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Boulder City, NV
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| Hoover Dam is an American icon that is visited by more than 10 million people every year. EDA was hired by the Bureau of Reclamation to develop a plan for exterior media at the dam. New exhibits were installed at the facility’s visitor center within the last three years, but a number of the challenges faced by Reclamation in managing the site were not addressed, including efficient delivery of orientation information at arrival points, development of a vision for an underutilized building on the site, and encouraging safe, responsible use of the nearby trails. |
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| EDA also developed exhibit concepts for several other exterior spaces, including a re-creation of an historic scene inside the stone bunker on a hill high above the dam where guards stood watch during World War II, an outdoor museum using oversized artifacts from dam construction, and wayside comfort stations including shade shelters and water on the trail that links the dam with Lake Mead NRA. |
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| A daylong charrette was held to identify management issues and develop statements of significance and interpretive themes. Managing crowds is a major headache at Hoover Dam, and the interpretive guide staff is stressed by a near-constant flow of visitors taking the dam tour. |
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Among the strategies that the team developed was the idea to create an exhibit experience focused on school-age children at the Spillway House, an unused building easily accessible from the main parking lots. Funneling school field trips away from the main flow of visitor traffic is envisioned as a way to reduce the pressure on the dam tour (which is limited by the capacity of the elevators that transport visitors into the interior of the structure) and other high-traffic areas. |
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EDA staff worked with Reclamation interpreters and historic preservation specialists as well as interpretive specialists from the National Park Service (Lake Mead NRA adjoins the dam property) and private historic preservation consultants hired by Reclamation. The team visited and analyzed a number of sites proposed for development. Among the issues faced by the team were designing orientation/information delivery systems that did not detract from the site’s Depression-era ambience (which includes exceptional examples of art deco architecture, the famous Winged Figures of the Republic sculpture and native stone walls built by the Civilian Conservation Corps). |
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Major changes are underway at Hoover Dam, as a new highway bridge scheduled for completion in 2010 will eliminate the vast majority of vehicle traffic on top of the dam. Once the bridge is complete, it is anticipated that the ambience on top of the dam will be dramatically quieter and more conducive to pedestrians lingering over wayside exhibits. EDA developed concepts for a walking tour guided by a podcast to avoid the necessity of attaching any modern objects to the historic structure (which is on the National Register of Historic Places). |
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