Formations designed, fabricated, and installed 7,210 square feet of exhibits that explore the Wright brothers’ lives from their humble beginnings in Dayton, Ohio to the many challenges they overcame along their journey to making the impossible possible and achieving “first flight.”
Visitors engage with graphics, interpretive text, tactile elements, simple and complex interactives, and a variety of other mediums that help them understand the Wrights’ world and the significance of their discovery. A 16-screen video wall provides context for how the Wright brothers and their inventions impacted humankind, while a full-scale replica of the Wrights’ famous 1903 flyer provides a moment of inspiration for the visitor that ponders the marvel of this machine that set new meaning to the phrase, “the sky’s the limit!”
Client: National Park Service; Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina
This iconic photo of the brothers, colorized and turned into life-sized cutouts, welcomes visitors into the exhibit area.
Tall, vertical panels introduce each exhibit area. Different color schemes help the viewer keep track of the story as locations change between Dayton (red) and Kitty Hawk (blue).
This custom-built interactive activity demonstrates the concept of ‘wing-warping’, a key breakthrough to achieving flight. Models of various iconic aircraft are suspended overhead.
Large panels along the back wall provide a timeline of events. The ‘turning gears’ interactive presents a series of challenges that the Wrights faced in Kitty Hawk.
The large concave panels show the progression of the brothers’ prototypes from a simple kite to a manned flying machine.
Visitors can rotate these scale models to see exactly what each Wright invention looked like.
The reproduction glider is the centerpiece of this exhibit area. It is encircled by interpretive panels that feature genuine artifacts as well as tactile diagrams with braille text.
Sixteen monitors work together to form a video wall which dramatically recounts the story of flight.