Maritime Museum

In the northern Minnesota town of Grand Marais, a small Coast Guard complex exists along an isthmus projecting into Lake Superior. The four buildings of this complex were officially decommissioned in the summer of 2022. As the community of Grand Marais was considering new uses for the land, our studio proposed a maritime historical museum for the site.

My approach focused on welcoming the community back to the land now that the Coast Guard had turned the site over to the city. Three moves defined my approach. First, the parking lot that occupied much of the isthmus is removed and rewilded. Second, the existing buildings are gutted and converted into open air gathering and performance spaces. A radical deconstruction of the Coast Guard building present a fresh start for the community, one that reevaluated the history of colonization in the region. The roofs, the concrete bases, and a single wall facing the town are preserved, with the remainder of the buildings removed. Third, several small scale new buildings housing the museum program are placed across the site. I studied birchbark canoes and their use by the Anishinaabe people prior to European colonization. Experimental physical models inspired by canoe construction eventually led to a structure of connected mass timber A-frames. The structures are slightly elevated off the ground, in deference to the natural landscape and in consideration of the tendency for the area to flood. Through these interventions, the entirety of the isthmus becomes a destination, instead of merely a liminal space for accessing the end of the peninsula.

I won Gensler’s 2023 Rising Black Designer Scholarship by submitting this project. Below is the acceptance video I made.