American Revolution Museum Outdoor Interpretive Area

Project Overview

  • Opportunity to create an immersive environment that engages and draws the visitor into the time period
  • Create an outdoor area that expands the American Revolution Museum experience

Creating a revolutionary experience sometimes involves taking a step back in time.

The outdoor interpretive area has four main areas: the transitional pavilion, the military encampment, the amphitheater, and the living farm.

The transitional pavilion sets the tone for all of the outdoor spaces. The space provides information on the three main exhibits, but more importantly, it explains the paradigm shift between the historic artifacts based museum and the living museum.

The military encampment has the largest expansion planned. The area is broken down into the upper encampment, the lower encampment, and the drill fields. The encampment encompasses a large space that drops several feet vertically.

The amphitheater itself will act as a transitional space between the military encampment and the farm. The amphitheater will be used primarily to support displays for the military encampment, like cannon demonstrations (a crowd favorite), but also will need to be used for special shows for farm related events and even for shows not directly associated with either area.

The final exhibit space was the living farm. The historically accurate buildings needed to be increased in size and several smaller structures needed to be added. All existing historical replica buildings are rebuilt or renovated and moved to the new farm location. The farm fields were increased in size to allow for greater growing opportunities, and the outdoor circulation spaces widened to allow for better flow.

Overall, the American Revolution Museum Interpretive Area needed to create several distant exhibit spaces that felt like their own private zones, while allowing for easy flow between spaces and even allowed for visitors to start at any one space and move to another in any order.