Saint Louis Art Museum

The Challenge

Visitor Disorientation:
With the opening of the new Taylor Hall, guests often found themselves uncertain about how to navigate the museum’s expanded footprint. Entrances were not immediately intuitive, and visitors frequently missed key amenities such as ramps, restrooms, and galleries. Even seasoned patrons struggled to distinguish ticketed exhibition areas from general access zones.

Diverse Audiences:
SLAM’s visitors range from first-time tourists and school groups to local members, art scholars, and guests with accessibility requirements. Each audience type carries different expectations, levels of familiarity, and spatial literacy. The challenge was to create a unified digital and physical experience that could flex to meet these varying needs—inviting, inclusive, and adaptive for all.

Cultural & Historical Context:
Taylor Hall is both an architectural statement and a cultural landmark, merging David Chipperfield’s modernist precision with the museum’s Beaux-Arts heritage. Any digital layer had to honor this architectural integrity—amplifying, not interrupting, the building’s visual rhythm. The signage and media language needed to feel native to the space, aligning seamlessly with SLAM’s broader curatorial and brand sensibilities.

Data & Systems Integration:
Behind the scenes, SLAM’s digital ecosystem is complex. Real-time event data, ticketing systems, emergency alerts, and indoor mapping all needed to feed into a single, intelligent signage network. This required coordination between existing platforms, new content infrastructure, and museum operations to ensure information accuracy and consistency across every public-facing display.

Content Management Complexity:
The museum’s communications and visitor-experience teams required a content platform that balanced control and simplicity—allowing staff from different departments to design, schedule, and monitor content across a wide range of screen types, from large LED feature walls to informational kiosks and wayfinding displays. The system needed to empower creativity while maintaining institutional consistency, accessibility compliance, and operational reliability.

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