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An Oklahoma museum presents Bob Dylan’s music as a spatial experience

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Design, Architecture
Exhibition Design
Architect of Record
General Contracting
Crossland
Structural Engineering
Façade Mural Artist
Floor Area
1,626 sq-m

The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa explores the legendary musician’s 60-year career through exhibitions and an archive.

Key features

Olson Kundig set out to create a spatial narrative framing Dylan as a ‘Master of Change’, developing an architectural approach, exhibition design and rotating installations that capture this constantly evolving attitude in a red-brick former warehouse. The institution – located in Tulsa’s Arts District – is also the primary public venue for the Bob Dylan Archive, which comprises over 100,000 items including handwritten manuscripts, films, memorabilia and more. Visitors are presented with 100 of these items via a linear gallery wall and interactive display features that give a more in-depth understanding of Dylan's songs. A nearly 5-m-tall metal gate crafted by Dylan, a nod to American industry, puts the musician’s personal touch on the museum in the entry. 

‘Rather than create a monument to Bob Dylan in the traditional music museum sense, we imagined a synoptic, continually changing and highly programmed facility that will transform and grow along with the accompanying Bob Dylan Archive,’ says Olson Kundig design principal Alan Maskin. ‘The resulting design allows the Center to spill outside the building into the Tulsa Arts District community, and conversely, for the interior life and activity of the exhibits and programmes to be visible long before visitors cross the entry threshold.’ 

Frame’s take

Listening to – and appreciating – music is a highly sensory activity, one deeply tied to our ideas of culture and heritage. Olson Kundig’s celebration of one of America’s greatest musical icons treats this phenomenon in numerous ways, tying Dylan’s identity with the function of the space itself. While the Bob Dylan Center has much content on show – and varied at that – the interior takes visitors on a journey that focuses on feeling, not just information. ‘Museums are places full of stuff,’ writes RJ Smith for the Los Angeles Times. ‘Yet this new institution in Dylan’s name is not a repository of stuff: what’s on view is the creative process — how one of the most unpredictable forces alive built his art and keeps at it today.’

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