Expand Vol. 3 No. 12

Celebrating Ronald Reagan’s Western Legacy in Multi-Media Style

The forte of Houston-based Southwest Museum Services is transforming spaces. Whether it’s taking a boring rectangular room and converting it into a multi-media feast for the senses or designing and building mobile structures that convey information in a unique way, Southwest Museum Services is at the forefront of this market niche.

An excellent example of Southwest Museum Services’ excellence can be found at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, Calif. Located near the historic train station in Santa Barbara near the Santa Ynez Mountains, in and amongst Spanish Colonial style architecture, the Reagan Ranch Center celebrates Ronald Reagan’s legacy embodied by his ranch.

The ranch itself is located in the Santa Ynez Mountains. The purpose of the Reagan Ranch Center is to connect the ranch with Reagan’s private and political life at an accessible location so that visitors can learn more about Reagan and the role the ranch played in both a personal and historical context.

Most of the exhibits are located on the spacious second floor. The first floor is mainly home to offices and spaces where seminars are held with a few exhibits, such as a piece of the Berlin Wall, that greet visitors as they walk in. The third floor exhibits are primarily traditional oak display cases that showcase Reagan memorabilia.

The Heart of the Center

The center of the second floor exhibits is dominated by a 27-foot long timeline table fabricated out of steel and embedded with five, 65-inch flat panel LCD monitors. The monitors are all connected and have controls on the perimeter to access interactive information.

“It’s a highly visual, interesting tool to present information about what was going on at the ranch and during Reagan’s presidency,” says Charles Fleming of Southwest Museum Services. “When someone touches the perimeter of the screen, it changes and blade-like icons pop up so you can access a particular year and search for information that may displayed as things like a newspaper headline or a topographic map of the ranch.”

Beyond the interactive timeline display is a skylight of sorts set in a half circle above a ranch jeep that was dropped in through the ceiling by a crane. Projected on the half-circle is a filmed panoramic of the ranch that changes during the course of the day from sunrise to sunset.

“It’s like having a beautiful pastoral painting of the ranch, but it’s actually a slowly transforming image of the ranch itself. That was accomplished using a specialized Christie Digital Projector and a fish-eye lens with some special computer programming to make the image fit with minimal distortion. The surface is painted with a 20 percent gray paint to make the images more saturated,” explains Fleming.

The perimeter of the second floor is filled with photo murals and graphic panels with explanatory text, all printed on LexJet 7 Mil Ultra Photo Satin, laminated with LexJet 5 Mil T-Flex, and mounted with RubberMount White Adhesive.

The centerpiece of the displays that adorn the walls is a replica of the bookshelf at the Reagan Ranch headquarters. Southwest Museum Services photographed each shelf at the actual ranch, printed the photos, and applied them to the replica bookshelf.

Southwest Museum Services designed and fabricated all of the structures, set up and programmed all of the multi-media, interactive technology, and printed and installed all of the graphics

“Our clients are very demanding and if they don’t like it, our policy is to re-do it, so we want to use materials that ensure we don’t have to re-do anything. We’ve had great success with LexJet materials on this and similar projects,” says Fleming.