Making Moves at Amon Carter

When Schwartz/Silver was engaged to do a design a renovation of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s galleries, one of the challenges we were tasked with solving was how to provide for flexibility in the galleries. As the museum rotates through different exhibitions, they often would need to take down and build new walls to curate the layout for best displaying the works of art. This process would traditionally be time consuming, labor-intensive, and produce excess demolition and construction waste. As a solution, we worked with the museum staff to develop a wall system that is custom, modular, and mobile.

Our team needed to develop the system with a design that responded to many of the client’s concerns:

- Is the wall strong enough to hold heavy art?

- Will it tip over if someone leans against it (which we hope no one ever does!)?

- How do we take apart a long wall and repurpose it for smaller sections?

- How do we reconnect them and hide the seams?

And the biggest question:

- How do we move them from one place to another?

Photo by Amon Carter Museum of American Art

You can read more about the movable gallery walls in the Amon Carter’s recent blog post “Moving walls” or watch the video below to see a time lapse of the system in action.