Making a New Museum Start to Finish: Meet the University Team Overseeing the New Building
This is the second in a series of articles exploring the complexities of building a new Museum in the heart of the Princeton campus from the perspectives of the architects, contractors, and University staff leading the project.
Against a steady soundtrack of whirring saws and beeping trucks, three members of Princeton University’s Office of Capital Projects weave their way through the new Museum’s construction site at the center of campus, pausing to snap photographs of a newly added feature or confer with clusters of contractors who flag them down as they make their daily rounds. As the University staffers responsible for managing the Museum project through its completion, the group—Director of Construction Sara Cicerone, Senior Program Manager Jane Curry, and Senior Project Manager Dale Edghill—regularly traverse the new facility, redirecting contractors, solving problems, keeping an eye on quality control, and ensuring that work is proceeding as planned.
They know the building in all its intricate detail, from the complexities of the smoke detection system (“the most sensitive on campus”) to the number of people on-site any given day (“250 to 300 workers”) and to the schedule for paving a third-floor terrace (“tomorrow”). As they navigate past scores of workers pushing carts loaded with wooden doorframes or construction debris, Curry draws attention to a deep cavity in the terrazzo floor that will house a mosaic created almost two thousand years ago; Cicerone points out the playful pattern of newly installed restroom wall tile; and Edghill gestures toward a particularly arresting vista from an angled office window. “I want to find an excuse to move my desk here,” he joked. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to work in a space with these views?”
Curry and Edghill have been involved with the project for almost a decade, when the University determined that a larger Museum was needed. Their experience leading previous Museum projects—including renovations to the former building’s medieval galleries and study rooms, the creation of an art storage facility, and upgrades to past security systems—positioned them to manage critical tasks before demolition of the old Museum could begin. “To empty a facility is a lot of effort,” Curry explained. “There was so much campus infrastructure running through that site prior to taking it offline; we needed to relocate the regional fire pump, install an emergency generator, and provide two stormwater basins in that part of campus.” They also led the evacuation of oversize and embedded art objects (objects so large that removing them from the old Museum was itself a monumental feat), outfitted interim office spaces for Museum staff, and compiled the construction documents needed to secure planning permits and approvals from local, regional, and state agencies.
Cicerone, Princeton Class of 1996, is the newest member of the group, serving in a role that was created just a year ago. “I oversee all large capital projects within central campus, providing support to the teams, tracking the project statuses, and keeping an eye on progress,” she said.
A civil engineering major, she began her career in construction management with a job fair in Dillon Gym, when she submitted her résumé to a firm restoring New York’s Grand Central Terminal. While she had planned to attend graduate school, the opportunity to contribute to the project prompted her to accept the position with little idea of what a construction manager did. “I came to work the first day dressed in business attire—and they sent me home early to buy boots,” she said. Although Cicerone eventually earned a PhD in structural engineering, the “daily problem solving,” varied schedule, and opportunity to “work directly with the tradespeople, designers, engineers, colleagues, and clients all united around a final goal” drew her back to the field.
Edghill echoes Cicerone’s sentiments. After summers spent working alongside the facilities team at Howard University, where he studied architecture, his first job at an architecture firm “felt disconnected” from the people using the buildings he helped design. “Getting to work with experts in every field, like scientists and curators, and the ability to see the end goal come to a reality has been a joy,” he said.
All three appreciate the variability of their duties. “When the day begins, we are always trying to anticipate the work ahead of us,” Edghill said. Cicerone added, “There’s no typical agenda—except on Tuesdays,” when they meet with the design team and contractors and then walk the construction site to review progress. On any other day, the three leads may convene with Museum staff “to try to stay in step as we each coordinate various parts of the project,” Curry said; consult with representatives from various University units; or confer with Princeton’s interior designers and engineers.
Due to its location at Princeton’s historic core, the Museum is unlike any other building the group has supervised. “The logistics of building something of this scale on the central campus—as one of the first projects of the 2026 Campus Plan—has added to the complexity,” Curry said. For instance, moving enormous heavy-timber structural beams across a densely populated University neighborhood required “checking on the turning radiuses of the trucks getting them here,” she explained. Regular “neighborhood meetings” with campus partners, such as the Office of Undergraduate Housing, help minimize disruptions on a site surrounded by teaching spaces and residence halls. “They help us build quiet periods into the schedule,” Curry said. “We don’t want to be jackhammering next to a classroom building during exam period.”
The building’s design also separates it from other projects. “This building’s sophisticated structure is uniquely challenging,” Cicerone said. “It had to be erected in a specific sequence, including the hanging of the facades, because of the expectations of how the building would react as weight was added. In my twenty-year career, this is only the second building I’ve worked on that is so specific.”
The requirements for conserving, storing, and displaying art for wide audiences further differentiate the Museum from other campus structures. “Part of the program is keeping tight environmental conditions for the art, including humidity and temperature,” Curry said. This includes the creation of casework embedded in the building’s structure, refrigerated rooms for housing photographs, and art conservation studios designed to accommodate specialized work and equipment. Furthermore, “The building is wayfinding and signage intensive due to its public nature and status as a cultural building.” Public amenities such as a full-service restaurant, creativity labs, and large-scale art installations further set the facility apart and require frequent collaboration with Museum leadership, artists, and contractors.
Regularly spending time on the site has given the group insight into aspects of the new Museum that may surprise and delight future visitors. “When they go into the building, I think they will be most surprised by the scale of it,” Curry said, as her colleagues nodded in agreement. “[Visitors to the construction site] are like, ‘Oh, this is really big!’” Most impressively, Edghill noted, “They are gorgeous spaces.” Cicerone concurred: “They are. The execution of the skylights and the Solatubes, a system that brings natural daylight into the galleries, is so sensitive to the artwork.”
The project resonates with each member of the team in different ways. As an alumna, Cicerone appreciates “the sensitivity of the building to the campus itself. The desire to maintain the campus pathways is impressive.” Curry, who regularly brought her own children to the former Museum, is pleased that the design “increases visibility of the Museum in the community and increases the Museum’s role in the life of the University by extending teaching hours and expanding the ability to bring in art objects.” Edghill is gratified by the wide range of people who have come together to create the new facility. “I’m really proud of the way we’ve all been able to collaborate on everything that’s in the building,” he stated. “There’s no sole proprietor. It’s really taken a team to get us where we are today.”
Christine Minerva
Writing and Communications Assistant