A Building Assessment Is Not Just a Technical Exercise—It’s an Organizational One
Editor’s Note:
This three-part Chora Insights series accompanies the Mid-Atlantic Museums Conference and reflects Chora’s of experience advising museums on renovation and expansion projects. Together, these insights explore how institutions prepare for building projects, how planning processes are often misunderstood, and what empirical data reveals about the long-term operational impact of museum expansions. Our goal is to help museum leaders make clearer, more disciplined decisions when contemplating major capital investments.
— Maria Elena Gutierrez
When museums begin to feel the urgency to update their facilities, building systems, or space program, the instinctive next step is often to hire an architecture and engineering firm to conduct a facilities assessment. And rightly so. Only experienced museum architects and engineers can properly evaluate the complex systems required to operate a museum effectively — mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems; architectural conditions; fire alarm and fire suppression systems; life-safety infrastructure; and overall code compliance.
Yet a facilities assessment alone tells only part of the story.
Running parallel to the technical evaluation of the building, Boards must also assess the health of the organization that inhabits it. Governance structures, financial performance, decision-making processes, leadership capacity, and operating discipline all shape whether a renovation or expansion will succeed—or struggle. Without this organizational assessment, the picture remains incomplete. In our experience, it is often unresolved organizational and financial issues—not the building itself—that become the greatest obstacles to successful renovations.
So where should museums start?
When contemplating a renovation or expansion, museums should begin with a comprehensive, integrated assessment of both the physical asset and the enterprise that operates within it. Building projects are not isolated technical exercises; they are institutional undertakings that test governance, financial resilience, and organizational alignment.
For over twenty years, Chora has worked with museum boards and leadership teams to assess the organizational and financial systems required to support major capital investments. In close coordination with qualified architecture and engineering firms, we ensure that facilities assessments and space studies are grounded in institutional reality—so building decisions are sustainable, actionable, and aligned with long-term performance.
In our next insight, we turn to a source of widespread confusion in the field: the proliferation of plans behind museum building projects. Strategic plans, master plans, feasibility studies, space programs, and conceptual plans are often conflated or sequenced incorrectly. Clarifying their purpose—and the order in which they should occur—is essential to making sound building decisions.
Stay tuned.
