Denver Snow Rec Museum

The Denver Snow Rec Museum is a museum that is dedicated to memorializing the history of winter recreation, and is located in the Lodo district of Downtown Denver.

The design goals for the museum are:

To provide a place to learn about winter sports.
To provide a place to physically try the winter recreation sports people just learned about.
And to refer people to winter recreation opportunities throughout Denver and Colorado by connecting to the local and statewide open space network visually, physically, and conceptually.

As I studied the history of winter sports, it became clear that the best way to understand each sport was to understand the timeline of it’s development.

This led to a museum design with a nodal parti. The main circulation is handled through a central “timeline gallery” with each decade clearly marked as patrons progress through the exhibit. As new snow sports entered the scene, a branch gallery offers patrons the opportunity to temporarily depart from the timeline gallery to explore the branch sport, and then return to the timeline gallery to continue.

Towards the end of the exhibit experience, visitors come to The Overlook. Inside The Overlook is a glass exterior window that looks out to the southwest, and etched into the window glass (as if Augmented Reality) are callouts for famous winter recreation destinations within Denver and Colorado, along with more information about them.

The museum experience terminates at a green roof where patrons (and the general public) can get a fantastic view of the Front Range, and (if so inclined) can grab rental equipment and then try out a winter sport that they had just learned about on the built-in sledding hill.

After the final presentations, our instructor required all students to produce a book which showcased all of our project work from start to finish. A PDF of that book is available for download here.

My Role: Design and Presentation

Task		Personal focus area
Pre-Design
	Research: project requirements, constraints	x
Schematic Design
	Site Design	x
	Massing Design	x
	Interior Space Layout	x
Design Development
	DD Level Design Documents	x
Final Presentation
	Renderings	x
	Final Presentation Materials	x