The Cape Cod Museum of Art, located in the Old Kings Highway Historic District in Dennis, required more gallery and administrative space and a new image consistent with its growing civic and cultural importance as a regional arts institution. Founded in 1980, the museum houses permanent collections and traveling exhibits of work by regional artists past and present, yet its physical plant had grown increasingly inadequate to house and display its growing collection.
Polhemus Savery DaSilva designed and built the extensive renovations and additions to the original museum with the goal of transforming a random assemblage of utilitarian buildings into a functional, physical and aesthetic whole. The original museum buildings were donated by a Harwichport art collector and relocated to a site within the campus that includes the Cape Playhouse, Cape Cinema and Cape Playhouse Restaurant.
A new arcade — created to span and unify the building’s front façade — serves to organize entry functions including entry doors, handicapped ramp, display area, and lighting. It also provides a covered exterior space for museum functions. Major elements of the new building were oriented to welcome rather than exclude the visitor, and designed to elevate the building’s physical and cultural stature within its immediate and regional contexts.
Views across the new sculpture garden encompass the new Hart—Signore Sculpture Gallery, a space created by enclosing an existing porch with a glass curtain wall. This gallery effects a transition between the more formal spaces of the museum’s interior, and the casual feel of the outdoor garden.
Inspiration for the project — drawn from Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Arts and Crafts and other eclectic building styles of the district — was reinterpreted and expressed in contemporary terms. The most interesting buildings in the district are not pure examples of these styles but are hybrids. We strove to create such a hybrid; to use historicist elements in a way that is relevant to this museum in this location today.
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