Top 6 Historic Museum Restorations in the US

The US is home to thousands and thousands of museums of all ages. New museums pop up frequently, displaying art and artifacts, while the country’s oldest museum, the Charleston Museum in South Carolina, was opened in 1773. Below, we’ve detailed a few of our favorite museum restorations in the US in recent years. Some buildings have always functioned as museums, while others started as homes or other public buildings. Some of these historic buildings near 200 years old — and all have been impressively restored by some of the country’s top architects and restoration specialists.

Originally built as a Masonic Temple in 1908, the building at 1250 New York Avenue in Washington, D.C. was purchased and opened as the National Museum for Women in the Arts in the 1980s. In fact, it was the world’s first major museum dedicated to female artists. But in 2021, it was time for a major facelift. The Classical Revival building was closed for two years for extensive renovations, which you can see in an impressive timelapse video here.

Led by Baltimore architecture firm Sandra Vicchio & Associates, the extensive project included restoring the building’s roof and brick-and-limestone façade, working with the D.C. Historic Preservation Office. They also restored the building’s Great Hall and mezzanine, renovated and laid out the galleries in such a way that provides 15% more art viewing space, and made accessibility improvements like replacing the elevators.

The Mark Twain House is a small museum in Hartford, CT and is the house in which author Mark Twain (whose real name was Samuel Clemens) lived with his family from 1874 to 1891. The museum has undergone restorations, room by room, for the last 20 years or so, bringing it more in line with accurate period representations of the late nineteenth century.

In the early 2000s, restorations included the wallpaper, fireplace, and billiards table in the billiards room, the appliances and woodwork in the kitchen and servants’ quarters, the marble floor of the entryway, and the landscaping. The Clemenses' Mahogany Suite also underwent extensive restorations, for which John Canning & Co. won a Palladio Award in 2020 and David Scott Parker Architects in 2021.

On Memorial Day in 1938, the Soldiers Memorial Military Museum opened in St. Louis, honoring St. Louis soldiers who had lost their lives in World War I. But by 2010, the stripped-down classical building with Art Deco influences had fallen into disrepair. So Gene Mackey of Mackey Mitchell Architects took action, raising funds from donations to complete a four-year restoration that brought the museum into the twenty-first century—and beyond.

Reopened in 2018, the newly refurbished museum now includes modernities that make it Gold LEED-certified while retaining its historic integrity. The building was given new restrooms, electrical wiring, a security system, and a fire suppression system, while elements like the intricate mosaic ceiling, Art Deco lighting fixtures, and the four sculptures outside were all restored. The hardest part, according to the project architect? Installing the new HVAC system without damaging the existing marble-clad walls. These days, the museum sees more than double the amount of visitors it did pre-restoration. 

Located within two historic 160-year-old tenement buildings at 97 and 103 Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Tenement Museum preserves and tells the history of immigrant life in New York—and, according, immigration in the US—in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Over the last ten years it’s undergone a series of restorations, with costs in the multi-million dollar range, to preserve the aging building for generations to come.

Updates have included restoring the historic brick façade, installing an HVAC system using the existing 1905 air shafts, installing new windows with UV filtration to protect artifacts, and opening new floors of the building for additional exhibit space. The museum is a series of vignettes, each of which showcases the life of an immigrant family who lived in the building between the 1860s to the 1970s. The property has won multiple prestigious awards for the restoration, including a Merit Award for Architecture from the AIA.

In 2021, the Philadelphia Museum of Art reopened to the public after an extensive renovation of the Greek Revival building that’s almost 100 years old. First opened in 1928, the building has a temple-like exterior—and it had never been majorly restored until recently, when visionary architect Frank Gehry took on the project. The project included reopening and reimagining nearly 90,000 new square feet of space, and the interior is now fully ADA-compliant and energy efficient. “The goal in all of our work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been to let the museum guide our hand,” said Gehry in a statement.

Situated within San Francisco’s sprawling Golden Gate Park, the de Young Museum, one of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, dates to 1895. The already aging structure was damaged beyond repair in the earthquake of 1989. The rebuilding process was stalled and struggled to receive city funding—but after a private fundraising effort, the museum’s five-year rebuilding process took place from 2000 to 2005.

Redesigned by Swiss international architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, the building today has a modern design, full of interior courtyards and floor-to-ceiling windows that bring the outdoors in. And the striking exterior is clad in copper—while that initially made the building look bright and shiny, it’s deepened to a brown that blends with the natural surroundings and will eventually form a durable green patina.