Category Archives: Architecture

Field Notes: Places of Pride at the Architectural Heritage Center

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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The Frary House at Historic Deerfield: The Women Who Preserved the Places We Visit

The Frary House (left), part of the building that also includes the Bernard Tavern, Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts.

When we visit a historic house museum, we usually come to learn about the people who once lived there. But how often do we learn about the people who saved the house? The Frary House in Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts, tells the overlooked story of the women who preserved the places we visit.

Built about 1750, the Frary House could easily have been interpreted as another colonial home. Instead, Historic Deerfield tells a different story. The house is furnished as the Colonial Revival home of C. Alice Baker after she restored it in the 1890s, shifting visitors’ attention to a later chapter in the building’s history. That interpretive choice immediately caught my attention because it suggests that a historic house’s most significant story is not always its earliest one.

Baker purchased the Frary House in 1890 after learning that it was in danger of collapse. She later explained that she bought it “to rescue the home and to make a home for her mother.” At a time when Old Deerfield was struggling economically, her decision preserved more than a single building. It became part of a much larger effort that would help shape the future of the village.

The guide described Baker as one of America’s earliest female preservationists—a woman who owned property independently, invested in railroads, taught school, researched local history, collected antiques, and published books at a time when women are seldom remembered for participating so fully in public and economic life. Whether every claim of being “the first” can withstand historical scrutiny almost becomes beside the point. What matters is that Baker represents a much larger story that historic sites rarely tell.

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The House of the Seven Gables: More Than a Historic House Museum

The House of the Seven Gables, Salem, Massachusetts.

What is a historic house museum supposed to do? Preserve an important building? Tell the story of the people who once lived there? Re-create a particular moment in history? Most historic house museums are organized around one primary purpose with the house serving as the central artifact through which that story is told.

The House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts challenges that assumption. By the time I finished my visit, I realized that the woman who transformed the house into a museum had imagined something much larger. Caroline Emmerton, a Progressive Era reformer and preservationist, transformed a celebrated historic house into an institution that combined preservation, literary tourism, education, and social reform. More than a century later, that integrated vision still defines the site.

In 1668, Salem sea captain and merchant John Turner and his wife, Elizabeth, built the house that would become known as the House of the Seven Gables. Three generations of the Turner family lived there before the property passed to the Ingersoll family in 1782. One of its later residents, Susanna Ingersoll, welcomed frequent visits from her cousin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose experiences at the house inspired the setting and title of his 1851 novel The House of the Seven Gables. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion was already famous as both a remarkable survivor of colonial Salem and the home most closely associated with Hawthorne’s classic novel.

By the early twentieth century, however, the property’s future was uncertain. When the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion came up for sale, Emmerton purchased it in 1908. She was already deeply involved in the Progressive Era settlement house movement and saw an opportunity to accomplish far more than preserving a historic building. Working with architect Joseph Everett Chandler, she restored the house to what they believed reflected its seventeenth-century appearance while simultaneously establishing the House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association. Rather than operating the house simply as a museum, she used its popularity to support a settlement house which offered educational and social programs for Salem’s immigrant community.

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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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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.

*The Sammlung Merzbacher at the Kunsthaus in Zürich.*

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Walking Through Two Eras at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio, following completion of its 2 Era Restoration. The project interprets both the Beecher family residence and the later Edgemont Inn period, revealing the building’s evolving role in the community across generations.

When I visited the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio this February, I expected to learn more about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s years in the city and how her experiences there influenced the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. What I did not expect was to come away thinking as much about the building itself as the woman who once lived there.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House recently completed what it calls a two-era restoration, interpreting both the Beecher family period (1840) and the later Edgemont Inn period (1940). At first, I wondered whether trying to tell two stories in one house might feel confusing. Instead, I found it to be one of the project’s greatest strengths.

The tour begins with Harriet Beecher Stowe, her family, and the Cincinnati she encountered in the 1830s and 1840s. Visitors learn about Lane Seminary, debates over slavery, the city’s free Black community, and the experiences that shaped Stowe’s understanding of freedom and injustice. These stories unfold in rooms restored to the Beecher era, allowing visitors to imagine the world she experienced as a young wife, mother, and writer living in Cincinnati.

What impressed me most, however, was how the restoration itself became part of the interpretation.

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When Museums Become Backdrops: Managing Commercial and Media Photography

*Wedding photo taken at the Cincinnati Museum of Art. Credit: Sherri Barber Photography.*

In the previous post in this series, I looked at visitor photography policies: whether visitors can take pictures, where they can take them, what equipment they can use, and how museums distinguish casual personal photography from behavior that disrupts the visitor experience. But there is another side to museum photography policies.

When photography moves beyond ordinary visitor memory-making, the questions become more complicated. A museum gallery, historic house, a picturesque barn, sculpture garden, or historic landscape can quickly become a backdrop for someone else’s project: a wedding shoot, fashion session, graduation portrait, influencer campaign, documentary film, news segment, advertisement, stock photography shoot, or corporate video. That shift changes the issue. The question is no longer simply, “Can I take a picture?” It becomes: who benefits from the image, what resources are being used, what risks are created, and how is the museum’s name, space, collection, or reputation being presented?

As with the earlier posts, this is not a scientific or comprehensive study. I reviewed a selection of commercial, media, and photography policies from museums and historic sites to identify patterns in current practice. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Museums should consult an attorney when developing policies involving copyright, releases, insurance, contracts, filming agreements, or commercial use. My interest here is in how these policies reflect museum management, visitor experience, institutional risk, and revenue. Just a warning: this is a loooong post because of the complexity of this topic—and I’ll only be touching the surface.

From Visitor Photography to Site Use

The most useful distinction is between photographing a museum and using a museum as a setting. A visitor photographing a child in a gallery, a favorite object, a historic room, or a garden path is usually documenting a visit. A photographer staging an engagement session, fashion shoot, commercial, product video, or sponsored social media post is using the museum as a resource. Those are different activities. They require different policies.

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The Mid-Century Ranch House: Mary van Balgooy Shares Its History on Marketplace

Mary van Balgooy, vice president of Engaging Places, shared a brief history of the ranch house in America on Marketplace today. The ranch house was one of the most prolific housing styles of the mid-twentieth century, and Mary is one of the nation’s leading experts on Cliff May, the designer behind more than 3,000 homes in the U.S. who played a pivotal role in popularizing this style with the help of Sunset and House Beautiful magazines. Mary has authored two influential articles on Cliff May (here and here), one of which earned the Doyce Nunis Award from the Historical Society of Southern California, and a lengthy series of blog posts at Xamary.

Hosted by Kai Ryssdal, Marketplace provides essential context on the day’s economic news through stories, conversations, and data, helping listeners make sense of the economic landscape. The show reaches more than 11.7 million listeners each week across 800 public radio stations nationwide, with an additional 2.3 million listeners tuning in via podcasts.

On the Road: Newport Summer School

We’re now at the midpoint of the Newport Summer School and by the end of each day, we all share sore feet and stiff backs—except for Richard Guy Wilson, the director of the program. He may be in his 80s, but he has a bottomless reserve of energy.

Participating in the course are a wide range of interests. We have a couple people who lead historic preservation organizations and a couple more who are in graduate school and getting ready to enter the field. We have a handful who work with historic sites, including Edith Wharton’s The Mount, National Park Service, and Lisbon Cathedral. A couple of interior designers and a few who don’t work in the field but love the art and architecture of the 19th century. Ages stretch from early 20s to late 60s.

The diversity of interests and experiences makes for fun conversations and as several noted, can feel comfortable “nerding out” about a preservation issue or an architectural feature. But I’ve also discovered the value of the program—and it varies. Everyone wants to learn about 19th century architecture in Newport, which has an extraordinary collection by some of America’s best architects and interior designers. The combination of illustrated lectures and field sessions allows us to see a lot in a very short time. For graduate students, it creates a foundation of knowledge that will inform their studies and careers. For mid-career professionals, it provides comparisons for our projects and communities, broadening our perspectives. Perhaps more importantly, it also “feeds our soul,” providing a much needed break from the demands of the office while refreshing our passions.

Today we head north to Providence, starting earlier and returning later than usual, so I expect another exhausting day. But it will be worth it.