Murphy & Dittenhafer Architects bring a new narrative to an old space

M&D completed a concept design to convert a former concession building into a new welcome center at Sandy Point State Park.

Rendered new exterior

Perched along the northwestern shore of the Chesapeake Bay is Sandy Point State Park. Since 1952, the park has offered visitors a stretch of beach and nearly 800 acres to explore along the edge of Annapolis, Maryland.

In the heart of the bayside haven sits an unassuming small building, once home to the park concession operations.

Murphy & Dittenhafer Architects recently completed comprehensive concept design to convert the building and interior areas into a welcome and nature center with education and exhibit spaces.

Existing exterior

Existing interior

Telling multiple histories

“What’s interesting about this project,” says Architectural Designer Jonathan Taube, “is that it’s focused on multiple histories.”

The welcome center’s exhibit space will walk visitors through not only the Chesapeake ecosystem but through the social history of the park, from the time of indigenous peoples to today.

With a fraught 70-year history, Sandy Point State Park was a segregated beach when it opened. M&D worked with three clients – the National Park Service, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and the Chesapeake Conservancy – along with exhibit designer Adler Display, to produce exhibits that tell the story of desegregating the beach during the civil rights movement.

Taube, who studied sculpture and minored in exhibit design in college, found the focus on social history and not just the ecosystem to be a forward-looking approach to the overall environment. Taube worked with Architectural Designer Harper Brockway to come up with a design that includes exhibits that depict animal and plant life along the Chesapeake and outline ways to get involved in maintaining the health of the bay.

Emphasizing a building’s capabilities

Besides the exhibit space, M&D’s design includes a nature education/multipurpose room, staff office space, storage, and restrooms. With construction of a nature center in the space already in the works, M&D’s design for the rest of the building needed to feel congruent.

The role of concept and design, Taube says, is more than just deciding on the colors, materials, and location of walls.

“We have to discover what the building is capable of doing,” he says.

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The designers take into account I an idea of how many people the building can accommodate, how each room should be used, and how traffic should flow, and then formalize it. Taking the clients’ desires into consideration, the Architects then suggest whether a room needs an acoustic ceiling or flooring that holds up to a certain amount of foot traffic per day.

 Taube isn’t sure if or when bidding for construction of the project will begin. If the project moves forward, he’s hopeful that M&D will be back to implement its preliminary design in final format.

Rendered new interior

The narrative of a building

Taking an old concession building and converting it into a state-of-the-art welcome and educational center is no small task, even on a conceptual level. Taube points to the collaboration with his three clients as enabling his success in that venture.

“The client is really the main ingredient in any project,” he says.

In this project, the three agencies involved put a lot of time and thought into the story they wanted to tell and to whom they wanted to tell it. Every element, from target audience to traffic flow to exhibit design, makes the final project more interesting and valuable to their constituencies. It all comes together to inform the design.

A mechanical engineer typically isn’t interested in the message a building conveys but rather in its performance, Taube says. But as an architectural designer, we are interested in the narrative aspects of a building and how to inject meaning into the design.

“Places and buildings have a story to tell,” he says, “and one thing we can do in Architecture is to help tell that story.”

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