ObjectIDEA plans new National Museum

The Johnson County Museum is ready to change its name and move into a new home. Equipped with a strategic plan and a new interpretive master plan completed by Object Idea, the museum will begin its transformation into a new National Museum of Suburbia and Suburban Policy Forum.

The new museum will capture, commemorate, and critique the ideas of American suburbia, including the story of how the suburbs took hold and played out near Kansas City. By interpreting suburbia through the eyes of agencies, planners, developers, builders, residents, policy-makers, and scholars, the museum will strive to chronicle how America's suburbs came to be; reveal their many physical and cultural dimensions; and encourage people to think about suburbia's real and imagined place in their hearts and minds, and its place in America's future.

A year-long process, the planning was conducted with the support of grants from IMLS and the Johnson County Heritage Trust. Object Idea worked with a task force of volunteers, members of the museum's staff, and museum planning consultant, Museum Insights of Mystic, CT.