Case study · Hall of Flowers, Golden Gate Park · Sept 5 – Oct 25, 2026
How we built it.
Frame of reference
A museum can be fascinating, or completely meaningless, if you don't have a frame of reference for what you're stepping into. Some of us learn by seeing. Some by hearing. Some by touching, moving, and becoming part of the story ourselves.
May 13 · The call
Brian Scharf and Kelly Harris, the first walkthrough
Kelly Harris, Executive Director of Haight Street Art Center, asked if BRAVE would take on the immersive half of the show. I said yes before I'd finished the math.
This is the Hall of Flowers the first day I walked it: an empty 1930s fair building, a skylight, and a roll-up door I'd later measure six times for a bus.
May → August · The room on paper
Eight days after the walkthrough, the first ground plan had the whole sequence blocked out: stage, Furthur, the thresholds in and out, liquid light, the makerspace. A dozen versions later, the bus never moved. On June 17 a 16-page bid set went to fabricators.
Block-out
Renders of the real hall, built to put artists, fabricators, and HSAC in the same room before anything was built.
The promise
Drag across each image: concept render, then the room.
RenderBuilt
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RenderBuiltAug 15 – Sep 4 · The build
Walls going up around a bus that came in at midnight. The answer wasn't to build an exhibit. It was to build a world people could step inside.
Off camera
AP, Reuters, and CBS all shot video during install. Ten feet behind the interviews: fire marshal walkthroughs, a licensed electrician tying into a subpanel, network run to every interactive, telephones under test, a stage going up with a 12×18 tie-dye over an LED wall. Nobody films that part. It's the part I'm proudest of.
Furthur
In 1964 the Hobson family sold their 1939 school bus to Ken Kesey for $1,250. It sat on the Kesey farm in Oregon for almost sixty years.
Ben Marks curated it with the Keseys. Our job was the room around it: placement, staging, light, and the ceiling. How do you stage a thing like that so it doesn't look like a museum object, and doesn't look like a prop? Light and distance. Give it room.
Furthur in Light
Most immersive shows black out the windows. We gelled all twenty-four of the hall's skylight windows in six colors instead. The room changes by the hour. It's the piece most people walk under without knowing it's a piece.
Site-specific installation · Brian Scharf / BRAVE Design
Radical listening
“It started with the Acid Tests. Before the Dead were a band with an audience, they were a bunch of people in a room with a PA, a light show, the bus parked outside, and no idea who was supposed to be performing. That's the moment I kept coming back to. So the exhibition isn't about the Grateful Dead — it's built the way they built a show. You participate or it doesn't work. We refer to that as radical listening, and it's the rule for every interactive exhibit in the room: the telephones, the story hallway, the listening wall, the projection floor. Each one blurs the line between audience and band.”
Brian Scharf, Lead Creative Producer and Experience Designer, BRAVE Design
You participate, or it doesn't work.
The interactives
01
Pick up a telephone and leave a memory, or hear one left by a stranger.
Three telephones, each a work of art: Cosmic Charlie by Eli Lippert, Sun and Moon by Elaine Chu, Blacklight by Joel Yau. Every story goes into a living archive. You design a phone booth for six weeks and you don't know if anyone will pick up. They picked up. They stayed on it.
Conceived and designed by Brian Scharf / BRAVE Design. Created with Callie Schneider / Latent Space Co.
02
The voices come back out on your way in.
Stories left in the phones play back in the entry tunnel: overlapping, fading, returning, the way memory does at a show when the lights go down. Two weeks in there were hundreds of voices. No two walks through sound the same. It's the quietest piece in the hall.
Entry tunnel story soundscapes created by Callie Schneider / Latent Space Co.
03
Step inside a live recording.
Isolate the bass. Pull Jerry forward. Drop the drums. Follow one player's line through a jam you've heard a hundred times and hear something you never knew was there. During exhibit hours the wall plays into the house. When a band plays, it stops talking and starts listening.
Experience design: Brian Scharf / BRAVE Design. Creative technology: Benjamin Pender. Photography: Bob Minkin.
04
Mix the archive yourself.
Vintage film and photographs loaded into a live projection system, played from controllers at the edge of the rug. Layer, stretch, blend, recolor. Nothing you make lasts longer than the time you're standing there. Same impulse as the light shows behind the band in the sixties: don't document the moment, get inside it.
Benjamin Pender and Zane Groshelle. Resonance technology in collaboration with Lance Gordon / Mad Alchemy.
05
Before there was a light show, there was cloth.
An original Courtenay Pollock tie-dye. His backdrops hung behind the Grateful Dead in the early seventies. We mounted it over an LED wall and lit it from behind. Light moves through the dye. The pattern is his. The way you see it is new.
Courtenay Pollock. Backlight: Benjamin Pender. Produced by BRAVE Design.
06
Candles, rugs, and room to sit a while.
A candlelit altar at the foot of the stage, with rugs and poufs on the floor so people could stay.
Brian Scharf / BRAVE Design.
07
A room divider built as architecture.
It started on paper as a screenprint wall. It became a grid wall: a decorative architectural divider that splits the hall into rooms you can still see through, with roses running down it.
Brian Scharf / BRAVE Design.
Also in the room
Under the hood
The whole hall runs in modes. One screen in the nerd closet flips the room.
Daytime. Every interactive live. The Listening Wall plays our soundtrack into the house.
Turn a knob on the circle and the art on the rug changes. Hardware we built, talking to visuals in real time.
Every interactive on one managed network inside a 1930s fair building, with Starlink behind it if the line drops.
The floor staff runs it without us. That's the actual job.
Eye candy gets people in the door. Systems keep it running seven weeks, three to five hundred people a day.
The people
“Entering 'Forever Grateful, Golden Gate Park' is like stepping inside one of the band's signature red roses.”
History becomes tangible. The audience becomes part of the story. The most powerful environments don't just show you something. They change how you listen.
Forever Grateful closed October 25. The room is gone. This is how we built it.
The film
A five-minute film, shot in the room on its last weekend, is in the edit.
Lead Creative Producer and Experience Designer
Brian Scharf / BRAVE Design
Exhibition Curation and Interpretive Design
Renée de Cossio, Director of Exhibitions, Haight Street Art Center
Interactive installations and Furthur bus staging
BRAVE Design
Photography: BRAVE Design and Yanit Mehta / Design Draw Build. Renders and plans: Brian Scharf / BRAVE Design.
