It seems like such a simple notion: Why would a museum designed specifically for children install exhibits actually harmful to their health? That was the question dogging Brenda Baker and John Robinson in 1997 as they developed a new gallery space for young children at the Madison Children’s Museum in Wisconsin. Parents themselves, the duo was determined to get away from the heavily themed fiberglass-and-plastic environments so common in their field. After months of research, they began to understand just how harmful some man-made materials could be to their young audience—materials commonly found in children’s museums the world over.

“I remember so vividly the profound irony of that moment where we all realized that we as a field were working hard—with conviction and passion— to create beautiful, nurturing, exploratory spaces for young children, but we were doing it out of materials that were also poisonous,” says Robin­son, exhibit development and commu­nity relations manager at the museum. “It was a powerful realization.”

The revelation led the two exhibit designers to develop “First Feats: Cele­brating the Early Years,” which opened in 1998 and remains the Madison Children’s Museum’s flagship attraction. Geared exclusively to chil­dren 5 years old and under, “First Feats” was the first “green” exhibit in the United States, made almost entirely out of natural materials safe for both children and the planet. The exhibit’s success has led to two promi­nent awards from the Association of Children’s Museums, while its popu­larity and socially conscious goals have spurred Baker and Robinson to create a web site specifically for designers who want to follow in their footsteps. The site, www.GreenExhibits.com, which launched in April, only enhances the legacy of an exhibit clearly ahead of its time.

Decisions, Decisions
As an artist, Baker, exhibits director at Madison Children’s Museum, began working with oil paints, paint thinners, and numerous other toxic chemicals in college and graduate school. She didn’t think much about her material choices until 1995, when she had new carpeting installed in her home. Suf­fering from acute chemical exposure within days of the carpet installation (likely the trigger after years of repeti­tive toxic exposure), Baker had to seek medical treatment to bring her body back to full strength. It led her to ques­tion the material choices she made as an artist and as an exhibit developer and designer at the children’s museum: If carpet and paint could harm me, how much more could they affect children, whose immune systems aren’t even fully formed?

A few years later, the decision was made to change Madison Children’s Museum’s early childhood exhibit. Baker and Robinson never really cared for it. The space was too conventional for their liking—something to climb over, something to slither under, a ball pit, the usual. In their research for the new exhibit, they traveled to other chil-dren’s museums to see what their peers were doing to reach the youngest mem­bers of their audience. They didn’t par­ticularly care for what they found there, either.

“Generally what we were seeing out there were spaces that didn’t respect kids’ capacity to be sophisticated in terms of the spaces they respond to. … It was more or less primary colors and slick, shiny surfaces that’re easy to mop puke off of,” Robinson recalls. “We knew that kids have an incredible capacity to appreciate a beautiful, aes­thetic space. We wanted to make a point: Young kids, you don’t need to consign them to red, yellow, and blue.”

At the same time, Baker was researching indoor air pollution and its effects on children and adults as a result of her health issues; her efforts led to several troubling discoveries. She found that 90 percent of kids’ time is now spent inside, sitting among all of the harmful effects of synthetic materials such as fiberglass, plywood, carpeting, latex paints, and plastics, which “off gas” toxins. When surrounded by these sub­stances, Baker says, children are exposed to long-term health issues, especially res­piratory illnesses such as asthma.

Thus, Baker and Robinson came to a decision: Their new exhibit was going to trend toward the abstract, and it was going to help children reconnect with the natural world. Instead of heavy theming, the space would be open-ended, giving kids a chance to explore its secrets. It’s like that old adage: A child would rather play with the box a toy comes in rather than the toy itself. Well, at the Madison Children’s Museum, that box was going to be safe for the kids to play with.

So to satisfy these objectives, the designers came to another decision: It was time to “go green.”

Going Green
In designing “First Feats,” Baker and Robinson had to divorce themselves from the conventional wisdom of creating a gallery space. If fiberglass and carpeting can harm a child’s development, then they had to find building materials that would be healthy for children. By partnering with experts in the Madison area, especially medical doctors and an architect who has been working in green spaces for three decades, they discovered the only way to ensure the health of their visitors was to use all-natural supplies, which do not pro­duce the harmful off-gasses or “volatile organic compounds” found in syn­thetic materials.

Perhaps the most noticeable shift in this direction for “First Feats” is its wood flooring, made of fir. It was a major hurdle to overcome, Robinson says, convincing the museum’s board of directors that a hard floor was actually safer for young children than carpeting. But that’s just one of many innovations in the space. It is the only multilevel exhibit in the entire museum, with two platforms about six feet in the air across the room from each other; they are connected by a pulley system, allowing children to pass pieces of fabric to each other as if on a clothesline.

Beneath one of those platforms is a reading room for adults, which they can use just to calmly watch over their children, read to them, or investigate literature about the motivations behind “First Feats.” Nearby is a large cotton-covered fixture with tubes coming out every which way; it’s not an octopus (the designers would not want to be that specific, of course), but it could certainly pass for one in a child’s imagi­nation. Its “tentacles” are actually tubes that contain their own secrets, such as sounds and lights. There are no signs telling children about these hidden items, though—they’re left to discover the treats on their own.

There are two rooms beneath the other platform. One replicates a home environment, where children can act like grown-ups and fix “meals” or learn to take care of babies (in the form of dolls). The other adjoining room is a musical extravaganza, with xylophones and drums for children to play. Along a nearby wall, scarves hang on hooks. These simple pieces of fabric are the perfect summation of what “First Feats” is all about: They are used for every­thing from superhero capes to magic carpets—or anything else a child can imagine, no explanations needed.

“First Feats” also includes an area geared specifically for infants and tod­dlers, with images located at eye level— along the floor. Some of the cotton mats in this area are filled with sand, so those just learning to walk or crawl can experience sensations through their unsteady hands and feet. A large, color­ful mobile hangs overhead, so if chil­dren are lying on their backs, they have something to look at. The goal, Robin­son says, is to constantly stimulate kids’ minds and senses, no matter where they are or what they’re doing in the exhibit. It retains its cool, earthy tones through­out, as the wood is left in its natural color. Attempts were made in the albeit limited space to allow as much nat­ural lighting as possible, help­ing visitors further their connection with the outside world; the platforms feel like tree houses, not jungle gyms at a McDonald’s play area.

“You can watch par­ents walk into the space and their shoul­ders relax,” Robinson says. “They feel good in there and they’re more open to being a partner in the learning that’s going on with their kids.”

“That’s the favorite space in the museum,” Baker affirms. “It’s the way it feels, it’s the way it looks, it’s the way it smells.”

Sustainability
In a sense, “First Feats” became a trip down the rabbit hole for the two designers. What started with the simple goal of creating a healthy space for children led them to inves­tigate an entirely new set of building supplies. And those materials in turn led to the introduction of a new concept at the Madison Children’s Museum: sustainability.

Sustainability is a term that lends itself to multiple definitions and inter­pretations, but the overall principle, Baker says, is “making sure that the resources available today are here for the future.” It requires a balancing act between social, economic, and envi­ronmental concerns in order to do what’s best for the planet and its inhab­itants. Sounds all well and good in the­ory, but when put into practice and followed through to its end, sustainability becomes a unique challenge.

“The more you try to do this, the more you realize how deep the issue goes,” Robinson says. He provides this example: Using sustainable wood floor­ing is good for children and the envi­ronment, but if the materials must be shipped from California to Wisconsin, the gasoline and pollution resulting from that long trip, from a sustainable perspective, wipe away the benefits of “going green” at the museum. Or, if that wood is taken from a source that isn’t renewed, that would also affect the overall environmental benefits of the purchase. (Baker says a good rule of thumb is to limit suppliers to a 500-mile radius.) Likewise, in the area of social consciousness, sustainability dictates not purchasing materials from a Third World country whose workers are forced to work long hours for low wages.

So as they prepared “First Feats,” Baker and Robinson had to think sev­eral steps ahead, looking outside the immediate environmental impact of Madison. The search for these supplies was difficult, but by tapping into help from local experts and simple dogged determination, they eventually found what they desired. The wood flooring, for example, came from an old ware­house in Chicago that was being torn down; meanwhile, the wood for one of the platform installations came from cherry trees that fell naturally on a local artist’s property.

Sustainability can be a scary term for some, Baker says, especially those serving on boards of directors that hear cash registers chiming and see budgets exploding when the word is uttered. But she says that’s just another hurdle to cross in the switch from synthetic to green. There is a stigma surrounding natural materials that they are more expensive than man-made options, which leads to the third portion of sus­tainability: economic stability. The designers believe it’s simply a matter of perspective.

“It really depends on being able to work with your board of directors and your community to get people to reorient their ways of calculating costs,” Robinson says. Using the floor again as an example, he notes the initial costs were higher than simply dropping in some car­pet, but the wood will last much longer—and looks better with age, not worse. Nevertheless, “First Feats” went in at $116 per square foot, well within the museum’s parameters (the high end would be about $160 per square foot).

But that’s not to say costs shouldn’t factor into a facility’s decision to go green. As Baker points out, it may not be economically feasible, especially when considering structural costs (sustainable building materials are considerably more expensive than their traditional counterparts); it’s better to have a facility partially green than no facility at all.

“It’s a matter of institutions com­mitting to it as an ideal or a goal and realizing that you’re not going to rein­vent everything overnight,” Robinson says. “It’s the intention that’s the important thing, I think, that there’s work to be done and we’re doing what we can to get there.”

Earning that commitment is not easy, though. Baker says it wasn’t until “First Feats” was actually finished before she felt the exhibit earned the full support of the board. “You just go on blind faith because you know it’s the right thing to do,” she says. Once the museum’s leadership saw the exhibit, all questions faded away.

“It has to come from the top down in order to be embraced by every­body,” Baker says, “and I think we have that now.”

Spreading the Word
Changing minds is one of several reasons Baker and Robinson launched GreenExhibits.com this spring. The site is geared specifically for exhibit designers looking to make their facili­ties more sustainable at any level. Drawing on nearly a decade of experi­ence, Baker and Robinson hope to make their case for going green, as well as provide valuable resources to get others in their field off to a good start.

When they began their research in 1997, Baker and Robinson say there was not as much information available as there is now, as sustainability has caught on in large companies such as Ford, Nike, Starbucks, and others. Nevertheless, much of the research is geared toward builders in the con­struction field, not museums. GreenExhibits.com will translate some of those materials and serve as a launch pad for other institutions to seek out their own information and partnerships.

“Ultimately, the goal would be that people would embrace sustain­ability in all areas of their operation,” Baker says, be that buildings, clean­ing supplies, recycling, and every­thing in between.

When it is running at full speed, the site will contain these sections:

• Photos of green materials used inan exhibit context

• Photos and case studies of suc-cessful green exhibits and museum projects around the world

• Project rationales, which outlinethe need for green practices in the early childhood, education, and museum communities

• Links to sustainability efforts, ini-tiatives, and people in every state, in hopes of fostering more local initiatives

• Bibliography of key publicationson green exhibit design

• Notices for green exhibit designworkshops and presentations around the country, contributed by users of the site

• Information useful for “institu-tionalizing” a green philosophy in all aspects of museum operation

• Chat room, hosted by a greendesign expert.

Demand for such a resource is cer­tainly there, the designers agree. Since its debut, word about “First Feats” has spread and approximately 20 represen­ tatives from other museums have vis­ited Madison each year, seeking advice on accomplishing similar goals at their own facilities.

“I’ve been impressed with how many museums have called John and Brenda for advice as they’re starting their own early childhood exhibits, wanting to follow our lead,” says Ruth Shelly, Madison Children’s Museum’s executive director. “It’s very flattering.”

The “go green” phenomenon is “just the beginning of being a trend,” says Janet Rice Elman, executive director of the Association of Chil-dren’s Museums. “I think we’re right at the front end. It’s a major investment, both in terms of funds and time and intellectual expertise. It is more expensive to build an environmentally appropriate space, but in the long term, in terms of energy savings, it should benefit the museum. It can be challenging to see that far into the future, though, when your capital campaign goal is looming large in front of you.”

There are more than 300 children’s museums worldwide, so that’s a mas­sive audience for a small facility in Madison to try and reach. But Baker knows of several facilities that have either already incorporated green design into their buildings and/or exhibits, or are planning to become more sustainable in the future. They span the United States, in cities such as Boston; Durango, Colorado; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Brooklyn, New York; Naples, Florida; and Pittsburgh. In November, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh opened the first “green” children’s museum in the United States. As it expanded from 20,000 to 80,000 square feet, including a large new wing, the museum went back and retrofitted its original structures to meet sustainability standards and built its new section in line with sustain­ability standards. The facility now runs completely on renewable energy (solar and wind), consists of a high level of recycled materials, and fea­tures no-irrigation landscaping. “It was very important to us in approaching this expansion of our museum and cre­ating all of these new spaces to be very mindful of the environment,” says Bill Schlageter, director of marketing for the museum.

This “commitment to core values” is what it takes to effect change at museums, Elman says, a quality Madi­son Children’s Museum has in spades.

“Madison Children’s Museum is playing a leading role in terms of educating the field on green exhibit and construction design,” she says. “It’s such a part of their institution and their culture, it’s become who they are. Madison’s leadership in terms of a commitment to this kind of design has really set the bar high for the field.”

Building for the Future
The Madison Children’s Museum, based largely on the efforts of its two exhibit designers, has gone so far as to adopt a “sustainability mission state­ment” in 2004, which promises to:

• Integrate the principles of sustain-ability into all major business decisions

• Seek strategic collaborations

• Design and develop our products, services, and materials with the long-term health of our children and com­munity in mind.

“It’s all about gradations,” Baker says. “We aren’t going to be able to do everything in the way that would be best for the world because we don’t have the resources. But we’re making steps in that direction.”

The museum plans to take a giant leap forward over the next three years, as it moves into another building that would more than double its total square footage and provide a tremendous opportunity to create a much greener facility. Refurbishing an existing museum is a difficult, expensive task that requires closing down gallery spaces; the new structure will be a blank slate from which the museum can naturalize itself as much as possible.

“This is going to be the No. 1 issue, I think, facing kids as they enter adult-hood—reconciling the impact of the way we live on our resources and try­ing to come up with creative solutions to making it better,” Baker says.

“It’s not about deferring responsi­bility or consequences to somebody else,” Robinson adds. “It’s about tak­ing responsibility and ownership for your own trajectory. Hopefully spaces like ‘First Feats’ are inspirational in that regard.”