Museum and Visitor Center Projects
Spencer Associates participates in the Promontory Partnership, composed of our firm and Barry Howard Limited, for the express purpose of designing museums and visitor centers. This partnership represents a 40 year collaboration between architecture and interpretive design established initially to create the highly regarded Indian Arts Museum in Grand Teton National Park. When the museum opened in 1971, it established a new standard for the integration of interpretive design and architecture—a standard based on the premise that museums are most successful when they are interpretive driven with the architecture responding to and supporting the interpretive thrust.
Representative project types accomplished by Spencer Associates and / or the Promontory Partnership have included the design of historical museums displaying and interpreting artifacts that have contributed to the development of our country such as the California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento, California; environmental museums dealing with the flora, fauna, and geology of a region such as the Coyote Point Museum for Environmental Education in San Mateo, California; and visitor centers which provide orientation for the public prior to their experiencing a natural or man made environment for the first time such as the Bay Model Regional Visitor Center in Sausalito, California.
Local, state, and federal clients for these projects have included the cities of San Mateo, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale; state clients have included California and New York; and federal clients have included the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Fish & Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Bureau of Land Management.