PETERSEN AUTOMOTIVE MUSEUM — TOTALLY AWESOME!

THE SOLUTION

Show Ready partnered with FGPG to fabricate the full environment across the Mullin Grand Salon (the Petersen's flagship exhibition space), engineering every element to serve the narrative while meeting the structural and durability standards of a public museum installation.

THE AESTHETIC

The brief had a sharp edge: capture two decades of pop culture excess without letting the environment become excessive itself. Not a neon carnival, not a retro novelty shop with clip art.

Every surface decision was a vote for quality over reference:

• Brass and Lucite throughout, pushing well past standard exhibit materials
• Real neon — "Totally" in pure neon, "Awesome" in neon outline — where LED would have been the easier call
• Pastel wall treatments calibrated across ten sections and sixteen rounds of graphic iteration

The era wasn't quoted. It was rebuilt, at a standard the original couldn't always meet.

THE CURVED INTRO WALL

The experience opened with a custom curved intro wall that established the exhibit's visual language before a single vehicle came into view. The curve was structural and spatial — guiding the entry sequence and creating a deliberate moment of transition from the museum corridor into the world built inside it. First impressions in an immersive environment are fabrication problems. This one was solved with geometry.

THE 18-MONITOR STAIRCASE SCULPTURE

The centerpiece of the exhibit was a spiral staircase sculpture supporting a stack of 18 42-inch monitors with exposed cordage — a direct reference to the tech maximalism that defined the '80s consumer environment. Building something that looks deliberately messy to current safety and structural standards is a more precise fabrication challenge than it appears:

• The monitor stack had to hold under continuous public load
• The exposed cordage had to read as intentional rather than incomplete
• The overall sculpture had to anchor the journey through the space without dominating it

It does all three.

PONY WALLS AND ARCHITECTURAL DETAILS

A series of pony walls featured lit clear tubes and glass blocks — two of the most recognizable architectural signatures of the '80s — built into the structure of the exhibit rather than applied as decoration. Key details included:

• Custom-fabricated glass block integration that functioned as both structure and light source
• Lit clear tube detailing that carried period materiality through the full perimeter
• Seamless integration with the surrounding graphic system across all ten sections

The era's aesthetic wasn't referenced from a distance. It was built into the walls.

RETROFITTED ASSETS

A meaningful portion of the exhibit was built on reused and retrofitted components from previous Petersen installations:

• Lightboxes from the Porsche exhibit
• SEG frames and projector screens from the Lowriders exhibit
• Matrix frames upgraded to more robust housing to meet the new installation's structural requirements

Every reused element was integrated so completely into the new design language that no visitor could identify what was new and what was carried forward.

INFORMATION PLINTHS

Custom information plinths throughout each section gave the exhibit two operating speeds simultaneously:

• Enthusiasts got curatorial depth — vehicle history, engineering context, cultural significance
• Casual visitors moved through without interruption, pulled by the environment rather than stopped by the scholarship

The plinths served both audiences without calling attention to the distinction.

THE ARCADE

The exhibit closed with a fully functional arcade engineered to do three things at once:

• Extend dwell time through playable classic consoles, sit-down motorcycle games, and stand-up arcade units
• Generate shareable content through blacklight effects and period-authentic hardware
• Deliver the cross-generational moment the Petersen's brief called for

RESULTS

"Totally Awesome!" opened June 7, 2025, to immediate critical and public enthusiasm, with coverage across automotive, design, and general interest media including Hagerty, The Autopian, NBC Los Angeles, and DuPont Registry.

Over 300,000 visitors were projected across the exhibit's run, drawn by a combination of the vehicle lineup: the 1995 McLaren F1, the 1984 Pac-Man Rod, a Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder replica from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and more than 30 additional iconic vehicles, and an environment that gave non-enthusiast audiences a genuine reason to show up.

The functional arcade and interactive elements generated consistent social sharing throughout the run, with the exhibit earning coverage as one of the Petersen's most immersive installations to date. Executive Director Terry L. Karges called it a "full sensory time machine", which is a fabrication outcome as much as a curatorial one.

"Totally Awesome!" is our ninth collaboration with the Petersen Automotive Museum, a partnership that has now spanned multiple flagship installations in the Mullin Grand Salon.

WHY IT MATTERS

An 8,000-square-foot museum exhibit has to work at every scale simultaneously — structurally sound enough to handle 300,000 visitors, detailed enough to reward the person who stops and looks closely, and experientially coherent enough that the overall arc lands before anyone reads a single plinth. Show Ready built "Totally Awesome!" to hit all three. The room doesn't lie. Neither does the work.