline Studio created a graphic panel display to hang in the hallway of PVIC that shares the Foundation’s vision of a new discovery park at Lower Point Vicente.  If you’re in the neighborhood, check it out!

In conjunction with our current work on the Annenberg Project at Lower Point Vicente, Storyline Studio has been confirmed to design the next phase of permanent exhibitions for the Point Vicente Interpretive Center in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.  Taking advantage of Lower Point Vicente’s ideal position as a whale-watching site, PVIC features exhibits on the natural and cultural history of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, with a special emphasis on the Pacific Gray Whale.  The Center opened in 1984 and expanded to 10,000 square feet in 2006, but some of the new gallery space housed temporary exhibitions; the current project will convert these spaces to permanent exhibitions, complementing a series of outdoor installations that are part of the Annenberg Project.

We’re moving ahead full steam with designs for the Jefferson County Historical Society.  The conclusion of the first design phase involved building a white model of the interior of Port Townsend’s 1892 city hall building — here you can see our master model-builder Warren Hall putting on the finishing touches.