Mystic Seaport’s new Thompson Exhibition Building, on the northern end of the 19-acre historical museum on the shores of the Mystic River, sits like a piece of 21st-century abstract sculpture in the midst of a 19th-century fishing village.
Chad Floyd, of Centerbrook Architects, who oversaw the design of the $11.5 million, 14,000-square-foot building, said the Thompson is not intended to evoke a historical maritime theme like the legendary seaport. Rather, the building calls to mind the sea itself.
“We have a building trying to speak of the man-made aspect of the sea, with ships that sailed on the sea, of the natural aspect of the sea itself, the movement of the water, the marine animals, the wind blowing over the crest of the waves,” said Floyd. “I have all of these metaphors. I mixed them up in a way that my fifth-grade English teacher would not have approved of.”
The building was constructed as a welcome center, a space for meetings, exhibitions and storage and a viewing spot for entertainment on the quad. The welcome center opened to the public in September. This weekend, a show of maritime artifacts opened as the inaugural exhibit in the building’s Collins Gallery.
The exhibit “SeaChange” paints a fascinating historical picture of seafaring. But no less fascinating is the structure in which it is housed.
Thompson Building
Floyd — whose past work includes Florence Griswold Museum’s Krieble Gallery, an expansion of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center and renovations to the Garde Arts Center — said creating a building that would blend in with the seaport’s historic theme was never an option. “Making something new that is trying to look old is frowned on in the preservation community. That’s not appropriate, just replicative,” he said. “It’s better to differentiate, to make clear what is old and what is new.”
Instead, he took inspiration from the historic site’s self-identification as “the museum of America and the sea.” “I wanted to bring forth this identity on a poetic, deeper level,” Floyd said.
The exterior of the building, in Western red cedar, is meant to evoke a surging wave, the crest pointed southward toward the quad. Floyd called it “a wave crashing, frozen in time in wood.” The curvilinear shape also could call to mind the shape of marine creatures.
Inside, exposed hardwood ceiling beams resemble the ribs in the hull of a ship.
Even smaller details, like features of the mahogany decking, have maritime inspirations. “Under the porch we have columns, struts, lined up supporting the roof porch, meant to suggest the masts and spars on wooden sailing vessels,” Floyd said. “The railing cable turnbuckles resemble the rigging of a sailing vessel.”
One element of the design is especially enigmatic, the seemingly random pattern of the windows on the facade facing Greenmanville Avenue. This feature harkens back to Floyd’s childhood, when he read about ocean liners such as the Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth or the SS United States.
“There were articles in magazines about the great ships. They’d show you the side view in a cutaway that allowed you to see inside the hull, the dining room, the boiler rooms. I was fascinated,” he said. “I was trying to create an intriguing window design that from the outside gives you a peek inside. It doesn’t lift the veil completely, but it asks you to peek in, to see what’s happening in the hull of a great ship.”
Floyd said the multiple references will be lost on many visitors but are there for the finding for those so inclined. “I’m trying to be suggestive. … I’m trying to invest it with lots and provide depth for people who really want to see,” he said. “The building can be enjoyed at a surface level as well.”
The building is named after Wade and Angela Thompson, who were the lead donors on the project.
‘SeaChange’
The seaport is dotted with six small galleries, but the Collins Gallery fills a need nonetheless. “We didn’t have a modern exhibition space, a larger space that was up to modern curatorial standards,” said seaport spokesman Dan McFadden. The Collins measures 5,000 square feet, with 26-feet-tall ceilings and lighting designed by George Sexton Associates, the firm that lights some of the world’s premier museums.
A state-of-the-art video setup greets visitors to the gallery, projecting images of crashing waves onto a tall screen shaped like a gaff-rigged sail, as well as onto the floor in front of it. The presentation is so real-looking it’s tempting to reach down to feel the water.
Sail-shaped partitions are dotted throughout the gallery as backdrops of the exhibition’s artifacts. “SeaChange” shows about a dozen choice pieces culled from the museum’s collection of about 1 million items. Exhibit designers McMillan Group, of Westport, assisted by Trivium Interactive of Boston, have forgone wall labels in favor of explanatory elements in video, audio and 3-D photogrammetry.
The first item is a weird hatrack, which a 19th-century sea captain who frequented the Arctic made from narwhal tusks and Hawaiian wood. Nearby, a collection of scrimshaw artworks surround a photo of a bar called Cobweb Palace, which operated in San Francisco from 1856 to 1897 and was frequented by sailors. The bartender collected scrimshaw. “Men who had no money would trade the scrimshaw for a drink,” said exhibits director Elysa Engelman. Six scrimshaws on exhibit can be seen in the Cobweb Palace photo.
Nineteenth-century household furnishings — a cradle made from a sea turtle shell, an ornate bed bought in China by a young man with wanderlust — sit near a collection of tiny carved wooden scale models of ship figureheads and a 1740s model of the HMS Burford. A 14-feet-tall painting of the ship the W.R. Grace, which sank off the cost of Delaware in 1889, dominates the room.
A poster about guano — the nutrient-rich fertilizer made from bird droppings found on islands, which was a lucrative cargo for ship captains — sits under an 1930s-vintage umiak, a walrus-hide boat made by the Inupiat people. Nearby is exhibited a set of 1780s navigational maps owned by Napoleon Bonaparte’s stepson. The oddest item is a collection of plans of World War I-era watercraft using “dazzle” camouflage, which was designed to disorient the viewer by presenting a misleading optical illusion.
Engelman said the exhibit’s title is meant to convey how seafaring has an altering effect on things: bird droppings turned into cash crop, tusks turned into artworks, walruses turned into boats, a sunken ship turned into an artwork.
“There are so many stories of things taken from the sea and turned into something else, as well as things taken by the sea and turned into something else,” she said.
MYSTIC SEAPORT is at 75 Greenmanville Ave. in Mystic. Pre-Christmas hours are Thursday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Closed Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. After Christmas, the seaport is open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is $26, $24 seniors, $17 ages 6 to 17, free to ages 5 and younger. mysticseaport.org.
