The Diorama Problem

SaveMPM.org — Collections & Public Trust Series

What Built Environments Are, Why They Break Every Category, and What That Means for the Streets of Old Milwaukee

There is a special kind of object in natural history and cultural museums that has no clean home in the standard vocabulary of collections management. It is not a specimen you can move to a new drawer. It is not a painting you can lift off a wall and loan to another institution. It is not a building that can be sold or demolished under normal real estate law. And yet it is not quite any of the things that are not those things, either.

It is the built environment — the walk-through diorama, the immersive streetscape, the life-size habitat recreation — and for collections managers, it has always represented the hardest problem in the field. What is it? Who owns it? Can it be deaccessioned? Can it be moved? What obligation does a museum have to preserve it, and for whom?

At the Milwaukee Public Museum, that problem is no longer theoretical.

1. What a Diorama Actually Is — and Isn’t

The word 'diorama' has theatrical roots. In the early 19th century, Louis Daguerre and Charles-Marie Bouton created large-scale painted panoramas that used shifting light to create a sense of movement and change. The term meant, roughly, a scene seen through — an illusion of depth and place. When natural history museums adopted the concept in the late 1800s, they transformed it from a theatrical trick into a scientific and educational medium.

In the late 1800s, museum workers developed the first natural history dioramas using three-dimensional displays to recreate natural habitats. Frank Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History pioneered this practice using the museum's collection of preserved animals, set against a painted backdrop with strategic lighting. These early dioramas were relatively contained — box-like structures with glass fronts. They presented a classification challenge, but a manageable one: the taxidermied specimens were accessioned objects; the backgrounds and fabricated foliage were exhibit materials, typically not accessioned.

Then the diorama evolved into something far more ambitious — from a box you looked into to an environment you walked through. Habitat dioramas became art installations intended to create an illusion of the physical world to evoke wonder and communion with nature. They are one of the earliest forms of what we now call immersive experience. And in Milwaukee, the concept was taken further than anywhere else in the world.

2. The Milwaukee Style: A World First

Referred to by staff as the Milwaukee Style, MPM's exhibits de-emphasize cases of artifacts in favor of large-scale theatrical scenes that recreate particular times and places. While the museum boasts a collection of four million natural and cultural objects, the public-facing exhibits favor models, set pieces, and soundscapes that immerse visitors in the story being told.

Throughout its 142-year history, Milwaukee Public Museum has been at the forefront of exhibit design, including designing the world's first diorama that visitors could enter and walk through, developing the world's first exhibit that put life-size models of dinosaurs in their natural habitat, and creating the world's first permanent tropical rainforest exhibit.

The Streets of Old Milwaukee, which opened on January 8, 1965, was the centerpiece of this innovation. It created one of the first walk-through dioramas in the world, transporting the visitor back to a fall evening in Milwaukee at the turn of the 20th century. It was an immediate hit and continues to be the most visited spot in the museum. More than seven thousand people visited during opening weekend.

The construction of the Streets was itself a community act. Many of the items used to build the streets — from doors and windows to hardware and architectural details — were salvaged by museum employees from Milwaukee buildings doomed by urban renewal in the 1960s. The Streets contain extensive materials generously donated by the community. And inside those donated buildings, items are rotated from the museum's large permanent collections.

The European Village, its companion exhibit, was built from the strong desire to create a companion to the Streets that reflected the immigrant experience. Thirty-four community groups helped create it. Its Jewish House is filled with genuine Jewish artifacts and period pieces from the early 1900s — accessioned collection objects housed within a built architectural environment.

3. Why Built Environments Break the Standard Categories

Standard museum collections management operates on clear distinctions. An object is either accessioned — formally added to the permanent collection, held in public trust — or it is not. This framework works adequately for objects that can be individually identified, moved, documented, and separated from their context. It begins to strain when applied to habitat dioramas, where the taxidermied specimens are accessioned but the painted background and fabricated rock formations may not be. It breaks down almost entirely when applied to walk-through built environments like the Streets of Old Milwaukee.

Consider what the Streets actually consists of. The architectural shell — the cobblestone streets, the building facades, the gaslit lanes — was built directly into the Wells Street museum building. It cannot be removed without dismantling the structure it inhabits. MPM's own director of earned media acknowledged this plainly: these exhibits, these buildings and other murals, are painted on or built into this structure. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't bring them over to the new building.

Within that architectural shell sit the furnishings, props, and display objects — some of them accessioned items from MPM's permanent collection, rotating through storage and back into the exhibit. These are governed by all the standard public trust obligations. They have accession numbers.

And between those two poles sit the donated community materials — the salvaged doors and windows from demolished Milwaukee buildings, the period items contributed by families — whose accession status may be unclear, inconsistently documented, or lost to the passage of time.

The terminology for diorama-like objects and installations is still inconsistent, both in the literature and in public use. The field has developed terms like built environment, architectural installation, and building-integrated feature, but there is no consensus standard, no universal AAM or ICOM category that definitively governs them. Each institution has largely been left to define these categories for itself — which is precisely what makes the MPM situation so significant.

4. The Conservation Problem No One Talks About

Built environments pose not only a classification challenge but a conservation one that is genuinely unique. In some dioramas, there is no way to access the inside without removing the huge panes of glass in front of them. Even minor repairs are a very costly process — imagine how difficult it is to repair an old classic painting, then imagine if that painting was 180 degrees with a domed ceiling.

The Streets of Old Milwaukee is not merely difficult to conserve — it is, in many respects, impossible to move. Its very immersiveness, the quality that makes it a world-first achievement, is the quality that makes it uniquely vulnerable. A cobblestone street that covers half a floor of a museum building, with architectural facades built to three-quarter scale against walls that are themselves part of the structure, cannot be crated and shipped.

If an exhibit is so thoroughly integrated into its building that it cannot exist independently of it, is it part of the building? Or is it part of the collection? Or is it something else entirely — a site, a place, a cultural landscape — that doesn't fit neatly into either category and may require an entirely different framework of protection?

5. The Disposition Plan: Applying the Wrong Category to the Wrong Assets

It is important to be precise about what the documents actually show, because precision matters when public assets are at stake. Both the 2016 and 2021 versions of MPM's Collections Policy define 'Non-Accessioned Collections' identically: Archives, Library, Photograph, Education, and departmental teaching collections — informational and media materials largely subject to copyright law. Neither version was changed. Neither version extended this category to built environments, dioramas, murals, or structural features of the building.

The 2021 policy (File No. 21-259) also carries an explicit prohibition against unauthorized alteration: the policy states it 'may not be altered or amended without proper approvals,' and that departments 'may not create or implement individualized policy' in conflict with it. This language was not present in earlier versions. It was added precisely to prevent exactly what the 2025 Disposition Plan attempts.

The 2013 LMA's 'Personal Property' definition is equally limited: operational equipment and supplies — chairs, tables, computers, office supplies — explicitly excluding Artifacts. It was designed to describe the contents of offices and utility spaces, not the immersive environments built by County employees over decades before MPM Inc. existed.

The problem, then, is not the Collections Policy. It has been consistent, clear, and actually strengthened over time. The problem is the 2025 Plan for Disposition (File No. 25-586), which applies the terms 'non-accessioned' and 'Personal Property' to built environments and historic exhibits in a way that neither the Collections Policy nor the LMA authorizes, and which claims MPM Inc. may sell those assets and retain the proceeds for building transition costs — in direct violation of the policy's explicit requirement that all proceeds be held in a restricted fund used only for direct care and acquisition of collections.

That is not an interpretation of the policy. It is a contradiction of it. And the built environments now targeted — the Streets of Old Milwaukee, the European Village, the Rainforest, the dioramas — were all created before MPM Inc. even existed in 1992, with County-funded labor and community donations, as permanent features of a public institution. MPM Inc. was authorized to manage what the public owned. It was never authorized to sell it.

Conclusion: The First Walk-Through Diorama in the World

Milwaukee Public Museum designed the world's first diorama that visitors could enter and walk through. That is not a marketing claim. It is a documented historical fact. The Streets of Old Milwaukee, which opened in January 1965, was genuinely the first of its kind anywhere in the world. It influenced exhibit design at major natural history and cultural institutions for decades. The Milwaukee Style it pioneered — immersive, community-built, experientially centered, layered with real historical materials — became a model that museums around the world have studied and adapted.

The institution that created the world's first walk-through diorama is now presiding over its disposal. The community whose history it preserves has not been given a genuine voice in that decision. And the mechanism being used to accomplish it — a Disposition Plan that applies the terms 'non-accessioned' and 'Personal Property' to assets those terms have never covered, in direct contradiction of the Collections Policy those terms appear in — is designed specifically to avoid the oversight that public trust obligations require.

This is the diorama problem. It is not only a collections management question, though it is that. It is not only a legal question, though it is that too. It is a question about whether a community's irreplaceable civic heritage can be quietly disposed of under a plan that misapplies the language of its own governing policies — and whether the people of Milwaukee will act before that window closes.

SaveMPM.org — Collections & Public Trust Series

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SaveMPM.org documents the Milwaukee Public Museum transition — examining public records, governance agreements, and asset classification decisions that affect publicly owned collections, exhibits, and historic environments.