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Planning Sucessful
Museum Building
Projects

Planning Successful
Museum Building
Projects
WA LT E R L . C R I M M , M A RT H A M O R R I S ,
A N D L . C A RO L E W H A RTO N
A Division of
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

ALTAMIRA PRESS
A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, MD 20706
www.altamirapress.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2009 by AltaMira Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crimm, Walter L.
Planning successful museum building projects / Walter L. Crimm, Martha Morris, and
L. Carole Wharton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7591-1186-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7591-1186-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7591-1187-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7591-1187-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
[etc.]
1. Museum architecture. 2. Museums—Planning. I. Morris, Martha. II. Wharton, L.
Carole. III. Title.
NA6690.C75 2009
069'.22—dc22
2008046401
Printed in the United States of America
⬁™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents
List of Figures ix
Preface xi
1 Introduction 1
Trends in Museum Building 1
What Are the Drivers? 3
What Are the Risks? 5
Design Trends for Museums 7
Does Your Size Matter? 9
Where Do You Begin? 9
2 Planning and Organizing for Success 11
Getting Started 11
The Need for Planning 12
Strategic Planning: Introduction and Overview 14
Implementing and Ensuring a Successful Planning Process 23
In Summary 26
Framework for Success 26
3 Roles, Responsibilities, and Building the Team 29
Board Readiness: Morphing from Business as Usual to Full
Battle Mode 30
The Project Steering Committee 31
v

Working Groups of the Steering Committee 36
Selecting Project Team Members 43
In Summary 44
4 The Heart of the Museum: Exhibits, Collections,
and Educational Programs 47
Intellectual Framework 48
Visitor Experience and Audiences 49
Exhibition Planning 51
Collections Planning 53
Education Program 54
Linking Programs to Building Planning 55
In Summary 57
5 Hiring Your Design and Construction Teams 59
The Design Teams for the Building and Exhibits 59
Hiring the Construction Team 67
Not Enough Staff for the Tasks 67
In Summary 68
6 Project Management: Predesign, Design, Construction,
and Closeout 69
Terminology 71
Phases and Deliverables of a Project 72
Managing Decisions 74
Managing Costs 81
Managing Schedules 88
Selecting a Construction Phase Methodology 92
Bid and Construction Phase Management 96
Completing Construction and Closing Out Your Project 100
In Summary 104
7 Physical Framework: Defining What You Will Build 105
Chapter Organization 106
Building Project Vision Statement 107
Setting Criteria 108
Sustainability 124
Codes and Stipulated Regulations 129
Existing Site and Facility Assessment 133
vi C O N T E N T S

Site and Building Space Programs 136
Site and Room Definition Sheets 140
Functional Relationships 142
Phasing or Closing Down 144
Finishing Your Basis of Design Report 146
Design Phases Work Products 147
In Summary 153
8 Financial Planning and Cost Management 155
Importance of a Business Plan 155
Developing Your Business Plan 157
Planning and Managing Project Financing 162
Operating Budget Requirements 164
Where Can We Get the Money? 166
How Will We Ensure Good Management of the Money? 168
In Summary 170
9 The Capital Campaign 173
The Feasibility Study 174
Ethics of Giving and Receiving 178
Campaign Planning and Implementation 182
Sources of Funding 186
In Summary 190
10 Communications Strategies 193
Planning for Communications 193
Components of a Communications Plan 196
Brand Marketing and Communications 199
In Summary 201
11 Operations 205
Preconstruction Decisions 206
Impact of Closing a Museum during Construction 208
Impact of Remaining Open during Construction 217
Operations Planning 220
Plan Implementation during Construction 221
Staff Considerations 223
Moving In and Opening Up 224
C O N T E N T S vii

In Summary 228
12 Evaluation 235
Measuring Performance 235
Who Cares about Performance? 236
How Do You Measure Success? 238
An Ongoing Evaluation Process 242
In Summary 243
A Final Word 244
Appendix A Strategic Planning Worksheet Example 249
Appendix B Design Team: Table of Contents for a
Request for Qualifications 250
Appendix C Design Team: Table of Contents for a
Request for Proposal 251
Appendix D Construction Team: Table of Contents for a
Request for Qualifications 252
Appendix E Construction Manager: Sample Interview Questions 253
Appendix F Types of Museum Spaces 255
Glossary 257
Selected Bibliography 263
Index 273
About the Authors 287
viii C O N T E N T S

List of Figures
1.1 Life of Project Process 10
2.1 Early Planning Reduces Risk 14
2.2 The Strategic Planning Process 15
2.3 Environmental Analysis, or SWOT 16
2.4 Predesign Planning: Linking Strategic Plan to Project Design 25
3.1 Project Organization Chart 37
4.1 Marriage of Physical and Intellectual Frameworks 55
6.1 Sample Design Team Organization Chart 75
6.2 Contingency Over the Life of a Project 84
6.3 Cost Responsibility Matrix 86
6.4 Project Design Schedule 90
7.1 Database Space Program 137
7.2 Room Definition Sheet 141
7.3 Blocking and Adjacency Diagram 143
7.4 Philadelphia Museum of Art Construction Photograph 144
7.5 Phasing Diagram 145
8.1 Total Project Cost Management 164
ix

8.2 Project Financing 167
8.3 Sources and Uses of Funds 167
9.1 Factors Influencing Whether the Museum Should
Undertake a Capital Campaign 176
9.2 Example of a Gift Table 185
10.1 Communications Plans 194
11.1 Operations Schedule/Checklist 229
Appendix A Strategic Planning Worksheet Example 249
x L I S T O F F I G U R E S

Preface
Museums today are facing many challenges, and one of the most critical is in-
adequate facilities. Whether renovating, expanding, or building a new facility,
museums are investing time and funds to improve and enhance their buildings.
Since 2002, the authors have presented workshops on the topic of museum
planning, design, and construction at various museum association meetings.
These workshops were meant to share the best practices of the field as reflected
in the professional experiences of the authors. Martha Morris served as deputy
director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian,a mu-
seum that has undergone several major renovations over its fifty-year history.
Walter L. Crimm is a practicing architect with years of experience helping muse-
ums and other cultural organizations solve problems of renovation, expansion,
and new building. L. Carole Wharton has several decades of experience in bud-
geting, facilities planning, and management at major universities, government
facilities, and museums. In 2002 Martha Morris began her efforts to benchmark
the best practices and catalog the lessons learned from a variety of museum
building projects. This research resulted in an article in Museum News (July
2004) and was the catalyst for an annual symposium, Building Museums, spon-
sored by the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums (MAAM). The conference
has drawn hundreds of attendees from the United States and abroad, attracting
some of the best minds in the field—museum directors, designers, collections
managers, and board members, as well as architects, engineers, and planning
consultants—to share lessons learned about this vital activity. Case studies on
xi

new museums, historic preservation, and green design have been augmented by
workshops on project management and planning, financing and fund-raising,
marketing and earned income, and impact on collections and staff.
The response to Building Museums is a strong signal that the field needs
more tutorial materials for the board of trustees, staff, volunteers, funders,
and students. Given the recent litany of cost overruns and poorly planned
projects, it is clear that many museums are not well equipped to undertake
such complex projects. Few texts address the world of museum construction.
An annual conference is only one approach to this deep-seated need.
The MAAM symposium is organized under three overarching themes: vi-
sion, implementation, and sustainability/life after opening. This comprehen-
sive view is critical to understanding the drivers, the organization, funding,
and mission-based approach to success. The ratings for the symposium have
been extremely positive and many participants return to the conference each
year. The Building Museums conference has provided a rich source of infor-
mation about museum building projects, including 125 case studies along
with supplementary materials regarding service providers, as well as biblio-
graphic resources. From its inception the symposium has featured a Nuts and
Bolts Workshop, on which this book is based.
Planning Successful Museum Building Projects is a practical handbook of
tested tools and techniques to assist museum boards, administrators, and staff
as they undertake construction projects. It is meant to educate funders,
donors, contractors, and other practitioners in the basic needs of museums
and what makes them unique. The text draws on the professional experience
and practices of the authors, their academic research on best practices and
trends, and from other sources, including the case studies featured in the
Building Museums symposia.
This book is organized to walk the reader through the building process start-
ing with an overview of trends in museums (chapter 1), leading to chapters on
planning (chapter 2), roles and responsibilities (chapter 3), exhibitions and col-
lections programs (chapter 4), hiring the team (chapter 5), project management
of the design and construction process (chapters 6), developing criteria and
documenting your building (chapter 7), financing and cost management (chap-
ter 8), fund-raising and capital campaigns (chapter 9), communications (chap-
ter 10), operations (chapter 11), and evaluation of project success (chapter 12).
The book includes do’s and don’ts that offer summary steps to ensure success
and highlights the red flags that identify potential problems. The book provides
xii P R E F A C E

a practical how-to approach, illustrates case studies from the field, and includes
an array of helpful references that include checklists, suggested readings, sources
of professional guidelines, a glossary, and samples of working documents.
We would like to acknowledge the special assistance of the following per-
sons. For technical review assistance: Jeff Hirsch, Jim Cranage, Bill Jarema,
Bob Ghisu, Roger Rudy, Mary Alcaraz, Michael Brumberg, Gary Lockman,
Don Barth, Gayle Lane, and Peter Levasseur of EwingCole and Steve Keller of
Steven R. Keller & Associates. For graphic design of charts and diagrams:
Chris Mayrides and Ashlee Carrulo. For administrative support: Anita Clark.
For assistance with the glossary and bibliography: Diane Goldman, indepen-
dent researcher. Dana Allen-Greil, project manager in the new media office,
National Museum of American History, contributed her research to the chap-
ters on communications and operations.
Special thanks go to Graham Hauck, executive director of MAAM who has
worked tirelessly on Building Museums. We also wish to acknowledge John
Suau, former executive director of MAAM, for his early encouragement of our
efforts to create the annual symposium, and Mary Case, principal of QM2,
who has worked closely with MAAM from the outset on the creation of Build-
ing Museums. The members of the MAAM board of directors have strongly
supported the symposium, and we are grateful for the faith they have placed
in us in developing this book for the field.
A special thanks goes to those who have supported and encouraged our ef-
forts. Walt would like to thank his wife, Deenah Loeb, and children, Jonas and
Emma Crimm, who have gone to museums around the world with him, but
never to Orlando. Martha would like to thank her husband, Joe Shannon, for
his enthusiasm and patience and his insights into the value of museums in our
society. Carole would like to thank her husband, Yi Tsien, her most honest
critic, who has dutifully and diligently read her prose, mercilessly chasing out
jargon and fuzzy thinking for over thirty years.
Finally, we must say thank you to the many museum professionals who
have mentored and worked alongside us with the hope that this book captures
the collective wisdom of them all.
Walter L. Crimm
Martha Morris
L. Carole Wharton
P R E F A C E xiii

Introduction
1
The museum field today faces many challenges. Because museums are recog-
nized, respected, and supported by their communities in a significant way,
they must have the highest levels of management and leadership skills to meet
the expectations for quality services and engagement that the public demands.
Yet many museum professionals, boards, and supporters lack the resources
and programs to provide these skills. In today’s highly competitive environ-
ment for the public’s time and attention, museums struggle for relevance.
That factor is often the impetus for a variety of bold endeavors.
Museum expansion and renovation is often seen as an imperative. Yet this
most important trend requires extraordinary care in planning and imple-
mentation. Research and observation show that the museum building boom
under way for more than a decade is likely to continue unabated. More than
ever, museums need sound practical advice on how to successfully navigate
what is probably the most expensive and time-consuming activity they will
undertake.
TRENDS IN MUSEUM BUILDING
Museums of every type and size are engaged in facilities projects ranging from
renovation of older historic structures to expansions to entirely new facilities.
Billions of dollars are being invested in these projects, often the most visible
component of a museum’s program. Census data reveal that between 1993
1

and 2007 the investment in construction of privately funded museums grew
at over 15 percent per year.1
In 2006 the American Association of Museums revealed that “almost one
quarter of U.S. museums are engaged in a capital fund-raising campaign, with
a median goal of $10 million. Half of museums have begun or completed
building construction, renovation or expansion in the past three years.”2
Of
these museums, 75 percent represented private museums. In all museums sur-
veyed there were twice as many renovations as new buildings and expansions.
Although there is often more press coverage about art museum projects, there
was more building under way in zoos, children’s museums, natural history,
science centers, and history museums in that period of time. However, art mu-
seums and science centers were spending larger amounts.
The Association of Art Museum Directors tracks the progress of expansion
projects for its member museums. In 2007, 66 percent of planned expansions
were moving forward, while 18 percent were changing the time frame, 6 per-
cent changing scope, and 7 percent revising plans. In addition, between 2004
and 2007 their member museums saw an average 41 percent increase in con-
tributions to facilities growth.3
We also see a number of new museums being created. Museums are now
being formed to memorialize historic events such as the Ground Zero site in
New York City and the Holocaust museums in Washington, New York, and
Houston to name a few; or to honor special communities such as the Arab
American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan; or to honor the history
of African Americans in this country. Just about any topic is being covered, in-
cluding museums devoted to artists (Andy Warhol), or broad topics (the Cre-
ation Museum or Museum of American Finance), or significant locations
(American Revolution Center at Valley Forge). Not only U.S. museums are en-
gaged in this boom, but Chinese, Canadian, Australian, French, Greek, Ger-
man, Japanese, and Middle Eastern museums are building as well.
Museum building projects can consume anywhere from two to twenty years,
including initial planning, through architectural design, fund-raising, construc-
tion, and opening. Although twenty years may sound extreme, there are reasons
these projects can be seriously prolonged. Launching an idea can run into many
hurdles, including finding the right building site, getting approval from govern-
ment agencies, and testing feasibility. Many projects suffer from lack of strong
planning, staff turnover (including executive directors), poor budgeting, rising
2 C H A P T E R 1

costs due to the vagaries of the marketplace, and scope creep. Despite these re-
alities, many museums are eager to engage in building projects.
WHAT ARE THE DRIVERS?
Why has expansion become a critical component of the strategic success of
today’s museum? We believe there are several factors that contribute to this
phenomenon.
Mission
Museums and all nonprofits are being challenged to realize their mission,
or reason for existing. If a museum is to stay in business, its relevance to soci-
ety must be clear. Today museums are expected to ensure that all decisions and
actions taken are in service to their mission. Are they good stewards of their
assets? Do they serve the community? In the past decade the American Asso-
ciation of Museums developed a manifesto for museums and communities,
calling on each museum to redefine its relationship with community to one of
collaboration, mutual understanding, and public service. In response many
museums have taken the bold step of reinventing themselves, including reex-
amining or even rewriting their mission statements. And what more obvious
way is there to realize that new mission than through a highly visible building
project? Museum planners need to stop at this stage and ask themselves, is a
facilities or capital project the best approach?
Aging Facilities
As noted above, among museum construction projects there are more ren-
ovation projects than new buildings. Museums, like other organizations, have
a life cycle. Twenty-five years is an industry standard. No wonder many mu-
seums face backlogs of facilities maintenance and replacement of worn infra-
structure. In 2007 the Smithsonian Institution revealed a backlog in facilities
maintenance of $2.5 billion.4
How many museum buildings will eventually
suffer from leaking roofs, deteriorating electrical or plumbing systems, or in-
efficient heating and cooling? Even newer buildings can be subject to roof
leaks or the breakdown of infrastructure components. A landmark report on
heritage health in this country revealed that the most pressing needs are envi-
ronmental controls and improved collections storage.5
ADA compliance is
also a major concern for older structures and drives facility upgrades.
I N T R O D U C T I O N 3

Historic preservation goals also drive renovation programs. Saving land-
mark buildings is a moral and sometimes legal obligation. Historic buildings
are constantly in need of renovation. Aging facilities also have other problems
such as asbestos insulation or improper moisture barriers and leaky windows
or negative air pressure. Advances in technology and in more energy efficient
systems allow museums to save money and the environment. A sweeping
movement to create buildings that are environmentally friendly has also led to
new renovation approaches. LEED (leadership in energy and environmental
design) certification, a sustainability benchmark, is a badge that many muse-
ums now aspire to, and with that comes significant physical change. Finally,
with a push for new technology in exhibitions and in managing operations
there is need for more sophisticated information technology support systems.
Economic Impact
The modern museum is in the enviable position of being a catalyst for
community change. This plays out in several ways. Richard Florida’s writing
on the creative class underscores this trend. Florida’s theories relate to the
value of creative individuals and organizations that attract new audiences. A
highly educated workforce fosters economic development and a more vibrant
economy. Noted museum architect Daniel Libeskind has stated that “the dif-
ference between cities is their creative power and museums are manifestations
of that.”6
At the same time arts and cultural patrons are seeking new experiences.
The museum is capable of and in some cases is becoming an entertainment
venue. Much as a department store serves as an anchor in a shopping mall, the
museum itself becomes the centerpiece of community revitalization efforts.
Clearly there are critics of this phenomenon, but museums are becoming
more businesslike in their alliance with community revitalization efforts. An
article in the Wall Street Journal questioned the ability of nonprofit museums
to manage the demands of expansion: new audiences, high operational costs,
the need to present a wide variety of blockbuster attractions, and so on. How
many will fail?7
Visitor Experience and Competition for Leisure Time
Competition for audience attention and more sophisticated museum visitors
are driving museums to overturn the old paradigms of design and interpretative
4 C H A P T E R 1

techniques. Partnering with for-profits or other nonprofits to create more pow-
erful learning experiences is a way of leveraging a successful business model.
Government and foundation leaders are strong proponents of the educa-
tional value of museums. They have crafted public policy objectives that will
help museums further define their relevance. Education underlies the signifi-
cance of these policies. More sophisticated boards and staff understand that to
deal with the realities of competition the museum must use creative market-
ing approaches to sustain old and attract new audiences.
Boards or Major Donors
Increasingly board members and major donors are investing in new build-
ings. In some eyes it is a competitive drive to stay current with other muse-
ums. In other instances these individuals may desire to create legacies and
obtain personal recognition. Today’s boards and major donors are often per-
sonally involved as well as invested in their museums. In addition, corpora-
tions are invested in museums as marketing vehicles or through philanthropic
gifts, while foundations support museums as platforms for improving society.
This is good news for museums. Major donors are extremely important to the
financial success of building projects, but there is still great value in seeking
grassroots funding.
Collections
Collections are at the heart of most museums. They continue to grow and
create enormous demands. Many museums are opting to move collections to
off-site facilities for storage and research. Appropriate space for storage, exhi-
bitions, research, and conservation treatment is a critical need. These needs
are unfortunately never perfectly answered in museum facilities and drive re-
sponsible board and staff to seek increased space as well as special conditions
such as climate control, lighting, and security. Most museums consider this a
top priority and seek a solution through building renovations and expansions.
WHAT ARE THE RISKS?
As compelling as the drivers are, many risks are inherent in undertaking a
building project. Can new buildings stimulate needed change? The building
project is often seen as the “easy answer” to implementing dramatic change.
Working with a star architect is considered by some a guarantee of success in

ensuring a prime leadership position among cultural attractions in the com-
munity or even in the country. Jim Collins in his landmark book Built to Last
defines the BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) as a prime measure of success in
organizations. Yet these larger-than-life goals end up being major risks in
times of uncertainty marked by wars, economic instability, global warming,
and so on. Museums that move into the long-term BHAG of an expansion or
a new building need to be clearly armed for all risks.8
Studies have shown that, after the first year or so, attendance often dips at
newly opened or renovated museums, but that is only one risk. A few examples
of the challenges of new museum construction follow. In 2006 the Denver Mu-
seum of Art opened a $110 million, 146,000-square-foot addition designed by
Daniel Libeskind. Within the first six months, the museum announced staff
layoffs, noticeable repairs were being made to a leaking roof, and attendance
numbers were not as high as expected due to a severe winter. These circum-
stances highlight the types of unexpected risks associated with such ambitious
projects. Less positive cases include Cleveland’s HealthSpace museum, which
closed after three years of operation due to its inability to cover construction
debt. Poor attendance at the new City Museum of Washington, D.C., forced it
to close in 2004 after eighteen months of operation. Cincinnati’s National Un-
derground Museum and Freedom Center opened in 2004 and within eighteen
months was suffering significant operating deficits. Washington’s Corcoran
Gallery of Art developed an ambitious expansion plan designed by Frank
Gehry in the late 1990s, and pledges were made by major donors and the city
government. Yet fund-raising stalled in 2005 and the project was canceled.9
The risks that museums face in embarking on building projects include un-
realistic expectations, lack of successful planning, poor definition of scope,
underprepared board and staff, and poor synchronization of physical and
program plans. Museum building projects are ambitious and often need to be
implemented in phases that can stretch out for many years. At the same time
the museum usually faces the need to work with multiple funding streams.
Many building projects require the talents and input of a variety of specialized
contractors, community members, and staff and board members. These proj-
ects are a balancing act to say the least.
Many new museums are launched to build community pride, reflect aspi-
rations, memorialize important events in history, preserve artifacts, works of
art, and historic sites, and respond to changing demographics and public in-
6 C H A P T E R 1

terests. Museums provide legitimacy, and this is the good news.Yet many well-
meaning boards of trustees seem unprepared to take on a building program
and the ongoing operations of the new museum. Perhaps new museums risk
the most because they have little institutional history, unformed collections,
few established organizations with which to collaborate on programming, and
they lack well-developed audience and donor bases.
However, many museums have fared well in the process of new building
programs. The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the California Academy of Sci-
ences in San Francisco are just a few of the institutions that have produced
successful expansions in recent years. Most of these museums have a strong
and diversified donor base, community support, experienced leadership and,
in many cases, substantial endowments.
To weigh risks, museums often use feasibility studies to predict the success
of new facilities projects. There is much value in this approach, which will be
discussed in greater detail in chapter 2 on planning. Some, however, believe
that relying on feasibility studies is a flawed model and prefer to simply move
forward on a “build it and they will come” approach. What can mitigate risk
in a case such as this? A strong brand name, for one thing. Museums such as
the Metropolitan or the Smithsonian can count on a stream of visitors, and
expansions are less likely to fail in these cases. However, what is the impact of
oversaturation of the museum market itself? A small but potentially disrup-
tive trend is occurring in the art museum field: major collectors are building
their own museums. Are they looking for immortality and independence? Do
they compete with existing museums? If every city, university, private collec-
tor, or special interest group succeeds in building a new museum, what will be
the impact on the established institutions in their market?
DESIGN TRENDS FOR MUSEUMS
Art versus Container
Museums need to consider the dilemma of whether the building is a work
of art in itself or whether it serves to contain collections, exhibitions, and pro-
grams. Often this choice is based on marketing issues or the pressures of the
community or the desires of the board. A container approach focuses on the
content—the collections and programs. The art approach sees the building as
an attraction in itself.

Green Design
There is a clear emphasis on sustainable design today. Museums feel the
imperative to go green for several reasons: to lower operating costs in the long
run, to benefit the environment, and to attract the support of funders and
other stakeholders. Many museums also see the green aspects as a way of ed-
ucating the public about this most compelling need. There is of course the is-
sue of payback: how long before you break even on what is often a more
expensive investment up front?
Signature Architects
Not all museum projects are designed by internationally known architects,
but clearly there is a desire to work with the best. Doing so can add a premium
to the cost.
Open Collections
Museums need to share collections with the public as widely as possible.
Often this is done through open storage, where a systematic display of objects
is accompanied by in-depth information on the collections to offer a more
contemplative experience.
Off-site Facilities
Museums will choose off-site facilities either for storage and other back of
house functions or as satellite museums open to the public. The Smithsonian’s
Air and Space and American Indian museums have both opened satellite fa-
cilities, as has the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Guggenheim is
the leader in this regard with off-site museums in Spain, Italy, Germany,
Nevada, and the Middle East.
Not only are museums moving collections to off-site locations for storage,
they are also setting up off-site exhibition spaces. The Bilbao effect made fa-
mous by the Guggenheim Museum has been replicated by other museums
seeking the opportunity to share collections and reach new audiences. The ra-
tionale is clear, but often the cost of building and operations is overwhelming.
Visitor Amenities
Emphasizing spaces that will make visitors feel comfortable and prolong
their visit is a widespread trend.Orientation spaces,parking, dining options, gift
8 C H A P T E R 1

shops, hands-on learning centers, theaters, gardens, collections study space, and
lounges all add to the improved experience. Accessibility and accommodation
of a wide variety of visitors is also an important factor in building projects.
Museums also seek larger and more flexible spaces for hosting special
events, changing exhibitions including large traveling shows, and improved
circulation to facilitate crowd control.
DOES YOUR SIZE MATTER?
All sizes and all types of museums can be candidates for a building program.
Aside from time and cost issues, many of the problems encountered will be the
same no matter what the size of your programs, collections, and staff. Trade-
offs will always be needed in order to match visions with the reality of the
budget.
WHERE DO YOU BEGIN?
The following chapters will outline the logical steps necessary for a successful
building project. Clearly the best advice is to start with a strong planning ef-
fort. The diagram in figure 1.1 is a high-level view of the steps. At the outset,
a museum must develop a strategic plan with clear vision and goals, followed
by an implementation planning phase where a more specific scope of the proj-
ect can take shape. As ideas are honed, an iterative process takes place that
marries design ideas with strategic vision and the all-important budget feasi-
bility. Scope definition is critical and must be detailed in the early phases. Se-
lecting the best team of experts to work with the museum’s board and staff is
crucial for success. Determining the phasing and making decisions about clos-
ing the facility during construction are major issues. Construction itself is a
complex phase that can create further challenges for the museum, its staff,
board, and community. Selecting the best firms, managing expectations, and
understanding the operational details of construction require extraordinary
communications. Developing financing plans, conducting capital campaigns,
and working effectively with donors can be challenging. Finally, at the point
of occupancy and operations the museum has the obligation and opportunity
to test its assumptions and measure its success through audience studies, ef-
fective commissioning systems, and gauging public pride and staff morale.
The process is exhilarating and the end product something that promises to
be continually enjoyed by all.

NOTES
1. U.S. Census Bureau, www.census.gov/const/C30/private.xls (accessed April 6, 2008).
2. American Association of Museums, Museum Financial Information (Washington,
D.C.: American Association of Museums, 2006), 92–96.
3. Association of Art Museum Directors, 2007 State of North America’s Art Museums
Survey, www.aamd.org/newroom/documents/2007SNAAMReleaseData_final.pdf
(accessed April 6, 2008).
4. Jenny Mandel, “Smithsonian Problems Include $2.5 Billion Maintenance, Repair
List,” April 11, 2007, www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=36583 (accessed
April 11, 2007).
5. Heritage Health Survey Report, 2005, www.heritagepreservation.org/HHI/
execsummary.html (accessed March 18, 2008).
6. Daniel Libeskind, “Designing Soul,” Museum News, March-April 2005, 45.
7. Douglas McLennan, “Culture Clash: Has the Business Model for Arts Institutions
Outlived Its Usefulness?” Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2005, 11.
8. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Built to Last (New York: Harper Business, 1994), 94.
9. Martha Morris, “Building Boom or Bust?” Journal of Museum Management and
Curatorship 22, no. 2 (June 2007): 102–3.
10 C H A P T E R 1
FIGURE 1.1
Life of Project Process

Planning and Organizing
for Success
2
Few museum staffs build more than one building during their professional
lifetimes, and now we know why.
—Redmond Barnett, Washington State Historical Society
GETTING STARTED
Is your museum a start-up? An established museum? It’s important to under-
stand that museums have a life cycle. Knowing your stage of development will
help determine the way you need to approach a building program. What is a
life cycle curve? Literature on this topic points to the varied stages of growth
of the organization starting from infancy and stretching out to senility. Typi-
cally in the start-up phase a founding individual or group has a great deal of
enthusiasm and drive but few or no resources or structure. As the organiza-
tion begins to grow, it attracts new resources, including staff, collections, and
a facility in which to operate. Organizations in their prime are challenged by
new ideas and are constantly improving. Older organizations can be plagued
by bureaucracy. A senile museum is often characterized by lack of resonance
with the public, dwindling finances, decaying facilities, and poor morale. A
museum seeking to stay in its prime must recognize the challenges to its facil-
ities and seek to improve them.1
11

How to Start a Museum
Starting a new museum is a daunting endeavor. If you are a start-up, there
are several things you must do before planning a building program. In the
United States museums exist primarily as part of the nonprofit sector. Muse-
ums established as nonprofit charitable corporations typically file for status as
a 501c(3) seeking federal and state tax exemptions. The Internal Revenue Ser-
vice has specific requirements along with information to guide you on its
website (www.irs.gov). Obtaining this status will spare you from paying taxes
(with exceptions) and will allow you to receive tax-deductible contributions.
Instructions for creating a charitable corporation are regulated by each state.
You will be required to write and file articles of incorporation, develop a pur-
pose statement or mission, and select a name for your museum along with
naming a founding board of directors. Your board will need to understand its
fiduciary duties as it develops operating bylaws and early plans for the mu-
seum. Nonprofits are required to receive a substantial amount of their support
from public sources including governmental units or the general public.
Foundations, corporations, and individuals can start museums as well, but
they may not have the full range of exemptions and benefits. In any case, an
attorney should be your guide as you form a new museum.2
If you are a new museum within a parent organization such as a university,
corporation, or government entity, the steps necessary will be dictated by lo-
cal and state laws and policies and procedures established by the parent or-
ganization.
THE NEED FOR PLANNING
Long before construction, museums embarking on a building project must
engage in careful planning. Why? Because without a strong and well devel-
oped plan the museum is at risk for failure. Indeed planning is the best predic-
tor of success. We are happy to report that the majority of museums we have
surveyed in recent years have done strategic planning. However, without ad-
ditional planning museums that embark on building projects can experience
cost overruns, public criticism, and staff morale issues. These problems can be
avoided or greatly reduced by a strong planning process. As an example, a mu-
seum in the Midwest was the recipient of a generous pledge by a well-known
arts philanthropist. In its excitement to quickly move forward on a building
program, the museum administration and board selected a star architect.
12 C H A P T E R 2

Once the selection was made, the museum crafted a project budget which
quickly spiraled well beyond the original donor’s pledge. Planners were forced
to drastically scale back their program ideas. This was unsettling to many of
the participants in the planning.
Unfortunately, this story is not unusual. There are many unknowns in a
building project that the museum board, staff, and community may overlook
in their excitement and enthusiasm until it is too late and they are facing po-
tential disaster. Every part of the process carries risk—site selection, mission
statement and vision, selection of the planning team, the building design, and
the cost of construction and operations. What should a museum do when the
external world changes suddenly and new demands, such as increasing secu-
rity after September 11 or more stringent building codes in reaction to natu-
ral disasters such as floods or earthquakes, are placed on museums? Managing
expectations becomes a critical factor. Planning is therefore the best recourse
to avoid reactive situations.
One major factor that your museum must remember about planning is
that funders expect a strong planning effort in advance of making a grant. In
addition, accreditation through the American Association of Museums re-
quires evidence of a strategic plan. It is no longer an optional effort, but a re-
quirement for success.
What is planning? It is organizing ideas and resources for optimum results.
It is a process that results in a product. It is a system of assuring the best deci-
sions of staff and board and other key stakeholders involved in your building
project.
Planning begins early. Without early planning and decision making, the
ability to influence change diminishes over time. Once key decisions are made,
especially about a building project, the museum has reduced leeway in mak-
ing changes without increasing costs (figure 2.1).
What Type of Plan?
Museum building projects rest on many types of plans. The initial plan that
a museum must engage in is an overarching strategic plan. However, many as-
sociated plans will create the blueprint for success in your building project:
■ Facilities master plans
■ Site plans
P L A N N I N G A N D O R G A N I Z I N G F O R S U C C E S S 13

■ Collecting plans
■ Visitor experience or interpretive plans
■ Staffing plans
■ Fund-raising plans
■ Business plans
■ Marketing plans
■ Communications plans
■ Operations plans
This chapter will focus on the strategic plan while subsequent chapters will
address other types of plans.
STRATEGIC PLANNING: INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
What is involved in strategic planning? It is a process that involves many play-
ers, data gathering, decision making, and strong commitment from your mu-
seum leadership. The effort involves several critical steps, as outlined in figure
2.2. Preparing for strategic planning is critical. Your museum will need to
identify the key players, communications systems, and information sources in
advance of launching the planning work.You may spend months or even years
in creating your plan, so the process needs to be carefully designed up front
14 C H A P T E R 2
FIGURE 2.1
Early Planning Reduces Risk

and monitored throughout. The planning team must schedule regular meet-
ings, maintain minutes, and document and share key decisions. At the outset
a great deal of data gathering will occur. This information, along with all the
key decisions, needs to be cataloged in such a way as to be easily understood
by all players.Your museum should assign a staff member to oversee this func-
tion. Use of outside consultants in this process can be very helpful, but a per-
manent staff member should have primary responsibility for managing the
process and maintaining the documentation.
As a circular process, strategic planning begins with an environmental analy-
sis to determine the context of the organization, its assets and liabilities and the
needs of the community and stakeholders. It ends with the evaluation of its
success or failure in meeting its mission and vision. Even before the museum
embarks on this process there is a preliminary step: the formation of a planning
team or steering committee and operating structure. Participants will include
board, staff, and other stakeholders and outside experts. It is the board’s fidu-
ciary responsibility to lead this process, although the actual planning work can
be managed by staff and even outside consultants. The important factor is to
FIGURE 2.2
The Strategic Planning Process

create the best team at the outset. The core group for planning should not be
too large, perhaps numbering no more than eight to ten individuals. Advisory
task forces will be formed to bring input from the community, such as other
museums, the public, school systems, and other key stakeholders.
Once your planning team and operating structure are in place, the initial
phase of strategic planning involves an environmental analysis. Planning is a
data-rich effort and requires the collection of facts and opinions that will sup-
port sound decision making. The four elements that are typically identified in
this phase are strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, often called a
SWOT analysis. They are further defined as internal strengths and weaknesses
and external opportunities and threats. For example, as illustrated in figure
2.3, a typical approach to the internal strengths or weaknesses task is an assess-
ment of the following: collections, programs, staffing, reputation, funding, fa-
cilities, location, visitation, and leadership. Some of the latter could be
considered strengths while others could be weaknesses. For example, a mu-
seum may have a fine collection, but it may not be accessible due to deterio-
rating and cramped facilities. A typical planning process will examine the
existing status of all the major internal operations from the board to staff to
collections, programs, facilities, finances, and public perceptions.
External threats and opportunities can be factors such as the economic
health of the region or nation, competition from other leisure activities (in-
cluding museums that serve the same community), regional or even national
demographic makeup and trends, audiences who don’t visit your museum,
16 C H A P T E R 2
FIGURE 2.3
Environmental Analysis, or SWOT

public policy regarding arts and cultural funding, professional standards of
conduct, donor preferences, and legal requirements. A typical SWOT process
is conducted by the planning team with the help of special task forces of staff,
board, opinion leaders, audience members, and outside consultants. It in-
cludes an intensive review of all the key factors affecting the museum. An ex-
ample of such a process is that conducted by the National Museum of
American History at the Smithsonian Institution in the 1990s.3
Its environ-
mental analysis involved creating sixteen staff-led task forces to study a vari-
ety of key internal functions from educational programs to the use of new
media, as well as external issues such as trends in visitor services, exhibition
development, and collections management. The museum spent close to a year
on this phase of the planning alone.
Benchmarking, or examining best practices of similar organizations, is a key
tool in the SWOT phase. What makes those organizations successful? In the
case of museums, benchmarking can be done by surveying peer museums and
learning about their approaches to mission development, collecting, educa-
tional outreach, funding, and facilities, for example. It is typical to study the
practices of several other museums, even taking the time to visit them and talk
with staff and board about their approaches. This phase is most critical in the
building project. Benchmarking contributes critical information to determin-
ing feasibility of a building program, selecting architects and other contrac-
tors, and planning for funding. Benchmarking involves identifying best
practices in building design, site planning, solutions for collections preserva-
tion, or achieving LEED (leadership in energy and environmental design) cer-
tification, and financing options, for example. A questionnaire is developed by
the steering committee working on the building project. Peer organizations
are selected and invited to share data with your museum. If you are a science
museum, you will be seeking to benchmark other science museums, or other
science-based educational programs. You may want to benchmark museums
that are similar to your museum in size of collections or in the type of audi-
ences served.You will be looking at museums in your community and in other
parts of the country or the world. On-site visits that allow firsthand experi-
ence of the facility and face-to-face discussion with staff and board are very
helpful to augment the benchmark survey data. Some of this information may
be gathered during a market feasibility study. It is critical that your board and
senior staff be thoroughly familiar with this information.

How is SWOT and benchmarking information used in the strategic plan-
ning process? You should be able to define what makes you a viable organiza-
tion, where you need to improve. You will be clear about the external
constraints that affect the museum and how you can take advantage of op-
portunities. These data guide the formation of a vision for change and the
specifics of the planning goals, objectives, and strategies. Based on the needs
of the community stakeholders, the internal areas needing improvement, and
the opportunities for long-term service to the public, more specific ideas for
change can be developed. If your museum collection is not being seen due to
cramped space or inadequate conservation, or the nature of your visitors’
needs and expectations have radically changed, while new funders and poten-
tial partners are materializing, then you are in a position to create a vision for
change.
Mission/Vision/Values
This phase of the planning cycle is the most critical. Although months may
be invested in the environmental analysis, the visioning phase is probably the
one that most planning team members will want to spend their time on. There
is really no reason to invest time in planning if a significant positive change is
not contemplated. Therefore, no matter what the museum’s ultimate vehicle
to realize its mission, a strong vision with unanimous buy-in is fundamental.
Most museums as nonprofits have established mission statements. However,
during a strategic planning process there is always an opportunity to revisit
the mission. Is it responsive to the internal strengths and external opportuni-
ties? Does it resonate with the public? Is it worded in such as way as to define
the purpose of the museum, who it serves, and how that service makes a dif-
ference? Is it worded in such a way as to be easily understood and remembered
by board and staff?
Vision. A vision statement is unique to each museum, yet several questions
should be addressed.
■ How will your museum look in ten or twenty years?
■ Who will be visiting?
■ What will visitors learn?
■ How will the museum be managed?
■ What assets will be acquired?
18 C H A P T E R 2

Although the leadership of the museum (board, CEO/director) will articu-
late the vision statement, it must be collectively developed by as many stake-
holders as possible, widely shared, and endorsed unanimously. A vision
statement pushes the organization to a higher level of service and operation.
It is expansive and ambitious. It emphasizes that the museum is a dynamic
and engaging center for a variety of audiences, accessible to all, and providing
meaningful learning experiences, for example. Some vision statements are
short, but the more fruitful approach is to outline the elements of your trans-
formation in some detail.
Values. Many strategic plans include a values statement. Values are words
and phrases that guide the operations of the organization. In a sense they are
linked to the vision by the inspiring tenets they describe. For example, a val-
ues statement for a museum might include the following:
Our museum will display respect for the public and fellow staff members.
We will create opportunities for creativity in all programs.
We will promote stewardship through sustainable practices.
Values set a tone for the internal culture of the organization and the behavior
of the museum staff, board, and volunteers, and they establish guideposts for
communication with the external world about what is fundamentally important.
Vision and values work together to serve as a foundation for the unfolding
building project. Decisions about design and construction, staffing and oper-
ations, funding and communications, should always refer to the vision and
shared values developed during this phase of planning.
Goals and Objectives/Action Plans
The articulation of a framework of goals and objectives allows your mu-
seum to specify how you will achieve the mission and vision. This is the point
at which a planning team will develop a list of ways to meet the vision through
a variety of projects. Knowledgeable staff needs to participate intensively at
this phase to develop a balanced set of goals and objectives for collecting, ex-
hibitions, educational programs, staffing and organizational structure, fund-
ing, and infrastructure. In the end all the goal areas will form a balanced
approach among external and internal activities.

Decision making. One of the key activities in this phase of planning is se-
lecting priorities. How will decisions be made among the many competing
and attractive ideas that the planning team has developed? A set of decision
criteria must be developed and should include the following:
■ Relevance to mission
■ Responsiveness to audiences
■ Funding feasibility
■ Leveraging internal strengths and external partners
■ Adherence to legal and ethical guidelines
To build or not to build? Here the museum needs to consider the reality of
building construction as a major component of its vision. What is the oppor-
tunity cost of investing time and money in a new building, an expansion, or a
renovation versus other worthy needs of the organization? Which is the best
approach? What is the opportunity lost when investing in the facilities solu-
tion instead of collections, programs, or staffing?4
If the museum decides to build or renovate, a program plan will be devel-
oped at this phase that outlines in some detail your collections, exhibitions,
and educational outreach goals along with associated space needs.
Resource Analysis and Acquisition
Each objective that is developed by your museum needs to be carefully an-
alyzed to determine how it will be realized. What resources are needed in re-
gards to staff time, outside services, space utilization, or collections
availability? Each major objective needs some realistic level of feasibility in or-
der to make sound decisions.
Feasibility study. One of the most important activities for the museum to
undertake at this juncture is a feasibility study. There are different types of fea-
sibility studies that need to be undertaken in regard to building projects. The
two favored approaches are studies that assess the market for a new facility
and those that assess the donor interest in the project and its associated capi-
tal campaign. In undertaking a study to gauge market feasibility, many muse-
ums work with external firms to develop the necessary financials and
visitation projections. These studies will include the level of interest in the
community, who will visit the new facility, interest of members in supporting
20 C H A P T E R 2

this new vision, the competition, and their operations and future plans. The
feasibility phase also helps to define space assumptions: visitor projections
will likely impact size of public areas, food service and other amenities, loca-
tion of key activities such as shops, theaters, and the like.
A checklist of variables that might be included in these studies covers the
following:
■ Internally, how will the new facility operate?
■ What are the staffing needs?
■ What about facilities requirements for collections care?
■ How will the museum maintain new mechanical systems and exhibit com-
ponents?
■ How much security is needed to manage increasing visitation?
■ Will retail functions net new income?
■ What are the demographics and psychographics of your region, including
tourism patterns?
■ What is current attendance and what are visitor data about your existing fa-
cility?
■ What are the reasons that people do not visit your museum?
■ What is your competition?
■ Are you interested in targeting certain audiences?
■ What is the economic benefit to the museum’s community in dollars per
visitor?
Often a museum will undertake an economic impact study. For example,
the Museum of Modern Art in New York determined that its impact on the
city’s economy was $2 billion over its first few years after opening in 2004.5
Feasibility studies need to be evaluated with the proverbial grain of salt. A few
museums that relied on marketing studies failed soon after opening. The City
Museum of Washington, D.C., estimated 300,000 persons would visit after
opening in 2003. The reality of post 9/11 Washington left the number closer
to 30,000. One might ask are feasibility studies reliable? In many cases they
will be, but your museum must approach numbers in the most cautious and
conservative fashion. Of great importance is ensuring that the museum has a
strong and well-diversified financial base to absorb fluctuations in attendance.
Effective marketing also plays a factor.

“What if” scenarios are critical to build into your feasibility phase and bud-
geting: What if a major donor dies? What if a key contractor goes out of busi-
ness? What if there is fraud? What if there is opposition from community mem-
bers? What if there are environmental hazards, for example, asbestos,
archaeological materials, toxic waste, flooding, or skyrocketing cost of materials?
Finally, be sure to select consultants with strong track records especially in the
museum field.6
Funding is critical to the resource analysis phase. Obviously major
amounts of funding will be needed to advance a new vision and associated
projects. The status quo will not move the museum forward. At this phase it
is important to answer several questions, many of which can be incorporated
into a strong business plan that will support the case for major funding.
■ What internal resources can be applied to the museum’s priority projects?
(In most cases those resources will be staff time and collections.)
■ What matching funds are available from the museum as it seeks external
grants?
■ Are major gifts a possibility?
■ Are board members making leadership gifts?
■ What earned income can be anticipated from a future new facility?
Implementation of Projects
Once resources are in hand, the museum needs project management sys-
tems to create a sequenced set of activities to implement major project ele-
ments. All projects can benefit from this approach, especially the building
project and its major components including program activities such as exhi-
bitions. Project management tools allow the museum’s management and
board to chart the work to be done and measure progress, including major
goals and objectives, strategies and target dates, assigned responsible staff and
resources allocated. Charts can be created in readily updateable software pro-
grams including word processing, spreadsheet, or project management soft-
ware. (See appendix A for an example.)
Evaluation
All planning efforts must contain a strong evaluation component. You will
want to identify project success criteria and ways to measure them. Unfortu-
22 C H A P T E R 2

nately, many museums are so exhausted by the process of implementing proj-
ects and moving on to the next phase of their planning that they have little time
or enthusiasm for assessment. So it is essential to think ahead to how you will
evaluate your plan prior to implementation. Don’t make it an afterthought.
Targets and measurements serve as touchstones throughout the project for
each stakeholder to answer the questions, How am I doing? How are we doing?
They also become useful communications tools to engage the public in track-
ing the project’s progress. Practically speaking, at project completion, a good
evaluation process ensures that lessons learned are catalogued, that systems are
working properly, that staff understand their roles and responsibilities, and
that the museum knows how effectively it has used its resources. At the same
time the impact on the public is paramount. Did we meet our vision for change
in the eyes of the public? What impact have we made on our audiences?
Measurement of effectiveness can be both qualitative and quantitative. Were
audiences delighted by the visitor experience? Did new education programs re-
sult in learning advances among school children? Did membership and visita-
tion increase? How did the press react to the new building and the museum
exhibitions? Are funders satisfied and new donors lining up? Are staff aware of
the plan and how they make a contribution? The evaluation of the major com-
ponents of the strategic plan allows the museum to learn about their successes
and failures and to feed that information into the next planning cycle.
Evaluation requires a systematic approach to measuring success. The mu-
seum should start with a baseline of data that it can then compare itself to in
future years. Items that you might include in that baseline are attendance, costs
per visitor, visitor ratings of facilities and programs, membership numbers,
contributions by type of funder, percentage of collections exhibited, rates of
new collection gifts, amount of space devoted to state-of-the-art storage, and
so on. Staff and board should be sure these measures relate to the vision for
change that has been developed in the strategic plan. The baseline benchmarks
help the museum measure its progress. As the data are compared over time
your board, director, and staff will have important information about the im-
pact of the strategic vision on the public and on internal operations.
IMPLEMENTING AND ENSURING A SUCCESSFUL PLANNING PROCESS
Strategic planning is a lot of work. The time involved can be anywhere from a
few months to several years. Typically strategic plans are meant to cover an

implementation period of three to five years. However, if a building program
is involved, the time involved could stretch to a decade or more. In reality the
plan is a living document that continues to guide the work of the museum. It
can also be changed as internal and external circumstances warrant. For ex-
ample, a museum on the East Coast invested several years and millions of dol-
lars in planning a new facility that included a name architect and a local
developer. In the midst of a successful capital campaign the developer pulled
out, causing the museum to spend a year securing a new site. Without a strong
strategic plan and dedicated board and staff, this might have been a failed ini-
tiative. They were flexible enough to make the change, and the museum’s ba-
sic vision and plan components are stronger than ever.
Once your museum has reached the point of defining a vision and selecting
goals and objectives, many other related plans will need to be developed. These
will include at a minimum a facilities master plan for building projects, col-
lecting plans, visitor experience or interpretive plans, and business plans. Each
of these plans will draw heavily on the groundwork of the strategic plan. Each
of these plans guides the ongoing phases of your museum building project.
The planning process needs to be inclusive of key staff, board, community
members, outside experts, and funders. The board is ultimately responsible
for leading the process and for assuring buy-in. Creating a plan takes time and
money. Conducting feasibility studies, working with outside experts, and oth-
ers require substantial investments of both. The experts you may include in
your planning phase range from architects to marketing specialists to aca-
demics and exhibition designers. Planning grants are often sought from fund-
ing agencies or board members.
Communications systems are fundamental during the process. Keeping the
staff, volunteers, and community members aware of the unfolding decisions
is important. Reporting and tracking progress in a visible way through pub-
lished minutes or websites helps to ensure everyone is up to date. Sharing data
widely assists enormously in achieving buy-in. In fact as key decisions are
made, they should be documented and archived. The planning process will
evolve over time and decisions will often be made in an iterative process. A full
record of decisions is needed for future reference.
How do we move from the strategic plan to the building project? Much ef-
fort has been expended on planning and now you are strongly considering a
building project as a key component of your vision. Whether a renovation, an
expansion, or a new building, several factors are crucial in making the deci-
24 C H A P T E R 2

sion to proceed. Now is the time to test the feasibility by creating an early
snapshot of your building project. Figure 2.4 highlights the factors that will go
into that decision. The questions you will ask yourself are
■ Do we have the staff, collections, and finances to do this?
■ How much will it cost and is the funding capability there?
FIGURE 2.4
Predesign Planning: Linking Strategic Plan to Project Design

■ What does our audience and community expect?
■ Are sound plans in place for collections, visitor experience, and outreach?
■ Have we assessed our physical framework and space needs?
■ Can the board make a unanimous commitment to this project?
IN SUMMARY
Do’s and Don’ts
■ Choose the right planning teams.
■ Involve leadership in planning and decision making.
■ Prepare the board in advance.
■ Ensure a compelling vision.
■ Incorporate internal and external viewpoints.
■ Assign responsibility for implementation and oversight of planning.
■ Complete a thorough feasibility study allowing sufficient time to fully un-
derstand the options.
■ Know where your museum is in its life cycle.
Red Flags
■ Lack of ownership of the plan: “It’s what the board wants, not me”
■ Staff or board are “too busy” for planning
■ Inability to gain donor support
■ Apathy on the part of the public
■ Unrealistic expectations on the part of board or staff
■ Poor alignment with goals of the plan
■ Resistance to change
FRAMEWORK FOR SUCCESS
As the museum moves forward toward realizing the new vision for its future
through a building project several steps are critical for success. The following
will be detailed in the ensuing chapters:
■ Roles, responsibilities, and building the team: Who will do what?
■ The heart of the museum: What is the content?
■ Hiring your design and construction teams: What is the process for bring-
ing on outside experts?
■ Project management tools: How do we get from predesign to opening?
26 C H A P T E R 2

■ Physical framework: What will you build?
■ Financial planning and cost management: What are the costs and how can
they be controlled?
■ The capital campaign: Where are the financial resources?
■ Communications strategies: Who should know what and when?
■ Operations: How will it work?
■ Evaluation: What is success?
NOTES
Quote by Redmond Barnett included in benchmarking survey conducted by Martha
Morris, 2002.
1. Ichak Adizes, Managing Corporate Life Cycles (Paramus, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999).
2. Hugh Genoways and Lynne Ireland, Museum Administration: An Introduction
(Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2003), 21–35.
3. Discussion of the strategic planning process is drawn from the author’s
experiences as manager of the process at the National Museum of American History
from 1993 to 2001. See bibliography for relevant publications on this topic.
4. Franklin Robinson, “No More Buildings,” Museum News 81, no. 6 (November–
December 2002): 28–29. Robinson discusses the trade-offs of deciding to build
versus investing in the museum’s core programming, such as collection building.
5. Kevin Hassett and P. Swagel, “Creative Accounting: MoMA’s Economic Impact
Study,” Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2006.
6. Gail Lord and Barry Lord, The Manual of Museum Planning, 2nd ed. (Lanham,
MD: AltaMira, 2000), 85–105.

Roles, Responsibilities,
and Building the Team
3
The purpose of this chapter is twofold: to define the roles and responsibilities
of the individuals engaged in the development and execution of a museum
construction project and to suggest how they can be structured to form an ef-
fective team.
From the time a museum construction project is a gleam in someone’s eye
to completion and full operation, many hands will have shaped and guided it.
While players filling roles large and small may come and go throughout the
process, successful planning and completion of a building renovation and/or
expansion project requires the coordinated and cooperative efforts of a host
of individuals: the board of trustees; the museum’s senior leadership, program
and administrative staff; outside consultants, architects and their design
teams, exhibit designers and their team, and the construction team. In addi-
tion public officials and donors, community and corporate partners, and
other interested stakeholders may also fill specific roles. Although players in
small museums may wear many hats, no one person will be able to manage
the complexity of such an endeavor alone.
The board of trustees and any authorizing bodies of publicly financed mu-
seums make the first decisions that set a museum’s construction project
process into motion. Once the decision to undertake a project has been made,
the board and the museum’s senior leadership must establish a structure to
guide the project, including appointment of a steering committee who are a
29

core team of board members and senior museum managers with clearly de-
fined roles and accountabilities. Staff and stakeholders must also be organized
into working groups to ensure their input informs the process and generates
buy-in of the players.
BOARD READINESS: MORPHING FROM BUSINESS AS USUAL
TO FULL BATTLE MODE
At the heart of the board’s role and its engagement in a building project is its
fiduciary responsibility to the museum and its community. For that reason
alone boards must assume an active role in any major building project the
museum undertakes. Undertaking an expansion project, often a once in a life-
time event for board members and museum staff, is a daunting task overlay-
ing an already heavy workload. It is not to be undertaken lightly, nor driven
by unrealistic visions or schemes. A detailed discussion of the board’s respon-
sibilities follows.
The structure of the governing board for oversight of the project will vary
depending on the board’s historical degree of engagement in museum opera-
tions, its size, the scale of the proposed project, and its capacity to oversee a
major initiative. Board roles will be discussed here and will be referenced at
different steps of the process as appropriate.
A typical midsize museum board would have an executive committee and
standing committees responsible for finances, programs, collections, develop-
ment, and buildings. Depending on the size of a museum, each of these stand-
ing committees is staffed and supported by a member of the museum’s
management staff; for example, the finance committee by the chief financial
officer, the programs committee by the chief curator and/or educator, the
fund-raising committee by the development officer, and the building com-
mittee, by the deputy director or the chief operating officer, an assistant di-
rector for administration or the chief financial officer. In a small museum, the
museum director and/or the deputy director may have to assume all of these
support roles. In very small museums, the financial responsibility may rest
with a board member.
Whatever the size, boards undertaking a building project must recognize that
their task is no longer business as usual. Boards of large museums may divide re-
sponsibilities for an expansion project among existing standing committees, cre-
ate a separate steering committee to guide the planning,design,and construction
30 C H A P T E R 3

Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content

tubes, caused by the movements of the muscles and of the body
generally. The valves, like those of the veins, prevent the flow of the
lymph backwards, but allow it to pass forward towards the heart.
This is shown by the examination of a narcotized mammal (killed
immediately after the examination has been made). A glass tube is
placed in the thoracic duct, and about a dozen drops of lymph
(which would have been delivered into the great vein) pass from it in
a minute. If, however, the animal's legs are moved, as though in
running, or if "massage" is applied to the limbs—the pressure being
directed from the extremities towards the heart—then a greatly
increased flow of lymph is observed, as much as sixty drops in a
minute! This is the chief explanation of the value to our health of
exercise, and also of the importance of "massage" as a treatment in
disease. Either exercise or massage entirely revolutionizes the rate of
flow of the lymph, quickening it so greatly that the physiological
effect on the general chemical processes going on in the body
cannot fail to be most important.
Curiously enough, whilst mammals have to depend entirely on
pressure and exercise for anything but the slowest flow of the
lymph, the cold-blooded vertebrates, fish, amphibia and reptiles (and
even some birds), have remarkable, rhythmically contracting,
muscular sacs, which pump the lymph from large lymph-vessels into
large veins, and are called "lymphatic hearts." The eel and other fish
have them in the tail, but they are best seen in the common frog.
There is an anterior pair, one under each shoulder-blade, and
another pair, one on each hip. Each opens at one end into a large
"collecting" lymph-vessel, and at the other end into a large vein.
They "beat" like a heart, but do not keep time with one another.
Their muscular walls are formed by what is called "striated"
muscular tissue (as are those of the blood-heart), and they are
under the control of branches of the spinal nerves. The movement of
the hinder pair in a frog can be seen through the skin.
In man and all vertebrate animals the intestines, stomach and liver,
heart and lungs (or swim-bladder) lie loose, except for a fibrous
band of attachment, in a great cavity (often divided into two or more

chambers), which they fit fairly closely. The small space between
them and the walls of the cavity is occupied by a liquid. This is
lymph, and the great cavity is a lymph-space. When this cavity is in
its primitive form it is called the body cavity, or "cœlom." In man and
mammals it is divided into four chief chambers—the peritoneal cavity
(in which the stomach, intestine, and liver are loosely attached and
have a certain mobility), the right pleural and left pleural cavity (one
for each lung), and the pericardial cavity (for the heart). These great
chambers are part of the lymph-system, and so is the lymph-holding
space around and within the brain and spinal cord, and so are the
great spaces beneath the frog's skin.
If we look at the structure of an earth-worm or of one of the
graceful marine worms (Nereis or Arenicola), we gain a good deal of
light as to the nature of the lymphatic system of Vertebrates.
Suppose you have killed a large earth-worm with chloroform! Then
pin it out on a cork plate, and open it by a cut along the back with a
fine pair of scissors. The point of your scissors passes through the
muscular body-wall of the worm into a great chamber filled with a
clear liquid. This chamber is the "cœlom," and is the same structure
as the pleural and peritoneal chambers of the Vertebrate. But it
holds (proportionately) more liquid. The liquid is "lymph," like that of
the Vertebrate, and has numerous protoplasmic cells floating in it.
There is comparatively little connective tissue in the earth-worm.
The cœlom is free and unblocked—the great viscera lie in it. There
are some delicate, transparent bands of connective tissue, but not
much nor bulky. The wall of the cœlom itself is lined with connective
tissue, and if that tissue grew greatly in bulk, and bound all the
organs and muscles together, it would reduce the large cavity, filling
it up with spongy tissue in the small interstices of which there would
be lymph. And so we should get a lymph system resembling that of
Vertebrates, instead of one large chamber.
But what about the opening of the lymphatics into the blood-
vessels? This is one of the interesting differences between the earth-
worm and the Vertebrate. The earthworm and many marine worms
have a beautiful system of vessels, containing a bright red blood,

and forming true capillaries, connecting arteries and veins. The heart
is a long, rhythmically beating tube, extending along the whole
length of the animal just above the intestine. There is no opening
into it of the lymph-cavity. It is purely a respiratory blood-system,
pumping its fluid, coloured red by oxygen-seizing hæmoglobin into
every part of the body. It passes along the fine capillaries of the
skin, where it seizes oxygen from the outside air or water and carries
it to all the tissues. The fact is that the red respiratory element of
the blood which we call the "hæma" or hæmal portion (the Greek
word for red blood is αἷμα) is here kept separate from the nourishing
and elaborating element, the lymph or lymphatic portion. So that we
should, to be explicit, describe the blood of a vertebrate as
"hæmolymph," a conjunction of hæma and lymph, which in the
more primitive earth-worm and sea-worm have never effected a
junction! In some closely allied marine worms, however, a junction
of these two is effected in another way. We know that in the
Vertebrates the red blood corpuscles are formed by detached bits of
the same tissue, which becomes converted into capillaries, the finest
blood-vessels. Now in several marine Chætopods or bristle-footed
worms (Glycera, Capitella, etc.) the tissue which should form the
blood-vascular system and its red liquid blood, changes its mode of
growth; it never forms blood-vessels at all, but divides into free red
(hæmoglobinous) cells or red blood corpuscles, which float in the
lymph of the cœlom. There is no blood-vascular system produced in
these worms, but the "cells" of the tissue which would in other
worms form blood-vessels break up into red corpuscles, which,
mixing with the lymph, bring it into the condition of "hæmolymph,"
identical with the blood of Vertebrates!
In the molluscs, snails, whelks, oysters, clams, and cuttle-fishes
there is a further, variation. The same two fluids and two systems of
spaces are present as in the earth-worm, but the cœlomic space and
fluid have been nearly blocked up and obliterated by the swelling-up
and great size of the proper hæmal vessels. Only in rare cases is the
blood of molluscs coloured red by hæmoglobin, usually it is of a pale
blue colour. There is still left a pericardial cœlom, a space around the

heart, and from this some fine lymph-holding vessels ramify
amongst the tissues, but the chief spaces in the body are dilated
parts of the true hæmal system. In Insects and Crustacea (say
cockroach and lobster) this process is carried still further. The great
cœlom, so well developed in the Chætopod worms, and the Sea-
urchins and Star-fishes, and retaining quite a large development also
in the Vertebrates, is nowhere to be found. The swollen blood-
vessels have squeezed it out of existence, except for certain sack-
like remnants which enclose separately the ovaries, and the testes,
and the kidneys, and have each its opening to the exterior conveying
the products of those important organs to the outer world. Thus we
gain a brief insight into the true history of the lymphatic system and
its vicissitudes in the lower animals and in man.

R
C H A P T E R X X X I V
THE BLOOD AND ITS CIRCULATION
ED, crimson, scarlet, hot, the river of life, the carrier of all that is
good and all that is bad by its myriad streams through our bodies;
the rarest, most precious, most gorgeous of fluids; the daughter of
the salt ocean, finer and more worshipful even than the waters of
the great mother, the sea; the badge of horror and of accursed
cruelty, yet also the emblem of nobility, of generosity, of all that is
near and dear, of all that is splendid and beautiful; the blush of
modesty and the flag of rage; the giver of coral lips and glowing
cheeks to youth and health, and no less of the ruddy nose which
women hide with powder and men bravely bear without
concealment! Such is the blood, and it is no wonder that the mere
sight of it has always had an overpowering fascination for mankind.
The wild people of the Solomon Islands, when they see a drop of
blood flowing from an accidental scratch of hand or foot, say, "I must
go home; some danger is at hand; the blood has come to tell me!"
Sorcerers and witches of all times have endeavoured to procure a
few drops of the blood of their intended victims in order to "work
spells" upon the precious fluid, and so, according to the theory of
"contagious magic," upon the person from which it came. In Italy to-
day, as in this country a few hundred years ago, when some one's
nose bleeds, a Latin hymn to the blood (beautiful in its conception)
begging it to stay its flow, as it did when the soldier's spear pierced
the side of the crucified Christ, is sung. In a village in the hills near
Naples I was taken with an attack of nose-bleeding, and bathed my
head with cold water from a pretty fountain which supplied the
people with its pure stream. The women brought handsome old
brass basins and embroidered cloths of the most delicate linen for

my use. I heard a strange chanting behind my back as I stooped
over the water, and when the bleeding had ceased I found that an
old man of the village had placed two straws in the form of the cross
on my shoulders, and was reciting the ancient Latin hymn to my
overflowing blood! I obtained afterwards from a friend the words of
the same hymn as used in long-ago days in English villages.
One primitive race if not others, namely, the Australians, take a very
prosaic and business-like view of the blood. They use it as an
adhesive—a sort of liquid paste or gum, always ready to hand! In
order to fasten feathers or other decoration to a pole, the Australian
"black fellow," without wincing or hesitation, and as a matter of
course, makes a cut (with a sharp piece of stone or glass) in his own
arm, and uses the convenient blood. It also serves them as paint, as
it has served many a chieftain of European race for signing his name,
and many a prisoner for writing in the absence of ink.
There is for some people a fascination in the sight of blood which
must not be mistaken for cruelty, although it is accompanied by
dangerous and undesirable emotion. Just as other emotion-producing
experiences—such as the sight or hearing of torture, of hairbreadth
escapes, and of ghosts—produces uncontrollable repulsion and
horror in some people, and to others (or even to the same people
when in another state of health or mental balance) actually gives a
pleasurable sensation (exquisite shudderings, as the French say), so
does the sight of blood or even the mere hearing of the word "blood"
act differently on different people. Every one who has witnessed a
Spanish bull-fight knows that it is not any desire for, or enjoyment of,
the sight of pain which excites the crowded mass of spectators.
There is no "cruelty," in the proper sense, in their state of mind, no
pleasure in witnessing pain—a thing which, terrible as it is to think of,
yet does exist naturally in mankind, and has to be, and is, repressed
and absolutely got rid of in the course of the humanizing education
of civilized mankind. The spectators of the Spanish bull-fight are
primarily under the spell or fascination of the sight of blood, and in a
less degree they are attracted by the wonderful exhibition of skill and
strength on the part of the matador and his troop. The crowd

excitedly acclaims the first drops of blood which the splendid bull is
made to shed. They buy, after he has been killed, the paper-winged
darts smeared with his blood. The colour, the mystery, and the
magnificence of blood produces in them a violent emotion. It is to
them a delight, but only a single step separates their delight from
pain and actual physical distress. The most absolutely nauseating
smells are very nearly identical with delightful perfumes, and we all
know how readily a taste may be acquired converting the former into
the latter—as in the case of the (to most people) foul-smelling East
Indian fruit, the durian, and of rotten cheese and "high" game. We
also know that a sudden revulsion of "feeling" may occur in regard to
hitherto approved smells and flavours, so that headache, vomiting,
and even fainting may be produced by a smell or flavour which was
previously found a favourite beyond all others.
So it is with this great and mysterious thing—the blood. The sight of
it nearly always produces emotion and excitement, but if these
emotions are not accompanied by an unreasoning joy and delight,
they may result in equally unreasoning and uncontrollable disgust,
horror, and often a sudden and unaccountable collapse. Some time
ago in a popular lecture on the colouring matter of the blood I had
no sooner said the word "blood" than a gentleman in the front row
fainted and had to be carried out. Men are more susceptible to this
curious effect of the sight or thought of blood than women. Often
they do not know that they are so, and are as astonished and
perplexed by the sudden fainting as are onlookers and as are, for the
matter of that, physiologists and psychologists. It is a common
experience of medical men who vaccinate adults, when there is a
scare about smallpox, that at the sight of a tiny drop of blood caused
by scratching the arm with a lancet, men frequently faint, whilst
women rarely do so. Great, burly, red-coated soldiers, and also
athletic schoolboys, have been especially noted as fainting when
vaccinated. Maid-servants rarely faint under this absurdly trivial
ordeal, whilst the butler and the valet much more frequently do so.
Here is, indeed, a curious and unexpected difference between men
and women which I commend to the consideration of those who are

discussing the desirability of admitting women to the parliamentary
franchise. It is an unexplained instance of the influence of the mind
on the body, and until it is better understood, one must not conclude
that the difference is a proof of superior fitness for participation in
political affairs.
I trust that none of my readers may suddenly faint on reading this
page, but should be glad to hear of any experience of the kind. It is
readily understood when the profound impression produced by the
colour of man's blood is considered, that the great inquirer Aristotle
and a good many uninquiring people of the present day should
overlook the fact that the lower animals have blood. The insects,
crustaceans, mussels, clams, snails, and cuttle-fish, and many worms
have true blood and a heart and blood-vessels, but in most of them
the blood is colourless, or of a very pale blue tint. Hence, like the
lymph described in the preceding chapter, it escapes attention, and
Aristotle called them all "blood-less animals." The fact is, however,
that not only do they possess colourless or pale blue blood, but that
the bristle-footed worms (earth-worms and river-worms and marine
Annelids) and even the leeches possess bright red blood contained in
a complete branching network of blood-vessels, whilst here and there
among the otherwise colourless-blooded molluscs and crustaceans
and insects we find isolated instances of the possession of red blood.
Thus the flat-coiled pond-snail, Planorbis, has bright red blood, so
have one or two bivalve clams, so, too, has an insect larva (known to
boys as a blood-worm) that of the midge (Chironomus), so, too, have
some small fresh-water shrimps, and also a single species of star-fish
and one kind of sea cucumber!
I explained in the previous chapter that the blood of the vertebrates
may well be called hæmolymph, since in them the colourless, slightly
opalescent fluid called "lymph" is continually poured through certain
openings into the red blood, and mixed with it. In the earth-worm
and other lower animals the red-coloured blood, or its equivalent—
the "hæma," as distinguished from the "lymph"—is held in a closed
system of vessels, and does not receive any of the lymph. When
examined with the microscope, the blood, or hæmolymph, of man is

found to consist of an albuminous, slightly sticky liquid, in which float
an immense number of "corpuscles"—minute bodies, some rounded,
some irregular, some bun-like, and some spherical. The most
abundant of these are the "red corpuscles," of the shape of buns,
slightly depressed on each surface. Three thousand two hundred of
them could be placed lying flat side by side along the space of a
measured inch. They appear pale greenish-yellow in colour under the
microscope, but in quantity, lying one over the other, they allow only
red and some blue light to pass through them, and so have a fine
red colour. They consist of a small quantity of albuminous matter and
water, and of a large proportion of a red-coloured, crystallizable,
chemical substance dissolved in them, called hæmoglobin, or blood-
red. It is this hæmoglobin which performs one of the most important
duties of the blood, since it combines with the oxygen of the inspired
air when the corpuscles are flowing through the fine vessels of the
lungs, and carries it to the tissues in every part of the body, which
greedily take the oxygen from the red corpuscles.
The red corpuscles of man's blood and that of the hairy suckling
animals—the mammals—are not nucleated cells, but are regularly
formed and renewed as they daily wear out, as fragments of larger
mother-cells, which break up into these corpuscles, in the marrow of
the bones, and some other situations where they are found. In all
other vertebrates the red blood corpuscles have a kernel, or dense
nucleus, and are complete "cells," usually oval, smooth and flattened
in shape—a curious difference not easily accounted for. There are in
a pint of the blood of an average man about two billions of these red
corpuscles, and the amount of blood in the body is about one-
twentieth of the total weight of the body—say, in a man weighing
160 lb., about 8 lb. or pints of blood. The clear, colourless lymph
existing in all the lymph spaces of the body is probably about twelve
pints. In many animals the red corpuscles are much less numerous
than in man; for instance, a drop of human blood contains a
thousand times as many red corpuscles as does an equal-sized drop
of frog's blood. It is true that the frog's red corpuscles are a good
deal bigger than those of man, but the result is that the human

blood is some hundreds of times richer in hæmoglobin than the
frog's, and has a proportionately greater power of carrying oxygen
from the lungs to the tissues, and keeping up the slow, burning
process, or oxidation, upon which the activity of the body, as well as
its warmth, depend. The body depends upon its supply of oxygen as
a steam-engine depends upon the oxygen of the air, which keeps its
coal-fire burning.
The pace of the blood-stream which is produced by the force-pump
action of the contractions or beats of the heart is tremendous. It
courses along at the rate of ten inches in a second in the big arteries
and veins, and it has been carefully ascertained by experiment that a
heartful of blood (which in a big man is about half a pint for each
half or "side" of the heart)—or let us speak of a single corpuscle—is
driven out of the heart through the great artery or aorta to the most
remote parts of the body, and is back again at the heart, after
running through endless branches of arteries, smallest capillaries,
and thence into fine veins, bigger veins, and the biggest vein, in
twenty to thirty seconds, the time occupied by twenty-five to thirty
heart-beats. The walls of the arteries are firm, though elastic, and it
is no wonder, with this tremendous pressure and pace on the liquid
within, that when an artery is cut the blood spurts out to a distance
of several feet.
The colourless liquid of the blood contains, besides the red
corpuscles floating in it, others brought to it in the lymph and derived
from various connective-tissue spaces and special nodules or
"glands." They are outnumbered by the red corpuscles in the
proportion of five hundred to one. They are colourless, and bigger
than the red corpuscles. Most of them continually change their
shape, and consist of active, moving protoplasm. These are the
"phagocytes," which, besides acting chemically upon the constituents
of the blood-liquid, take into their substance (as does the amœba or
proteus-animalcule) and digest and destroy all foreign or dead
particles, and the bacteria which may find their way into it. They
pass out, forcing their way through the excessively thin walls of the
finest capillaries—blood-vessels not wide enough to admit two of

them side by side—and enter, to the number of thousands, the
tissues which have been wounded or poisoned by bacteria, to carry
on their all-important protective "scavenger" or "police-constable"
work.
Inflammation is the slowing of the blood-stream by dilatation of the
vessels at an injured spot, in order to allow the phagocytes to make
their way out of the blood-stream into the tissues, and so get to
close quarters with the enemy. There are other excessively minute
dustlike particles called "platelets," which are sometimes very
abundant in the liquid of the blood. Besides the duties of oxygen-
carrying and scavengering the blood has other great and vitally
important business. It has to distribute nutriment, to pick up waste
oxidized chemical products and get rid of them, and to distribute and
equalize the heat which it carries around the body like a perfect hot-
water warming installation.

M
C H A P T E R X X X V
FISH AND FAST DAYS
OST people are familiar with the fact that fasting in the Christian
Church has from early times been of two degrees—one in which
no flesh of beast or bird or fish, not even eggs, not even milk, may
be consumed, and a less severe degree in which the eating of fish is
allowed. It is not at first sight clear why the eating of fish—and even
of birds such as the Barnacle goose and the Sooty duck, supposed to
be produced from fish—has been permitted by the Christian Church,
since the flesh of fish is highly nourishing and an excellent substitute
for the meat of beasts and birds, and a man fed upon it is far from
suffering the effects of true "fasting." Many races and out-of-the-way
people live entirely upon vegetables and a little fish, and do very
well on that diet.
It has been proved by some learned inquirers that there was a
special significance about the permission by the early Christians of a
fish diet during so-called "fasting." Real and complete fasting,
abstention from all food, for a day or even a week, was and still is
practised by some Eastern peoples as a religious exercise. It is a
matter of fact that an ecstatic condition of mind is favoured by
complete fasting, and conditions favourable to illusions of various
kinds are so produced. But the later Christians seem to have
regarded the partial fasting during Lent and on certain days of the
week as a sort of protest against gluttony and excess, and there is
no objection to it among Protestant Churches excepting that it must
not be claimed as a merit or the equivalent of "good works."
That fish were, even in the most ancient times, allowed to be eaten
on fast days is curious. It is suggested by some students of this

subject that the custom came from Syria, and had to do with certain
pagan ceremonials and the worship of the fish-god Dagon. It is
supposed that some of these early Christians managed, under the
guise of a fast of the Church, to maintain an ancient pagan custom
and religious rite connected with the Syrian fish-god. The Jews also
eat fish on Friday evening—though in both cases the origin of the
"fish-eating" was lost sight of in the early centuries of the Christian
era. On the other hand, it appears that the worshippers of the fish-
god (at any rate, at a remote period) were forbidden to eat fish as
being sacred; hence it seems possible that the permission of a fish
diet to Christians during days of fasting was given as a means of
encouraging those who retained pagan superstitions to ignore and
forget them. The supposition that the eating of fish on certain days
is a survival of a ceremonial observance connected with fish-worship
is the more probable explanation of the custom.
The worship of fish or of a fish-god is one of the outcomes of the old
Nature-worship—the cult of Cybele and Rhea, who in the Greek
Islands became the great mother Aphrodite born of the sea, and in
Syria Ashtaroth (Astarte). She appears also as Atargatis, the Syrian
fish-goddess born from a fish's egg, and worshipped at Hierapolis;
her worshippers must not eat fish. Dagon, the fish-god of the
Philistines, belongs to the same group of mythologic inventions. He
was half-fish and half-human, like a merman, and is, in spite of this
strange personality identified with the Greek Adonis! The cult of the
fish-god was widely spread in ancient Greece, even in Byzantine
times, and many Christian converts were devotees of the fish
worship. I have on my table a photograph of a life-sized fish
modelled in gold which was dug up in 1883 from the shores of a lake
near the coasts of the Black Sea. It was at one time supposed to be
of mediaeval workmanship, but is now shown to be of ancient Greek
workmanship (450 B.C.), and was probably a votive offering
connected with the worship of the fish-god.
Then, again, in the ancient Indian story of the Deluge we read of
Manu (who is the Noah of that variety of the ancient legend) finding
a remarkable young fish in a stream where he is bathing. The young

fish (which is really the god Vishnu in disguise) can talk, and
requests Manu to take care of it, and promises him if he does so to
reveal to him when the deluge is coming on. Manu takes the fish
home and rears it. He then is told by the fish to prepare an ark, and
place on board useful animals and seeds and then to embark on it
with his family. The ark floats away in the flood, guided by the
sagacious fish, which seizes a rope and, swimming in front of the
ark, tows it to a mountain in Armenia (Ararat!), where the vessel
rests whilst the flood goes down.
There was evidently a special cult of the fish in Syria and the East,
which spread to Greece and Rome in very early pre-Christian times,
and survives in some of the stories in the "Arabian Nights" about
human beings being turned into fish. It is not surprising that this cult
should have lodged itself by obscure means in the practices of the
early Church.
The most remarkable outcome of this is the recognition of the fish
as the symbol of Christ. The letters of the Greek name for fish
ΙΧΘΥΣ (ichthus) can be interpreted as an acrostic, the component
letters of the word taken in order being the first letters of the words
Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σώτηρ (Jesous Christos Theou Uios
Soter), which are in English "Jesus Christ Son of God, Saviour." This
coincidence enabled the pagan worshippers of the fish-god to make
their symbol or "totem" (using that word in a broad sense) the
symbol of the Christian religion. Whether the use of the fish and of
the letters of the Greek name for it was or was not independently
started by the early Christians, its employment must have conciliated
the fish-worshipping pagans, and rendered it easy to bring them into
the fellowship of the Christian Church. Hence we see that a fish has
more to do with Christianity than appears at first sight. It is quite
possible that whilst the cult of the fish-god or fish-goddess may have
involved at one period of its growth an abstention from the eating of
fish or of particular species of fish as being sacred, yet the very
ancient belief in "contagious magic" and the acquirement of the
qualities of a man or an animal by eating his flesh, may have in the
end prevailed and led to the eating of fish, the sacred symbol, on

the fast days prescribed by the Church, when a special significance
would be attached to such food as was sanctioned.
The evidence of the connexion of the early Christian Church with fish
worship becomes convincing when once the importance of the great
secret cult of the "Orpheists" and its connexion both with early
Christianity and with fish worship is recognized.
It has long been known that there is a special association of the very
ancient and primitive Greek cult of Orpheus, with the much later cult
of Christianity. Many of the most important doctrines and practices
of the widely spread secret society of the Orpheists closely resemble
those of Christianity. Carvings and medals of Orpheus bringing all
animals to his feet by his music were, by the earliest Christians,
adopted as equally well representing Christ the Good Shepherd. But
recent discoveries carry the matter much further. Orpheus is one of
the names of a mythical hunter and fisherman of prehistoric times,
who taught his people music, and by his magic helped them to
successful catches of fish, and to the "netting" of beasts, as well as
of fish. His followers adopted the fish as their "totem," or sacred
animal, and they represented Orpheus (whether known by that or
other names) as the warden of the fishes, a fish-god, and himself a
fish—"the great fish"—and a "fisher of men." Fishes were kept in his
temples and eaten solemnly (at first in the raw condition), in order
to transmit to his worshippers his powers.
In Greece, where the cult of Orpheus was introduced by way of
Thrace, he became mixed with, or made a substitute for, Dionysus
(the wine-god), and the same legends were told about the one as
the other. He and his followers are pictured as wearing a fox's skin
(supposed by some to have been originally the skin of a sea-fox or
shark), and the fable of the fox and the grapes, and the very ancient
story of the fox fishing with his tail, belong to the Orpheus legends.
Very ancient peoples, earlier than the Greeks of classical times,
habitually adopted some animal as their totem and name-god—as do
many savage races to-day. Thus, the Myrmidones of Thessaly had
the ant (myrmes) as their totem, the Arcadians the bear (arctos),

the Pelasgi, who preceded the other tribes in Greece—the stork
(pelargos). It is now suggested that the Hellenes, who succeeded
the Pelasgi, and gave their name to Greece (Hellas) and to all its
people, were so called from their having the fish (ellos, the mute or
silent one, a common term applied to fish) as their "totem," and that
they were, in fact, from the first worshippers of the fish-god
Orpheus, Di-orphos, Dagon or Adonis! Other "cults" grew up among
them. The whole Olympian company of gods and goddesses were
fitted out by poets and priests with man-like forms, and with the
speech, habits, and passions of humanity. But the old deep-rooted
worship of the primeval fisherman who was typified by and identified
with "the great fish"—much elaborated by its hymns and mystic
ritual, its lore, and its legend—flourished and developed wonderfully
in secret, wherever Greeks were found. Its priests were missionaries
like the mendicant friars of later days, and it was—in pre-Christian
times—the most popular cult not only in Greece and Asia Minor, but
also in Southern Italy. Hence it is easy to understand that
Christianity, by adopting the fish—the ΙΧΘΥΣ—as its emblem,
readily received sympathy and converts from the Orpheists, and that
the solemn rite of eating the fish on appointed days was established.
Hence it seems to have come about that the early Christian Church
permitted the eating of fish on most (but not on all) fast days.
Some of my readers have seen the Greek word for "a fish" stamped
upon Prayer Books, or possibly a fish embroidered on the hangings
of the church where they go to celebrate the birth and the passion
of Christ, as their ancestors have done for a thousand years. And
now they will understand the origin of the association of the sacred
fish with Christian ornament, derived from a lingering pagan
reverence for the mysterious silvery inhabitants of deep pools, great
rivers, and the sea. It is to such survivals of the now dim rituals and
celebrations of ancient days that we owe the joyful holly and the
mystic mistletoe, still happily preserved in our festivities at Christmas
and New Year.
The use of fish as a regular article of diet is very widely spread.
Fresh fish is considered by medical men to be more easily digested

than the flesh of beasts or birds, and a healthy substitute for the
latter. Almost everywhere where fish are eaten, the practice of
drying, and often of salting, fish, so as to store them for
consumption after an abundant "catch," has grown up, and with it a
great liking for the flavours produced by the special chemical
changes in the fish arising from salting and drying. Ordinary
putrefaction produces very powerful poisons in the flesh of fish.
They are known as "ptomaines," and are produced in the flesh of
fish more readily that in that of other animals. But the process of
drying in the sun or of salting and smoking the fish averts the
formation of these poisons. It seems, however, that a diet of dried
fish is responsible for a certain kind of poisoning in man, which
renders him liable to the attack of the terrible bacillus of leprosy. The
leprosy bacillus must get into the body by an abrasion or crack in the
skin, through contact with a person already infected. It is known
that the lack of fresh vegetable and animal food produces the
ulcerated unhealthy condition called "scurvy," and a "scorbutic" state
of the body seems to be favourable to the establishment in it of the
leprosy bacillus. The substitution of fresh meat and vegetables as a
diet in place of dried fish and salted meat has apparently been one
of the chief causes of the disappearance not only of "scurvy" but of
leprosy from Europe. Leprosy is rapidly becoming extinct in Norway.
It still survives in a few localities, and is common in several
uncivilized communities in remote regions, such as parts of Africa,
India, China, and the Pacific Islands. In an earlier chapter, p. 292, I
have referred to the disease known as "scurvy," which has become
so uncommon now as to have escaped thorough investigation by
modern pathologists.
A few marine fish are known which are highly poisonous to any and
every man, even when cooked and eaten in a perfectly fresh
condition, and there are many individuals who suffer from the
"idiosyncrasy," as it is called, of liability to be dangerously poisoned
not only by the peculiar and rare fish which are poisonous to every
one, but by any and every fish they may eat, or by two or three
common kinds only. Thus, some persons are poisoned if they eat

lobster or crab, or oysters or mussels, but can tolerate ordinary fish.
Others are poisoned, without fail, by mackerel and by grey mullet,
but not by sole or salmon. The symptoms resemble those produced
in ordinary persons by the "ptomaines" of putrid fish, and seem to
be due to the presence even in fresh fish of a kind of ptomaine
which some persons cannot destroy by digestion, whilst most
persons can do so. It is literally true that "What is one man's meat is
another man's poison."
The use as a "relish" of the little fish, the anchovy—allied to the
sprat and the herring—preserved in salt liquor in a partially
decomposed state, but not undergoing the ordinary chemical change
excited by the bacteria of putrescence, is remarkable and very
widely spread. Anchovy sauce is made by mashing up such
chemically decomposed anchovies, and is one of the very greatest
and most approved of all sauces. The anchovy is a Mediterranean
fish; it is taken in small numbers in sprat-nets in the English Channel
and in the Dutch Zuyder Zee. So-called "Norwegian anchovies" are
not anchovies, but are small sprats. When taken fresh and cooked
and eaten, the anchovy has a very bitter, unpleasant flavour, which
can be washed out of it by splitting the fresh fish and letting it lie in
salt and water. It was this practice of washing out the bitterness
which led the Mediterranean fisher-folk to discover that if left for
some time in moderately strong brine the anchovy develops a
wonderfully appetizing flavour, and becomes dark red in colour,
whilst the liquid also becomes red. I believe that, although it would
be easy to do so, it has not been ascertained whether the red colour
is due to a direct action of the salt upon the blood-pigment of the
fish—as is the red colour of salt beef—or whether it is due to a
special red-colour-making bacterium, as is the case with salted dried
cod, which is sometimes rendered unsaleable by this red growth.
However that may be, the red colour of the preserved anchovy is
well known, and is produced by dealers by means of artificial
pigments, if not already naturally present in the salted fish as they
come to market. No one would guess on tasting a really fresh bitter

anchovy that it could develop the fine flavour which it does when
soaked in brine to get rid of its bitterness.
Another little fish, the Bummaloh, or "Bombay duck" (Harpodon), is
taken in large quantities off the West Coast of India, and is dried
and used for the peculiar flavour thus developed, which is quite
different from that of the anchovy. It is a deep-water fish, and is
phosphorescent. The liking for the flavours developed in these fishes
by various bacteria when specially treated, is similar to that which
necessity and custom has developed in our attitude to cheese. Fresh
cheese is difficult to obtain. Habit has ended in our preferring stale,
decomposed cheese, which has developed a whole series of flavours
by the action on it of special bacteria and moulds. The Roman
soldiers of the first century used a small salted fish (probably
enough the anchovy) to eat with their rations of bread, and such fish
were usually sold with bread. Probably the small "fishes" which,
together with a dozen loaves of bread, are stated to have been used
in the miraculous feeding of the multitude by Christ, were salted
anchovies.
Dealers in Norwegian preserved fish not only falsely call small sprats
by the name "Anchovy" in order to sell them, but they have recently
prepared sprats in the manner invented by French fish-curers for the
preparation of the young Pilchard. The French name for young
Pilchard is "Sardines," and their Italian name even in Sir Thomas
Browne's time (1646) was "Sardinos." The natural fine quality of the
sardine and the skilful "tinning" and flavouring of it by the French
"curers" of Concarneau in Brittany, have made it celebrated
throughout the world as a delicacy. The dealers in Norway sprats—
for the purpose of passing off on the public a cheap, inferior kind of
fish as something much better—have recently stolen the French
curers' name of "Sardine," and coolly call their sprats "Sardines." The
sprats thus cured are soft and inferior in quality to the true sardines,
which are a less abundant and therefore more costly species of fish.
The fraudulent use in this way of the name "Sardine" has been
condemned by the law courts in London, but the punishment for

such fraud is so small and the profit to the fraudulent dealers is so
great that our French friends have to submit to the iniquity.

I
C H A P T E R X X X V I
SCIENCE AND THE UNKNOWN
T is a remarkable fact that although the first efforts of the
founders of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Natural
Knowledge, two hundred and fifty years ago, in this country, and of
other such associations on the Continent, had the immediate effect
of destroying a large amount of that fantastic superstition and
credulity which had until then prevailed in all classes of society, and
although that period marks the transition from the astounding and
terrible nightmares of the Middle Ages to a happier condition when
witchcraft, sorcery, and baseless imaginings concerning natural
things gave place to knowledge founded on careful observation and
experiment—yet the ugly baleful relic of savagery died hard, even in
the most civilized communities.
In spite of all the light that has been shed upon obscure processes,
and all the triumphs of the knowledge of "the order of Nature," there
remains to this day in this country a surprising amount of ignorance,
accompanied by blind unreasoning devotion to traditional beliefs in
magic, and a love of the preposterous fancies of a barbarous past,
simply because they are preposterous! "There is something in it," is
a favourite phrase, and the words put by Shakespear into the mouth
of the demented Hamlet, who thinks he has seen and conversed
with a ghost, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamed of in your philosophy," are gravely quoted as
though they were applicable to the Horatios of to-day. We have no
reason to suppose that there are more things in heaven and earth
than are dreamed of in our philosophy. Those who inappropriately
quote this saying as though it were proverbial wisdom are usually

persons of very small knowledge, and mistake their own limitations
for those of mankind in general.
The real and effective answer to all such head-shakings and airs of
mystery is to demand that the reputed marvel shall be brought
before us for examination. The method of the disciples of the
founders of the Royal Society is not to deny or to assert possibilities.
They hold it to be futile to discuss why such and such a thing should
not exist, and still worse to conclude that it does exist, or to hold its
existence to be probable, because you cannot say why it should not
exist. The real question is, "Does it exist? Is it so?" And the only way
of dealing with that question is to have the marvel brought before
you and subjected to examination and test. "Nullius in verba!" The
mere statement of dozens of witnesses merely gives you as a thing
to explain or account for, not the marvel reported, but the fact that
certain persons say or are reported to say that it does. What you
have to examine, in the absence of the marvel itself, is, "How is it
that these people make this statement?" You must inquire into the
capacities and opportunities of the witnesses. There are several
possible and probable answers to that inquiry. For instance, it may
be that the witnesses are merely inaccurate, or are self-deceived, or
deceived by the trickery or credulity of others, or are insane, or are
deliberately stating what is false. Another and often the least
probable answer is that the witnesses or reporters state what they
do because it is the simple truth. The statements made have to be
accounted for by one or other of these hypotheses or suggestions,
and each suggestion as to the origin of the statements must be
tested by reference to independent facts in order to dismiss or to
confirm it.
The whole of what is called "modern occultism," including
spiritualism, second-sight, thought transference (so-called
telepathy), crystal-gazing, astrology, and such mysteries, can only be
treated reasonably in the way I have mentioned. We ask for a
demonstration of the occurrence of the mysterious communications
or prophecies, or "raps" or "levitations," or whatever it may be.
Lovers of science have never been unwilling to investigate such

marvels if fairly and squarely brought before them. In the very few
cases which have been submitted in this way to scientific
examination, the marvel has been shown to be either childish fraud
or a mere conjurer's trick, or else the facts adduced in evidence have
proved to be entirely insufficient to support the conclusion that there
is anything unusual at work, or beyond the experience of scientific
investigators.
It is unfortunately true that most persons are quite unprepared to
admit the deficiencies of their own powers of observation and of
memory, and are also unaware of their own ignorance of perfectly
natural occurrences which continually lead to self-deception and
illusion. Moreover, the capacity for logical inference and argument is
not common. The whole past and present history of what is called
"the occult" is enveloped in an atmosphere of self-deception and of
readiness to be deceived by others to which misplaced confidence in
their own cleverness and power of detecting trickery renders many—
one may almost say most—people victims. The physician who has
given his life to the study of mental aberration and diseases of the
mind is the only really qualified investigator of these "marvels," and
no one who has closely studied what is known in the domain of
mental physiology and pathology has any difficulty in understanding,
and bringing into relation with large classes of established facts as to
illusions and mental aberration, the "beliefs" in magic and second-
sight which are here and there found flourishing at the present day,
as well as the, at first sight startling, evidence of highly
accomplished men who have suffered from such delusions.
Leaving aside all these more extreme cases of what we may call
"challenges" to science, let me cite one or two of the more ordinary
classes of cases in which science is either attacked or treated with
disdain by modern wonder-mongers. It was declared by a writer in
the eighteenth century that, after all, human knowledge is a very
small thing, since we cannot even tell on one day what the weather
is going to be on the next; still less can we control it. That remains
perfectly true to-day, although by the hourly observation and record
of the movements of "areas of depression" in the atmosphere and

the telegraphic communication of these records from all parts of the
Atlantic region of the northern hemisphere to central stations, a very
important degree of accuracy in foretelling gales, and even minor
changes of weather, has been reached. Side by side with this
organized study of the movements of "weather" we still have the so-
called "almanacs," in which, as in the days of old, certain wizards
claim to foretell the weather of a year, as well as other events. It is
less surprising that these wizards should find believers when one
discovers that there are actually well-to-do, "half-educated" people
in England who believe at this day that the delightful clever
exhibitors of mechanical tricks and sleight-of-hand are really (as they
usually are called) "conjurers"—that is to say, that they conjure
spirits and use the "black art." Not long ago, having published my
experience of the trickery of "dowsers," and the illusion known as
the "divining-rod," I received a letter in which my correspondent
related that, being in the coffee-room of an hotel in a country town,
he was asked by a man who was there to stretch out his hand. He
did so, and the man placed four coppers in a pile upon it. The man
then took up an empty matchbox which happened to be on the
table, and placed it over the coppers as they lay on my
correspondent's hand. After an interval of three or four seconds the
man lifted the matchbox, and the coppers were gone! This, which I
need hardly say is one of the most common "conjuring tricks"
familiar to every schoolboy, was, according to my correspondent,
proof to him that the man possessed powers "not dreamed of in
your philosophy," and that such powers and those of discovery by
use of the divining-rod and similar occult arts are possessed by
many gifted beings!
It is to be hoped that such credulity is not very common—it is
difficult to form an estimate as to its prevalence, for it breaks out in
different directions in different individuals. The more impudent quack
remedies for various diseases have had believers amongst all classes
of society—and occasionally some enthusiast bursts out with
indignation in a letter to the papers, complaining that men of science
or the medical profession neglect their duty to the public and refuse

to examine the wonderful cure. In all these cases the cure is either a
drug which is perfectly well known and practically worthless for the
treatment of the disease for which it is recommended, or—as in the
case of the celebrated "blue electricity" and "red electricity"
(nonsensical names in themselves) sold by an Italian swindler as a
cure for cancer and patronized by aristocratic ladies and the late Mr.
Stead—is found to be absolutely non-existent. In this last case the
liquid sold in little bottles at a high price was nothing but plain
water! A more respectable case was the advocacy a few weeks ago
by a correspondent in a morning paper of a common African plant (a
kind of basil) as a sure destructive or warder-off of mosquitoes when
grown near human habitations, and therefore a protective against
malaria. Nothing could have been more emphatic than the
declaration of the value of this plant by its advocate. But a few days
afterwards a letter appeared from a scientific man, giving an account
of careful and varied experiments, already made and published,
which show that this basil, although containing in its leaves
"thymol," as do some other aromatic herbs, yet neither when grown
in quantity nor when crushed and spread out in a room has any
effect whatever in checking the access of mosquitoes and other flies!
In this case, the reputed medical marvel was to hand: it was dealt
with, tested, and, as they say in the old register of the Royal Society,
"was found faulty."

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