The Banning Museum
Alterations and Improbable Gateway Exhibition
Wilmington, CA

The Banning Museum’s primary 23-room building was built in 1864 in Greek Revival style by transportation pioneer Phineas Banning and is now a California landmark on the National Register of Historic Places near the Port of Los Angeles. The permanent exhibition designed by Durfee and Regn for the museum includes a visitor’s center, a main exhibition in the former ballroom at the basement of the Banning residence, and a series of exterior ramps to make the lower level of the museum handicap-accessible.

The exhibition Improbable Gateway tells the complex history of the coach, rail, and port systems in Los Angeles during the foundational years of 1850 to the building of the Panama Canal in 1914, after which cheap travel prompted the area’s exponential growth to the megalopolis that it is today.

One of the primary themes of the history – in which Banning is a recurring protagonist – is the inherent unlikeliness of the region’s success: lacking no natural harbor and surrounded by mountains and deserts. To foreground this role of the physical landscape in the story of early Los Angeles and allow the visitor a more visceral understanding of its complex history, Durfee and Regn created large, interactive relief maps of the region placed centrally in the gallery. These table-height maps also direct movement through the space, while allowing a sense of spaciousness in the otherwise compressed lower level.

Because much of the exhibition’s content can only be communicated through text, the designers clustered the information around key ideas articulated on viewing surfaces angled toward the primary path of movement; in this way a range of visitors - fourth graders to retirees - can follow the essential concepts of the story to support the images and models on display. To access more detailed information, visitors can look ‘against the grain’ at the backlit flip side of the reading panels. Collectively, these reading wedges produce a sense of visual movement in the gallery to accompany the story of the rapid expansion of transportation in the second largest city in North America.

The exhibition also features a touch-screen timeline tracing the effects of the original port and rail systems on contemporary Los Angeles, and a range of original artifacts, including a 3/4 scale model of a Concord Stage Coach, a facsimile of the one that Phineas Banning rode at the start of his career.

with graphic designer Joe Prichard

photos by Steve King