Meet Fast Forward Presenter >> Joshua T Lessard

What is your Big Idea for Philadelphia?

Architecture & Artifacts: The Evolving Role of Designers in Cultural Institutions

Whether it be appropriation, decolonization, restitution, or repatriation—Philadelphia continues to lead-the-field in conversations about cultural heritage. With many new world-class exhibitions opening in the coming years, we should also take a moment to reflect upon our cultural institutions’ internal processes. With this presentation, I will discuss the ways in which the design of two new galleries (which will open in November at the Penn Museum) pushes the boundaries of our collective definition of “museum”. I will explore the Africa Galleries and Mexico & Central America Gallery as prototypes for reframing this architectural typology as an armature for cultural expression.

As the exhibitions’ designer, I will provide a “behind the scenes” look at some of the innovations we employed, as well as the lessons learned. I will discuss questions such as: What was our approach? What challenges did we face? How did we achieve our goals? In what ways were we innovative? And in what ways did we stay the same?

I hope to inspire presentation attendees to think about how 21st Century cultural institutions shape and transform our collective understanding of the human experience.

lessard(at)upenn.edu

Joshua is a registered architect practicing in Philadelphia. As a member of the in-house team at the Penn Museum, his design work has been included among USA Today's list of the best museum exhibitions in the United States, and featured in Metro US, the Art Newspaper, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is a contributor to the expanded addition of the Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), stemming from his fieldwork documenting the effects of climate change on vernacular building traditions in Nepal and Mongolia. 

Joshua complements professional practice with studies in the graduate program at the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania.  He remains close to Philadelphia’s academic community, having taught over 20 courses in the Department of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism at Drexel University since 2013.