Title: Florence County Museum
Location of Proejct: Florence, SC
Project Completion Date: January 31, 2014
Firm Name: Watson Tate Savory

Short Description: This county museum’s new home is located on the southern edge of its city’s historic downtown.The design of the museum responds to its location at the intersection of a cultural district and the downtown area’s commercial storefronts while respecting the character of each. The 28,000 square foot museum surrounds a landscaped courtyard with two wings of galleries, offices, and classrooms accessed by a dramatic double-height lobby. The warm red brick and cream colored precast concrete facades project the museum’s role as a catalyst for the area’s revitalization, using culture and education as economic drivers.

Architect's Statement: The new home of this county museum has enabled a dramatic expansion in the museum’s exhibitions, programs, and community outreach. The program called for tripling the amount of gallery space to exhibit more of the collection, providing generous spaces for events, and creating much-needed educational spaces for school children, many of whom have few other opportunities to experience the history and culture of their region and its relationship to the larger world. It was also important for the design of the building to complement the historic architectural character of the small city’s downtown to help re-establish a city fabric lost to urban decay.

The museum’s site was selected for the opportunities it presented as a catalyst for urban renewal of this historic, largely abandoned downtown, with its predominately commercial street wall buildings, and for the site’s adjacency to an expanding cultural district, with large, free-standing civic buildings set back on wide lawns. The design of the museum responds to the intersection of these two urban conditions while respecting the character of each district in order to create a welcoming home for the museum’s blended narrative of art, science, and history. It is a demonstration of how a community of modest size can provide a cultural facility that uses design to contribute to the quality of life of its citizens, while adding value through the economic drivers of culture and education.

The 28,000 square foot, U-shaped building surrounds a landscaped outdoor courtyard with two linear wings accessed by a dramatic double-height lobby. The wings contain exhibition galleries, space for educational programs, art collections processing and storage areas, and support spaces. The primary entry façade is set back from the property line with a landscaped plaza and bench seating to allow sufficient space for groups to gather and to provide an appropriate civic scale at the main entry. The transparent lobby provides a welcoming view into the courtyard in order to attract a broader audience and to allow the activities of the museum to better relate to its urban context. A bridge crossing through the lobby connects the upper floors of the two linear wings. Galleries include climate controlled spaces for the exhibition of fine art in the west wing and a permanent exhibition of natural and historical artifacts that trace the region’s development from prehistory to the present in the east wing.

Visitors enter through the main doors and, once inside the lobby, can choose to explore the art galleries to their left, in the west wing, or regional history galleries on the right, in the east wing. The ground floor portion of the art galleries meet world-class climate control standards, enabling the museum to exhibit loan shows from leading institutions. The first exhibition in this space is a collection of paintings by a native of the local community, on loan from the Smithsonian. On the upper levels, the galleries are daylit through baffled skylights, as well as light scoops, which are expressed in the light monitors on the building’s exterior.

The sheltered courtyard is important not only as an outdoor focal point of the museum experience, but also for its ability to provide a measure of safety for visiting school groups and shading from the sun in warmer months. The courtyard is landscaped with regional plants and, in addition to its use as an outdoor classroom for visiting school groups, functions as a gallery for the display of sculpture and historic objects from the museum’s collection, as well a venue for special events and performances. The steel-framed building is clad primarily in brick and precast concrete panels with gray granite base stone. Light monitors, as well as the entry canopy and infill panels along the secondary street, are clad in zinc panels. These materials were selected to relate to the traditional urban context but used in a contemporary manner.

The scale and massing of the secondary street elevation is intended to respond to the architectural character of the adjacent historic district. The location of education spaces on this frontage as well as a large stair connecting lower and upper galleries in the east wing activate the street and help to contextualize the gallery displays. The ground level windows along the street and within the courtyard, as well as the light, rose-colored brick with painted steel lintels, relate to the human scale and coloration of the downtown commercial buildings and their retail storefronts.

Complementing the rose-colored brick, the main entry facade and the upper level of the flanking building wings are clad in cream-colored precast which frames inset panels of tan-colored brick. The light coloration is intended to relate to the character of civic buildings in the cultural district. The brick panels are set in an unusual Flemish diagonal bond pattern derived from the nearby old post office building.