Show the world,
not just the car.

The executive director of LeMay: America's Car Museum came to Arscentia in 2011 with a clear constraint and no solution. The museum was nearing completion on a 165,000-square-foot facility in Tacoma, and they knew exactly what they did not want: glass cases, velvet ropes, static signage. They wanted people inside the experience, not observing from a distance. What that actually looked like, they had no idea.

Instead of arranging cars by era and labeling them, my answer was to build the world each car came from. Put the vehicles in their natural environment and let the story tell itself.

The concept was not one car, one environment. It was thematic worlds designed to hold entire collections. "Swinging London" might feature a Mini, an MG, and a Triumph together, unified by the culture they came from. "Route 66" could hold a dozen American cars from that era in a single cohesive environment. The system also worked the other way: one theme could trace a single marque across decades, showing the evolution of the Mustang or the history of the Porsche. The theme does the curatorial work. The cars populate it.

To prove the concept, we built a series of pitch environments in-house at Arscentia. Period graphics, physical props, a complete mod-era vignette. The museum director walked through them and said yes on the spot.

The bigger idea was the infrastructure underneath the concept. Because the collection rotates regularly, I designed the environments to be modular. Graphics, props, and set dressing were built to swap out without touching the architecture. One floor, one world. Swinging London one season, Route 66 the next. The system was not designed around a single installation. It was designed to run indefinitely.

I art directed fabrication throughout, including all large-format printing and physical buildout, produced in-house at Arscentia.