PGAV: The St. Louis Company Behind Worldwide Attractions

    By Suzanne Vanderhoef

    If you’ve visited a major museum, zoo or other international cultural attraction – including the three largest aquariums in the world – there’s a good chance your experience, at least in part, was thanks to some folks from here in St. Louis.

    Local design company PGAV is the creative mastermind behind everything from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, to the 5-story aquarium in Abu Dhabi, to their newest project: the updated World’s Fair exhibit at the Missouri History Museum. They attribute their success to knowing what makes a good story and how to tell it.

    In the case of the World’s Fair exhibit, that means finding modern ways for visitors to relate to an event that took place more than a century ago.

    “There’s a touchscreen component to this around the model there are four different touchscreens,” explains Brian Roash, Designer and Art Director at PGAV. “It allows you to scroll through, read about different buildings, different parts of the fair information that may have been there before, but now it’s a little bit more technology driven this time around. “

    However, by far their biggest project to date is located far, far away from the Arch: the largest aquarium in the world in Abu Dhabi.

    “We were being asked to do things that we’d never done before, things that weren’t ever done before, especially just in the grand scale of this massive aquarium,” says Roash. “But PGAV had his hand on pretty much every element of the design, from the design of the actual building of the aquarium, all the way to the shapes of the tanks, to the a theming that went into the tanks, to the entire guest experience, how the guest journey from beginning all the way through the end, there’s media, we had our hands in pretty much everything to some degree with that project.”

    Speaking of aquariums, the group is also responsible for designing the number two and three on the list of the world’s biggest, as well.

    Link to the spotlight
    Sign Up
    HEC-TV NewsLetter

    Playing Now