Author Archives: Max van Balgooy

About Max van Balgooy

President of Engaging Places LLC, a design and strategy firm that connects people to historic places.

Swiss Museums in Sixty Seconds: Five Short Tours and a Longer Conversation

After visiting more than fifty museums and historic sites across Switzerland, I returned with far more observations than I could fit into a few blog posts—or a few hundred photographs. My three recent posts examined recurring patterns across Swiss museums: the influence of private collectors on art museums, changing approaches to interpretation at history museums, and the seemingly secondary details—from architectural models to museum stores and accessibility—that profoundly shape the visitor experience.

But words and still photographs can only convey so much. Sometimes you need to see visitors play at a transportation museum, walk through the rooms of a medieval castle, or watch a historic clock come to life. Five short videos offering glimpses of museums and historic sites that particularly interested me. Each YouTube Short lasts less than a minute, but together they illustrate several of the larger questions raised in my earlier posts.

*The automotive pavilion at Verkehrshaus is clad in highway signs.*

A Museum Designed for Movement

The Verkehrshaus, or Swiss Museum of Transport, in Lucerne is one of Switzerland’s largest and most popular museums. Its campus is divided into separate pavilions devoted to trains, automobiles, planes, ships, and space travel.

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Unfurling Patriotism at Yale

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Small exhibitions often have the freedom to tackle big ideas, and Unfurling the Flag: Reflections on American Patriotism at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library does exactly that.

Drawn entirely from the library’s extraordinary collections, the exhibition presents rare books, photographs, manuscripts, posters, and other historical documents in two long display cases. Rather than telling a chronological story, it explores patriotism through a series of themes, including absolutism, inclusion and exclusion, American exceptionalism, and patriotism as ideology. The introductory label reads:

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Were You Expecting to Smell Tito Puente’s Timbales?

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One of the pleasures of visiting museums is discovering something you didn’t expect.

When I visited ¡Puro Ritmo!, the exhibition produced by the National Museum of the American Latino in Washington, DC, I expected energetic music, dance, and interactive experiences. Those were certainly there, but one exhibit offered a completely different kind of surprise.

Standing before Tito Puente’s timbales, I assumed the museum might invite visitors to explore rhythm, play cowbells, or watch archival footage of the legendary bandleader. Instead, a small label read: “Places and scents are connected. Push the lever to smell the scent and imagine a night of dancing. What do these smells remind you of?”

Beside it was a small black cylinder. I pressed the lever, and a complex blend of gardenias, leather, and a hint of tobacco drifted upward. For a brief moment, it felt less like standing in a museum and more like walking into a crowded ballroom on a warm evening as Tito Puente’s orchestra prepared to play.

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Clearer Rules, Better Results: An Updated Photography Policy at Bayou Bend

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When I examined museum photography policies in my recent post, “Can I Take a Picture?,” I included a sign I photographed at Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens during a November 2024 visit. Jennifer Hammond, Bayou Bend’s Head of Learning and Interpretation, subsequently contacted me to explain that the museum had replaced much of that signage since my visit and that its photography policy has continued to evolve.

The new signs do not appear to have been prompted by my post. Instead, they offer a useful follow-up: museum policies and visitor communications should not be static and permanent.

Bayou Bend’s revised entrance signs are clearer and more welcoming. “Personal photographs are encouraged,” the photography sign begins, before outlining restrictions on commercial shoots, equipment, drones, climbing, and other potentially disruptive activities (I ‘m sure there’s a story behind the policy that visitors must keep their clothes on!). A separate sign prepares visitors for the historic house, explaining limits on group size, bag storage, barriers, fragile objects, and food and drink.

The revised approach has also produced an unexpected benefit. Hammond noted that quinceañera groups have become staff favorites and that the photographs they share have generated more effective publicity for Bayou Bend than some of its paid advertising. The experience suggests that a carefully managed photography policy can support visitation and visibility without turning the museum into an uncontrolled photo venue.

Bayou Bend’s experience suggests that museums should review whether their photography rules address demonstrable risks or simply preserve inherited restrictions. Clear conditions can protect collections, landscapes, and visitors while allowing uses that may also increase the institution’s public visibility.

A Terrific Guide for Community Conversations During America’s 250th

The U.S. Semiquincentennial offers history organizations an important opportunity to help communities reflect on the past while considering the future they want to build together.

To support that work, the American Association for State and Local History and NxtLevel have developed Building the Next 250 Years: Hosting Community Conversations at Your History Organization, a free facilitation guide designed to help museums, historic sites, and other history organizations convene thoughtful, community-driven discussions.

The guide is terrific: clear, practical, and unusually easy to use. It grew out of a 2025 pilot project involving six history organizations and more than 120 community participants from nearly every region of the country. Turns out that people valued opportunities for deep, intentional conversation rooted in mutual respect and hosted by trusted local history institutions (that’s you!).

Rather than prescribing a single program, the guide provides a flexible framework that organizations can adapt to their mission, audience, resources, and community. It walks users through the entire process, including:

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From Critique to “Clean House”: Evaluating Mike Gonzalez’s Testimony on the Smithsonian

At a congressional hearing on July 21, Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation accused the Smithsonian’s leadership of subverting its national purpose and called upon Congress to “clean house.” He also urged lawmakers to deauthorize the proposed National Museum of the American Latino and Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum before either institution has opened a permanent building.

His statement is important—not because it provides an independent or particularly rigorous evaluation of the Smithsonian, but because it reveals how quickly the argument has moved from criticizing exhibitions to demanding the removal of museum leaders.

The July 4 White House report, properly titled Saving America’s Story, accused the National Museum of American History of “ideological capture” and concluded that the Smithsonian could not be trusted under its current leadership. Gonzalez largely repeats that report’s assumptions and examples, but goes further by calling explicitly for a purge.

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Models, Mementos, and Maddening Stairs: Final Notes from Swiss Museums

*Model of a Bronze Age village at the Bern History Museum.*

After writing about art museums and history museums in Switzerland, I still had a set of smaller observations that did not quite fit into either post. They are not really small, however. They shaped the visitor experience again and again.

After visiting more than fifty museums and historic sites across Switzerland, I found that some of the most revealing differences appeared not in the major exhibitions, but in the supporting details: models and miniatures, museum stores, souvenirs, and stairs.

These features affect how visitors understand buildings, remember their visits, and physically move through museum spaces. They also reveal how museums think about access, retail, interpretation, and audience needs.

*An exhibition at Chillon Castle shows how the unrestored murals would appear in the medieval period.*

Models and Miniatures

Swiss museums and historic sites make frequent and effective use of models and miniatures. At their best, these are not decorative add-ons or simplified versions for children. They are interpretive tools that help visitors understand things that are otherwise difficult to see.

At Chillon Castle, a miniature showed how a room would have looked in the medieval period because the murals have faded over time. That is exactly the kind of interpretive problem a model can solve. The historic fabric is still present, but time has made it difficult to perceive. A miniature allows visitors to imagine the original visual effect without repainting, over-restoring, or asking visitors to make sense of nearly invisible evidence on their own.

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Beyond Chronology: Interpretation at History Museums in Switzerland

*A period room at the Bern History Museum in Switzerland.*

We recently returned from a two-week visit to Switzerland, where we visited more than fifty museums and historic sites across the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions. In the art museums of German-speaking Switzerland, I noticed a strong tendency to organize galleries around named private collections, or Sammlungen. In the history museums and historic sites, I noticed something different: interpretive practices in transition.

Some sites still rely on familiar approaches: chronological narratives, object identification, and basic descriptions of place. But many museums are clearly rethinking their exhibitions. They are experimenting with new interpretive layers, broader contexts, difficult histories, and more ambitious questions about identity, science, colonialism, and national memory.

The results are uneven, but they are worth attention. Swiss history museums seem to be moving beyond “what happened?” and “what is this object?” toward more complex questions: What systems produced this wealth? How did a person’s life connect to larger social and technological changes? How is national identity constructed? What should be done with inherited installations that no longer speak clearly to visitors?

For museum professionals elsewhere, the Swiss examples offer several useful lessons.

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A Thank-You Note Worth Remembering

Museums spend a lot of time thinking about how to ask people for support. We spend far less time thinking about what happens after someone says yes.

Recently, I made a gift to President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington, D.C., in support of Students Opposing Slavery, a project I have long admired. Within a short time, a small box arrived in the mail. Before I even opened it, the package already looked intentional: a Team Lincoln logo with a blue accent on a sturdy thin white box. What could this possibly contain?

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The Collector’s Museum: Art and Interpretation in German-Speaking Switzerland

*Founded in the 1780s,* *Kunsthaus Zürich* *now straddles a busy intersection in two buildings.*

We recently returned from a two-week visit to Switzerland, where we visited more than fifty museums and historic sites across the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions. Among the many differences in museum practice, one pattern was especially noticeable in the art museums of the German-speaking cantons: their organization around named private collections, or Sammlungen.

A wealthy collector may have assembled works of art over a lifetime and later donated or loaned the collection to a museum. Rather than fully integrating those works into a chronological, thematic, or art-historical presentation, the museum often retains the collection as a distinct unit bearing the donor’s name.

There are legitimate reasons for doing this. A named collection preserves its provenance and recognizes the role of private collecting in the formation of public museums. It can reveal an individual collector’s tastes, preferences, ambitions, and blind spots. The collection itself can become a historical document.

This model is not unique to Switzerland. American museums such as the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and the Frick Collection in New York preserve, to varying degrees, the identity and vision of their founders’ private collections. In those institutions, however, the collector’s personality, residence, installation choices, or philosophy of looking is central to the museum’s public identity. Visitors generally understand that they are entering a particular person’s conception of art.

The situation becomes more complicated when several named collections coexist within a larger institution. The visitor is no longer encountering one clearly defined collector’s museum but moving among several private visions whose differences are not always explained.