Post #207869 by Johnny Dollar on Mon, Jan 16, 2006 5:42 AM

consider it 'progress' or whatever, but if that is all that is left of the pacific cultures exhibit at natural history, that is kind of sad.

the backstory is that the pacific cultures exhibit at the national museum of natural history in d.c. had been there as long as i could remember, and judging from the vintage of the finishes and exhibition style had probably been installed in the mid 1960's if not earlier.

when i was working at my previous job, one of our clients was the smithsonian institution. as an institution they have scores of buildings and facilities that they must constantly maintain, and within the past decade, add a "shopping opportunity" to at every turn :)

i was excited when i found out that the pacific cultures hall was going to be one of my projects. as i read the scope of work i found that this hall was the remaining space in the natural history building that still had the asbestos-based 'popcorn ceiling' that was a popular midcentury finish. of course, we now know that asbestos is not as minty fresh as we might once have thought.

to that end, any work in the ceiling nowadays required extreme measures to prevent any asbestos from being disturbed and being released into the air, so that a workman won't breathe it and turn into a radioactive slime monster because of the space spores contained within the minerals.

the project required additional updated lighting in the ceilings, so we designed an extensive network of plastic partions and a filtration system, complete with specifications written by an industrial hygiene engineer. we submitted the documents to the smithsonian and never heard anything about it.

sometime in march 2005, i was in the natural history museum and noticed that someone had removed the lava rock from the base of the moai. i felt a disturbance in the mana... as if thousands of slit drums were drumming out and then suddenly silenced. i thought... 'what if they decided that the cost of replacing the light fixtures was too high, and they're going to gut out the entire hall and exhibit?' so a couple days later, since i had my contractor's pass which allowed me in before the public, i went in and tried to document the exhibit as well as i could. sadly in the dimly-lit hall, attempts to document the items in the glass cases were mostly unsuccessful. but i did my best to capture the images for posterity.

about that time i started urging people to go see the exhibit before it was too late. i am glad pablus and others did get to see it. i never returned to find out what had happened, but since talking with tikifish and now reading this post, it seems that the smithsonian did follow through with their more extreme measures.

all of the pictures i took are at the FOM website galleries, but i suspect they might be not totally accessible to the public. a selection of the photos are at 'locating tiki' here. if the ohana wish it, i could post the approximately 40 photos to this thread.

[ Edited by: Johnny Dollar 2006-01-16 05:57 ]