Hitchcock Center to be featured in Wild Designs Exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum

The Hitchcock Center has been invited to be part of the Peabody Essex Museum’s (PEM) exciting new Wild Designs exhibit that will profile the works of architects, artists, institutions and other creatives who are looking to nature and living systems for new ideas and creative solutions to human problems.

Opening May 26, 2018, Wild Designs will feature 24 projects and prototypes conceived by innovators who look to nature and living systems for new ideas and creative solutions to human problems. The exhibition includes mixed media sculptures, artist installations and drawings, as well as design projects ranging from preliminary concepts to realized products and buildings, including the Hitchcock Center’s recently constructed environmental learning center designed to meet the highest standard of sustainable development in the built environment through the Living Building Challenge™.

Hitchcock Center’s Mini-Works model, built by designLAB Architects, on display at Peabody Essex Museum May 26 through August 4, 2019.

On exhibit will be a mini-works scale model of the Hitchcock Center’s living building now under commission with designLAB architects, the architects that designed the Center’s actual building. The model will serve as an interactive display with buttons lighting up several of its ecologically designed building features to illustrate its rainwater catchment system, rooftop solar array, locally sourced materials, daylighting strategies, and more. A live link to the Hitchcock Center’s Living Building Dashboard will also supplement the interactivity of the display to show real-time energy and water use, as well as other sustainable performance indicators that make the Hitchcock Center’s building an innovative leader in the world of sustainable engineering, design and technology.

Hitchcock staff will be participating in the exhibition’s Opening Day on Saturday, May 26 with environmental educators offering a variety of fun activities as visitors explore natural history specimens, design a rainwater capture system, find patterns in nature, and more. Make sure to check out the interactive model of the Center while visiting the Wild Designs exhibition. Explore the building’s energy consumption in real time and navigate all of its nature-inspired features.

The Hitchcock Center is honored to collaborate with PEM’s Wild Designs exhibit and shares in their vision to create experiences that transform people’s lives by broadening their perspectives, attitudes, and knowledge of themselves and the wider world. The Wild Designs exhibit is just one more way the Hitchcock Center is broadening its reach and impact throughout New England as an environmental educator and innovator.

“We are so excited to work with the Hitchcock Center as one of only a handful of pioneering institutions who have looked to nature’s wisdom when designing and building their new environmental learning center. We’re surrounded by nearly four billion years of concept testing in nature,” says Jane Winchell, the Sarah Fraser Robbins Director of PEM’s Dotty Brown Art & Nature Center. “We have the opportunity to rethink our own challenges and strategies for new ideas all the time, which is similar to what’s happening in nature. New ideas percolate through evolution. Put that into a time capsule of millions of years and you end up with loads of different solutions. The Hitchcock Center is providing our region with new ways of thinking about and learning how our natural world can provide solutions to the problems of human sustainability.”

Wild Designs – On view May 26, 2018 through August 4, 2019
Peabody Essex Museum
East India Square
161 Essex Street
Salem, MA