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Signature Sponsor
By Annie Pentilla
June 15, 2018 - Butte, Montana's World Museum of Mining took one step closer this week toward making plans for a new heritage center a reality.
In November, the museum announced its plans for the facility, tentatively called the Mining Heritage Building.
A news release estimated that the building would cost around $2.5 million.
Museum director Jeanette Kopf said Tuesday that figure could change as plans for the facility get finalized and that it’s still too early to give an updated figure.
The museum plans to pay for the facility with fundraising and grants, she said.
Since Wednesday, architects working on the project have been hosting listening sessions with museum staff, volunteers, and residents, embedding themselves in the Mining City to learn everything they can about the museum’s needs.
The goal of the visit, said Kopf, is to gather information and come up with a concept for the new building.
Looking dapper in collared shirts and casual blazers, the architects hosted a listening session Tuesday inside a small church on the museum’s campus.
The group, from Mosaic Architecture in Helena and the Phoenix-based DLR Group, consisted of four architects who talked about what “constraints” and “opportunities” the landscape of the museum posed for the project.
The group spent much of Wednesday working with cardboard models, and by Thursday, they had narrowed down the possibilities to two preliminary concepts.
Earlier this year, plans for the facility called for a two-story structure with 5,000 square feet of floor space to be located southeast of the museum’s main gift shop entrance.
The building would provide updated bathrooms and much needed additional space for the museum, Kopf said in December, which broke an attendance record with an estimated 2,700 visits in 2017.
Plans also called for offices, a conference room to host events, and space to house and catalogue the museum’s archives, a sprawling mass of documents, news articles, maps, and — among other things — more than 10,000 photographs.
Since the architects' visit, some of those early plans have changed.
One of the concepts, for instance, calls for installing two small buildings instead of one large building.
And instead of constructing the structure southeast of the entrance and gift shop, the structures would be located near the center of the museum, to the north.
The plan also calls for, among other things, renovating the museum’s current main building, featuring a food service area and gift shop, and moving the museum’s entrance to a site adjacent to the building to the north so that the entryway would frame the Orphan Girl headframe.
Jeff Downhour, principal at Mosaic Architecture, explained that the plan would be in keeping with the museum’s village-like feel and would also direct visitors to the heart of the museum – its “Main Street,” he said.
The second plan the architects came up with is similar to the first, with the new entryway in the same northerly spot.
It involves expanding the current main building, where offices, the archives, and conference area would reside, and the gift shop and a food service area would be located nearby.
The plan features a new building to the north, which would function as an exhibit space.
Downhour noted that the two plans are preliminary rough sketches of what the renovation might look like and are not set in stone.
Both, he said, involve adding between 5,000 and 7,000 square feet of building space.
As for Kopf, she said volunteers have been working for years to catalog the museum’s archives, noting that one volunteer can recall working on the archive since the 1980s.
She described the museum as 22 acres of Butte and mining history that tells a story of how people lived both at home and in the mines.
The photos tell a story too, she said, noting that those featuring Butte’s miners are among her favorites and that she’s often struck by the expressions on their faces.
“They were so dedicated,” she said.
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