Experience 

Pack Place!

A Place for Everyone!

The Site for Pack Place -

The dream to have several different organizations housed in a centrally located center would remain a dream unless the existing organizations agreed to make the move.  Three organizations were invited and all three jumped at the opportunity to move into the new center. 

The Colburn Gem and Mineral Museum had been housed in the basement of the Asheville Civic Center.  Moving gave them four times more exhibit space and a myriad of new possibilities.  Designers for the new museum worked to focus the attention of the visitor on the display cases with dramatic lighting and presentations rather than on the architecture as they did in the rest of the spaces. 

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The Asheville Art Museum was also housed in the basement of the Civic Center.  The newly renovated 1926 Italian Renaissance building gave them substantially more space than their current home, enough to increase the number of works displayed from the permanent collection by fifty percent.  Traveling collections would also gain more space - one hundred percent more to be exact.  In the renovated library they now could showcase their permanent collection in four separate galleries and they would have two galleries for traveling collections.

The Health Adventure, a 23 year-old organization, had already established itself as one of the country's first health education centers for schools.  From their home in the Memorial Mission Hospital, they eagerly moved into the new complex.  Their new two-story home allowed them to create new exhibits for schools and, for the first time, the general public.   

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