The Connections Museum
Georgetown, Seattle
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Let Me Connect You
Our team is helping the Connections Museum expand its capacity to care for historic communications infrastructure. By converting an older industrial building into a workshop and office, the project creates much needed space to restore, curate, and host. The new facility will act as the museum’s back-of-house, allowing the existing public spaces to remain focused on the visitor experience, while much-needed capacity is added for preservation and production nearby.
Architecture
The additional space supports restoration, fabrication, and exhibit production, with room for collections storage and a print shop. Larger equipment, including a working letterpress, can operate here outside the constraints of the public museum. The workshop allows the museum to maintain and build its exhibits while continuing to grow the collection.
People
The Connections Museum has been maintained by a dedicated group of volunteers since it opened in 1989. Their needs guided the programmatic elements; creating space not just to expand technical work and restoration, but also to gather and host donors and community members.
Place
The main space of the Connections Museum is rooted in several floors of Centurylink’s Duwamish Central Office, which just a dozen decades ago housed a portion of the city’s actual switchboards and telecommunications operations. Honoring the size and complexity of the existing collection, this project doesn’t reorganize or restructure the museum, but instead expands operations into a new space elsewhere in Seattle. This allows the team to deepen and extend their curatorial and technical work, while leaving the collection in place at the current site.
Years of telecommunications history preserved: 100
Continuous years of operation: 37
Full central-office switching frames preserved: 100+
