MUSEUMS & HERITAGE · 2024
The People's House: South Façade
A 1:5 scale model of the White House South Façade, built to take projection mapping, at the heart of a new permanent museum in Washington, D.C.
CLIENT
White House Historical Association
LOCATION
1700 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.
OPENED
September 2024
DELIVERED BY
Juiceworks Exhibits, for Design and Production Inc.
MY ROLE
Principal-in-Charge & Technical Designer
STAGES
Design Development to Commissioning (RIBA 3-5)
The story
The People's House is a permanent, first-of-its-kind museum about the White House, created by the White House Historical Association. Its centrepiece is a scale model of the South Façade, with nineteen rooms across three levels, onto which media is projected.
We approached it as translation. Historic architectural drawings had to become a modular system that could be fabricated off site, transported into a finished building, assembled to tolerances tight enough for mapped projection, and maintained for the life of the exhibition.
What I did
Supervised the project for Juiceworks Exhibits and led technical design development.
Resolved the source drawings into a scaled architectural language and a repeating mould and panel strategy, so that windows, balustrades, cornices, and mouldings could be hand-cast from a controlled set of masters.
Key figures
1:5 scale · nineteen rooms across three levels · more than sixty hand-cast architectural moulds · about 5,000 sq ft Juiceworks scope within a 33,000 sq ft museum · more than 273,000 visitors in the first year.
Recognition
2025 InAVation Awards, first place, Best Use of Applied Technology in Museums and Heritage (awarded jointly to Design and Production Inc.) · 2025 GOOD DESIGN Award, Environments · 2024 blooloop Innovation Awards, third place in Exhibit and in Storytelling: Culture. Awards were made to the project and its delivery team.
Credits
Exhibition design: Ralph Appelbaum Associates. Prime fabricator and AV integrator: Design and Production Inc. Media: Cortina Productions. Architecture: Gensler.