Worcester Art Museum Arms and Armor Galleries

The Worcester Art Museum’s 2014 acquisition of the John Woodman Higgins Armory Collection—the second-largest arms and armor collection in the country, with over 1,500 objects—presented a rare opportunity and a significant design challenge. Arms and armor collections are traditionally displayed as trophy cases of European military achievement. WAM sought a different approach: a global story reflecting the true breadth of the collection, welcoming to a diverse contemporary audience. The project required a full gut renovation of 5,000 square feet, the museum’s largest gallery undertaking in decades, while meeting the collection’s stringent conservation requirements. The central challenge was communication—helping visitors navigate and find meaning across a collection of this scope and cultural range.

The vision was to create galleries where stewardship of the collection felt as visible as the collection itself, and where visitors could see themselves reflected in the story being told. Rather than a procession of cases, we envisioned an in-the-round entry gallery that places visitors in close proximity to objects from every angle, collapsing the usual hierarchy between viewer and artifact. A “Blueprint Wall” of life-size annotated drawings would give visitors a shared visual vocabulary before they encountered the objects, while large-scale contemporary artwork and hands-on interactives would signal that the galleries were made for younger and more diverse audiences alike. Throughout, architecture, exhibition design, lighting, and graphics were conceived as a single integrated system—ensuring every spatial and graphic decision worked together to tell a genuinely global story.

In the entry gallery, a multi-cultural arch wall anchors a central platform of armor from Sudan, Germany, and India, with a custom chain mail ceiling fixture—referencing an element used across armor traditions—unifying the room overhead. Restored historic arch openings became seating nooks, while sealed niches on the opposite wall were repurposed as projection surfaces, with animations drawn from the museum’s collection turning former windows into portals between physical and digital content. The rear gallery shifts scale and purpose: a large-format world map lets docents anchor objects geographically in real time, and a full-height “Blueprint Wall” of annotated line drawings—covering helmets, full suits of armor, horse armor, and swords from multiple cultures—gives visitors a shared vocabulary. Twelve-foot custom sliding panels within the open-storage casework allow curators to refresh focal displays without disrupting the larger installation, while a community-curated case and conservation viewing area round out the galleries.

Design Team

Yugon Kim (partners)
Tomomi Itakura (partners)
Whit Iglehart (partners)
Georgia Wiggins (designers)
Xinyi Ma (designers)
Aysenur Baructu (designers)

Collaborators

Kaplan Construction (physical fabrication)
South Side Design & Building (physical fabrication)
Zone Display Cases (physical fabrication)
Richard Lewis Media Group (digital fabrication)
Conform Lab

Photo Credits

© Ben Kou (photography)
Richard Lewis Media Group (videography)

Open Date

November 2025