The Expansion Is a “Go”. What’s Next?
This is the last of a three-part Chora Insights series published in connection with the 2026 Building Museums Conference of the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums. The series examines how museums prepare for building projects, how planning processes are frequently misunderstood, and what empirical evidence reveals about the long-term operational impact of expansion. Our goal is simple: to help museum leaders make disciplined, evidence-based decisions when contemplating major capital investments.
Chora Insights reflect our experience advising museums on renovation and expansion projects.
The new post-expansion normal
Pre-expansion planning has been sequenced appropriately. Feasibility and affordability of the capital project have been assessed carefully, and the scope of the project has been pinned down. All i’s have been dotted, and all t’s have been crossed.
So, here we are: The Board has green-lighted the project and construction will start soon. What’s next?
Fast-forward beyond the exciting, if nerve-wracking, capital raising and construction phase, where known and unknown “unknowns” will invariably manifest themselves — a period of inevitable mid-course corrections calling for adaptability and flexibility. Museum-specific circumstances carry the day during this period, and broad generalizations are hardly possible.
Think instead of the time after ribbon-cutting and Grand Opening, where your renovated and or newly expanded museum is re-gaining its operational footing. Things are reverting to normal, but what does the “new normal” looks like?
It’s complicated, but…
You will not be surprised to hear that it is not easy to find common traits in the experiences of museums that have undergone significant renovations or expansions: idiosyncratic features get in a way of crisp “before vs. after” comparisons and there are many dimensions along which operational performance may change.
Yet, a few high-level patterns appear to be broadly shared and provide food for thought:
A footprint expansion is unlikely to bring about a drastic change in the operations of a museum, but whatever budget impact it has, it is likely to be persistent. In other words, an expansion increases the expense envelope not just square footage.
In fact, expenses are likely to increase in tandem with the square footage, leaving expenses per square foot basically stable. A plausible rule of thumb to estimate future increases in total operating expenses in a normal year post-expansion is to multiply the current expenditure per square foot by the planned square footage addition.
About half of the expenditure increase will likely fall on Personnel, consistent with the nearly even-split of total operating expenses between personnel and non-personnel at most museums.
The per-square-foot cost of building operation will increase somewhat, perhaps reflecting higher costs for security, insurance, maintenance, and utilities in larger, more imposing premises.
Museums that already possess capital reserves (i.e. endowments) and that strengthened them through the capital fundraising effort, are best positioned to pull off —and sustain financially—a successful expansion.
Revenues will increase too, especially admission-driven earned revenues if the expansion accommodates better sources of concession income (e.g., shop, café), and if visitors are ticketed (i.e. the museum follows a paid admission model)
A corollary of the matching evolution of revenues and expenditures is that a museum expansion is no panacea against chronic budget shortfalls: a museum struggling financially before an expansion is likely to be in the same situation afterwards.
The impact of an expansion on memberships and attendance seems to be ambiguous: some museums see a significant durable spike post-expansion, others do not. Prudent projections are best couched within large margins of uncertainty.
To get a better appreciation of the operational impact of expansions at art museum, Chora is preparing a formal statistical analysis of before/after conditions which will try to identify common trends and benchmark them against a “control” group of museums that have not expanded. The methodology is not unlike that of epidemiological studies that try to assess the efficacy of a “treatment” in a targeted group. Museology meets medical research…
Stay tuned…
