Berkshire Museum 

Pittsfield, MA

TSKP x IKD was charged with rethinking the visitor experience of the entire main floor of the museum. Scope included renovating the lobby, gift shop, public spaces, galleries, aquarium, and theater space. Established in 1903, the Berkshire Museum’s collections comprises a wide variety of objects, from natural history and anthropological specimens, to artwork that encompasses paintings and sculptures from ancient to contemporary, to terrestrial and aquatic living animals. Typically, natural history museums present their material by theme or subject in separate gallery spaces. In fact, the existing Beaux-Arts style architecture of the Berkshire Museum is conducive to this type of organization. But as issues of globalization, climate, and the anthropocene gain attention, the way that we understand the world today is more holistic rather than compartmentalized, and interconnected rather than segregated. As a museum of natural history and art, the museum’s foundational mission itself reflects a forward-thinking, integrated approach to understanding the world today. TSKP x IKD’s design solution reflects this new way of framing and understanding the world. An organic-shaped ribbon of apparatus housing open collections storage, didactic materials, and interactive areas is in clear juxtaposition to the cellular nature of the building, punching through doorways, tying galleries together, and redefining circulation to encourage exploration, weaving, and making connections and stories among seemingly disparate objects. The aquarium, designed as if it is the inside of a shimmering geode, acts also as a gathering space that can be used for screenings and lectures, and occupies the heart of the museum.