On the heels of our educational trip to San Francisco, the CCHR project team traveled to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Our first stop was at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture. The Freelon Group, our architect for CCHR, designed this impressive building near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. We got inspired at the Oral History Room, which is frequently used by community members to leave their story, and we look forward to having a similar room at CCHR, thanks to our relationship with StoryCorps.

Once in D.C., we had a brief stop at the International Spy Museum, for which our team members Gallagher & Associates designed the exhibits. Not only did we learn how to pick a lock, but we also got a better understand of the importance of updating displays and technology over time. Gallagher truly has a good pulse on how visitors actually use the spaces created. 

We rounded out our trip with an entire day at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which blew us away as expected. The exhibit storylines are told in a way to not influence but merely give the facts; therefore no adjectives are used. The curators want visitors to come to their own conclusions rather than be swayed by museum mantra. The main hall of the museum was intentionally designed as an atrium topped with a skylight to remind the public that the Holocaust occurred in the light of day. Architectural symbolism goes a long way.

All in all, our two trips got the juices flowing with our creative design team, and the collaborative meetings we’ve had since have pulled together our “lessons learned” into some tweaks to our program that will make for a better CCHR!