Exhibition N⁰²: Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose
Nowruz Around the World Exhibit
San Jose, California
Status: ON-GOING
Recognition: 2020 IMLS Museums for America Awards

Project Description
Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose – Nowruz Exhibition
Sanctuary as Ritual and Cultural Continuity

The Nowruz Exhibition at the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose constructs a collective sanctuary through ritual: a spatial framework where cultural memory, seasonal cycles, and shared experience converge. At a moment marked by cultural division and misunderstanding, the project positions architecture as a medium for connection. Centered on Nowruz, the 3,000-year-old Persian New Year marking the arrival of spring, the exhibition translates a living tradition into an immersive, participatory environment for children and families. Rather than presenting culture as static display, the exhibition operates as a temporal and spatial system, where ritual becomes the primary structure through which space is organized and experienced. Observed across regions including Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, India, Pakistan, and Turkey, Nowruz transcends national, religious, and linguistic boundaries. The exhibition leverages this shared cultural framework to construct a space of encounter—where renewal, generosity, and collective gathering are experienced as both cultural specificity and universal condition..

Exhibition Experience
The exhibition is organized as a continuous field of environments that integrate storytelling, sensory experience, and participation. Architecture operates not as backdrop, but as an active framework that guides movement, interaction, and interpretation.
Key spatial elements include:

  • Haft-Seen Installation
    A central, sensory environment translating the symbolic table into an interactive spatial system of renewal and cyclical time

  • Chaharshanbe Suri Experience
    An interpretive fire installation transforming ritual into a spatial act of release, movement, and collective participation

  • Family Gathering Spaces
    Environments structured for storytelling, shared meals, and intergenerational exchange

  • Art, Music, and Poetry Stations
    Distributed cultural nodes that construct a multi-sensory archive of traditions across regions

  • Children’s Discovery Zones
    Hands-on environments where cultural practices are translated into play, creativity, and embodied learning


Collaborative Authorship
The project is developed through a distributed and community participatory design process, aligning with MIIM’s approach to authorship as collective rather than singular.
This includes:

  • Community design charrettes with families, artists, and cultural leaders

  • Advisory panels with scholars and practitioners

  • Iterative prototyping and testing with children and caregivers

  • Ongoing civic engagement over an extended development period

Through this process, the exhibition becomes a co-authored cultural space, reflecting lived experience, nuance, and community knowledge.


Project Goals
Advance Cross-Cultural Understanding: Create meaningful opportunities for children and families to engage with Persian culture in ways that are joyful, authentic, and accessible.
Center Community Voices: Collaborate with local Persian, Iranian, and broader Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) communities to co-create exhibition content.
Develop a National Traveling Exhibition: Design a scalable, tour-ready exhibition that can reach diverse audiences across the United States.
Strengthen Museum Practice: Establish best practices in culturally responsive exhibition design, civic engagement, and communications strategies for sensitive or underrepresented topics.

Position Within MIIM’s Work
The Nowruz Exhibition advances MIIM DESIGNS’ investigation into architecture as a temporal and ritual framework for collective identity. Here, sanctuary is not defined by enclosure, but by shared cultural practice—a space continuously produced through participation, memory, and renewal.