A Life at the Museum

CLEANING THE 11-TON, 13-foot taxidermy pachyderm that welcomes visitors to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History isn’t a job for your average garden hose—or even a pressure washer.

This spring, a team of six staff and contractors perched on 12-foot-tall ladders and lifts carefully vacuumed the hide of Henry the African bush elephant and brushed his hair in preparation for a middle-of-the-night 3D scan. Otherwise, says Chun-Hsi Wong ’92, associate director for operations at the museum, “you pick up every hairball.”

It’s another day at the office for Wong, who oversees all physical and administrative aspects of the most-visited Smithsonian museum, home to the Hope Diamond, Tyrannosaurus rex fossils and the United States’ oldest continuously operating insect zoo. He ensures that its roughly 4 million annual guests can easily navigate the exhibits, that the museum’s researchers have the facilities they need to keep making critical discoveries, and that the 115-year-old building is as safe as possible from fires, floods or Wi-Fi outages.

“These walls are 36 inches thick,” says Wong. “For me to try to provide public Wi-Fi—how do you do that?”

Wong, who graduated from UMD with a degree in architecture, has always been fascinated with physical spaces. Growing up in Taiwan, he’d scan the daily newspaper for apartment listings and their accompanying floor plans, transforming the image on the page into a model in his head.

Wong and his family immigrated to Maryland after the youngster finished elementary school. In high school, he participated in architecture drafting contests, winning the state competition twice. He and his three siblings attended UMD, where he worked as a telephone technician, a job that he happily recalls got him inside nearly every building on campus.

After earning a master’s degree in architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, Wong was working for a private firm that was awarded the Pentagon Renovation Project; a kickoff meeting had been scheduled for Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorism attack on the building, he says, “changed the trajectory of my whole career.”

The project turned into a mandate to rebuild the Pentagon. After that was finished, Wong became assistant director for headquarter facilities for the Department of Homeland Security, then moved on to the Smithsonian.

“It’s more fun here,” he says. “You see people smiling when they’re here.”

Wong knows that part of the reason people delight in visiting the museum is seeing the building itself, says Brenda Sanchez ’78, senior architect and senior design manager for the Smithsonian Institution.

“Somebody that isn’t sensitive to design could go ahead and do something without realizing, ‘We’re destroying a piece of historic fabric,’” she says. “He’s very good about asking for input for historic preservation and from the rest of the team that he needs to work with.”

Technology and physical space are major factors Wong must consider in his role. When he worked on the five-year renovation of the fossil hall, the team balanced QR codes and augmented reality features with the preserved remains. “People come here to see the real thing,” he says. He also encouraged halving the number of objects on display to increase circulation space and let people have room to take in the best fossils.

In the research space of the museum, Wong oversees a DNA lab with 64 microscope stations, where scientists discover 25 to 30 new animal and plant species every year. The Museum Support Center in Suitland, Md., also under his jurisdiction, holds even more lab space, plus three football fields worth of alcohol rooms, where animals of all types are preserved. “Somebody’s job is just to continuously top off the alcohol, because it evaporates,” says Wong.

Sometimes, simple geometry dictates the goings-on at the 2 million-square-foot building. The dimensions of every door frame are carefully recorded so that objects going out for display can be approved for clearance. In the Sant Ocean Hall, Wong says, the right whale skull on display isn’t necessarily the best example they have—it’s just the one that fit.

A personal perk of the job, Wong says, is the bragging rights it’s given his kids over the years. When he greeted the truck that delivered a complete skeleton of a T. rex in 2014, a resulting photo of his back appeared in many media outlets. “My kids said, ‘Dad, your butt is famous,’” he says.