Madison Children's Museum
Madison, Wisconsin

Above: Design rendering for the new Early Learning Exhibit.

In 1999, Design Coalition helped the Madison Children's Museum create it's award-winning First Feats exhibit, which celebrates the first years of a child's life with a homey feel and a safe environment full of rich experiences. It was the first such exhibit in the nation to accomplish this with artistic and natural, non-toxic materials throughout. (See photos below)

In 2010 Madison Children's Museum will open it's new museum with a early-learning exhibit about four times larger, but with the same goals. Design Coalition is working with a fantastic team of museum staff, artisans, child-care and other specialists, and architects to create a 'village' of earthen huts and linked treehouses, a stone grotto, a Baby Nest, and a horizontal climbing wall to welcome children from infancy to five. They will experiment inside the Water Dome -- Victorian-esque glass walls roofed with a large half-sphere of flowing water. They'll traverse the Skeleton Bridge, hanging from the sky-ceiling -- one staffer described our design, "as if the villagers had re-purposed a giant cyborg snake as a walkway". The bridge will provide a path for wheelchair users to reach the treehouses and there will also be a screened in observation deck amidst the "treetops". From all of this, student-researchers from the University of Wisconsin will be able to learn ways to design better spaces for children in the future.

Above: In-progress design rendering of the Water Dome.

Left: The Skeleton Bridge partially assembled for testing. (September 2009)

Above: The historic 1840's Gotten cabin is finally through the lengthy City approval process and is under re-construction. (September 2009)

Above and below: The original First Feats exhibit at the current Children's Museum on State Street,
opened in April of 1999.