My small (but tall) part of The Historic New Orleans Collection's expansion

Photo by David Grunfeld, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

When i first started working with The Historic New Orleans Collection last fall, the staff told me about the fantastic, $38 million expansion to their already amazing campus in the heart of the French Quarter. Construction was underway, but at the time, it seemed like a lot of projects we endure in the Crescent City: deadlines get pushed back, then back some more, and it’ll get done eventually. It was just hard to nail down an exact date.

But that day is finally here, as the Collection celebrated its historic expansion this past weekend with great fanfare (the block party was postponed to Saturday, May 18, because of inclement weather). I am eager to spend some time at the Collection to really take it all in.

I contributed a small part to the new expansion. The team asked me to design a “pylon” (a large, four-sided informational floor display) that would be placed in the “Organ Room.” A fully restored Aeolian pipe organ would be the room’s show piece.

Playing the Mormon Tabernacle Organ shortly after my 13th birthday. Please note that fantastically awful cardigan sweater and my white socks.

I was more than pleased to design something for this room in particular. Most probably don’t know that once upon a time, yours truly was a budding organist. I took piano lessons for as long as I can remember, but when I turned 12, my mother and piano teacher conspired to have me start learning to play the organ. They told me it would be a useful talent, and I could play the organ in church. At the time, I thought it sounded horribly nerdy but I agreed to learn for a year, then “re-evaluate” and return solely to piano lessons if after a year it didn’t interest me. At 13, when I said I wanted to return to piano, they would not take no for an answer and I continued studying organ. And truthfully, I am really glad I did. Mothers know best, you know. I was an organist in church for the better part of 12 years, so I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for organs. In fact, that first year I was studying organ, I got to play the world-famous Mormon Tabernacle Organ at Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

The pylon I designed focused on three previous owners of the Seignouret-Brulatour Building, and what function the building had during that time. At some point, it served as the residence for furniture maker François Seignouret, businessman and philanthropist William Ratcliffe (who purchased and installed the Aeolian Organ) and the studio for WDSU-TV (which is now headquartered outside the French Quarter).

The pylon is tall — very tall, in fact. At a towering 72 inches, it’s almost as tall as I am. Each panel is 2 feet wide. THNOC’s uses Garamond and Scala, and my primary goal was legibility from a distance that wouldn’t require a visitor to have to stand right in front of the pylon. Body text would not start until 20 inches from the top and other than the first panel “Centuries of History,” it would not go lower than 26 inches from the bottom, which would keep patrons from having to stoop down to read text.

Most of the photos used on each panel were quite old, and I knew that getting an 8” x 10” photo to reproduce to several feet would take a few tricks. One of my secrets is to use halftones. For the background image on each panel, I had to make sure that whichever photo I used would reproduce well at a size of at least 24 inches. I think it turned out well. Especially in a large format such as this, those big, beautiful black-and-white dots really give it a throwback feel. The colors come from THNOC’s in-house color palette, which allowed for some soft screens on the halftones as well as some solid color anchors at the top and bottom of each panel.

You can find this pylon on the third floor of the Seignouret-Brulatour Building in the Organ Room.