Juror Award
Aluminum by Design: Jewelry to Jets, Carnegie Museum of Art
Location
Pittsburgh, PA
Client
Carnegie Museum of Art
Design Firm
Bally Design, Pittsburgh, PA
Design Team
Frank Garrity (Principal in Charge), Stan Mamula, Gregoire Aby-Eva
Fabricators
Carnegie Museum of Art, Mega Media Concepts, Gottleib Design, Alpha Screen Graphics
Visitors move through five galleries that focus on aluminum as a crucial material that helped shape the twentieth century. To deliver a visitor experience different from the typical show of "art on the walls of a white room," Bally Design moved the objects away from the walls and into environments of rich color, dramatic lighting, integrated graphics, and custom vitrines – producing a striking visual language for use throughout the exhibition. Telling the story of aluminum proved challenging in regard to the floor plan design; how to integrate meandering and freedom of exploration with a sense of chronology? The solution was to suspend an aluminum ribbon, beginning outside the gallery entrance and continuing seamlessly through the five galleries, as a subtle indicator of the suggested route.
Jury Comment
"As a measured effort to break out of the white-box gallery, this exhibition adds design value with a minimum of effort and avoids the predictable overuse of aluminum. Instead, a simple ribbon is used as a graphic device to celebrate the material and to define a path."