Museum of Rotary Flight
Our Design for the Center for Rotary Flight
The Museum of Rotary Flight was sponsored by Sikorsky. This overhead view shows one of McMillan Group's designs at the corporate headquarter campus. The X2 demo helicopter, holding the fastest helicopter speed record, was suspended in a glass tower as the entrance beacon to the sub-levels of the LEEDS platinum museum and customer briefing center.
Throughout the multi-use building, McMillan Group was responsible for the architectural, interior, museum exhibition, graphic and lighting design. The first level entry looking up through the oculus and reflective pool provided immediate visual impact with it's reference to the sky and rotary flight.
McMillan Group's design also included: a customer business center (lobby shown here), a two hundred seat theatre, archival storage and a twenty five hundred square foot museum.
At the entrance to the museum was a mural of the founder, Igor Sikorsky, as well as a life-sized LED video wall with a sequence of fly bys to represent all current Sikorsky helicopters.
This interactive walk-through video time line showed the technical achievements
of Sikorsky’s aircraft.
Key to making this relative for the visitor was to allow them to be a “pioneer” in helping to solve the historical challenges and learn by being part of the story through a variety of interactive methods that McMillan Group created.
The inventor of the helicopter, Igor Sikorsky, founded Sikorsky Aircraft in 1924. McMillan Group created concepts for Sikorsky's Customer Center and Museum of Rotary Flight, a multi-functional building at their headquarters, as a destination to learn about the great heritage, pioneering spirit and vision, as well as the latest in flight technology being developed there. We designed the building exterior and internal treatments as visual metaphors for rotary flight. The overriding idea was a unifying story of innovation in solving the “impossible” and demonstrating how Sikorsky meets these technological challenges, in addition to the heroic stories of lives saved by the invention of these helicopters. McMillan Group was responsible for the architectural design, interior treatments, museum exhibitions, graphics and lighting design.
McMillan Group Inc. 25 Otter Trail, Westport CT 06880 203-227-8696
