The Two Museums

Jackson, Mississippi

Burns Cooley Dennis, Inc. (BCD) teamed with ECD (a joint venture of Eley Guild Hardy Architects, Cooke Douglass Farr Lemons Architects & Engineers, P.A., and Dale Partners Architects), Perkins+Will and Spencer-Engineers, Inc. to work on a once-in-a-lifetime project, The Two Museums. The museum complex, located in downtown Jackson atop a dormant volcano and up against an edge of the Pearl River Valley flood plain, was a $90 million project for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History consisting of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the Museum of Mississippi History. The combination of the dormant volcano soil stratification and the expansive clay soils of the Pearl River Valley flood plain required auger cast pile foundations to support the buildings, a specialized crawl space below the bottom levels to protect against highly expansive clays, and a specialized soil nail wall to protect the existing nearby property and allow below-grade construction of the lower levels of the museums.