Los Angeles Times: The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and
Culture will open on the Mall in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 24. (Alan
Karchmer / National Museum of African American History and Culture)
The panels wrapping the exterior of the museum are inspired by ironwork created by American slaves. (Alan Karchmer / NMAAHC)
By Christopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic
September 13, 2016 Reporting from Washington, D. C.
In full shadow it's a workmanlike brown, the color of shoe leather.
In direct sunlight the shade is closer to bronze. Late in the day its
western edge, turned toward the Washington Monument and the Lincoln
Memorial, begins to reflect the setting sun and turns a surprisingly
bright gold.
The shifting personality of the National Museum of
African American History and Culture, designed by a consortium of
architecture firms calling itself Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup and set
to open Sept. 24 near the center of the Mall, is no fluke or simple
trick of light.
The most impressive and ambitious public building
to go up in Washington in a generation — if also the owner of a truly
awkward acronym — the NMAAHC draws its considerable power from a
willingness to embrace the nearly bottomless complexity of both its
mission and its site.
As a new branch of the Smithsonian located
three blocks south of the White House, charged with marking the origins
and history of the slave trade and giving some measure of the modern
African American experience, the museum could hardly be more fraught as a
cultural institution or work of architecture.
Despite some flaws
and unfortunate signs of cost-cutting, the design succeeds almost
precisely to the degree that it is enigmatic and even fickle, spanning
huge gulfs in the national character without being naive enough to try
to close them. The building embraces memory and aspiration, protest and
reconciliation, pride and shame.
Its attitude toward architectural
battle lines is similarly catholic. It is an essentially modern
building cloaked in a decorative pattern, aloof and standoffish in
certain ways and carefully contextual in others.
As it rises from
the northern edge of the Mall along Constitution Avenue — with the
Washington Monument directly to the west, the Smithsonian’s 1964
National Museum of American History to the east, the massive 1932
Commerce Department to the north and open grass to the south — the
NMAAHC is undeniably an imposing architectural object, monumental and
temple-like.
Yet it also suggests something that has been
unearthed, a box pulled from the ground and dusted off; much of its
420,000 square feet of interior space is buried below street level.
The
$540-million museum is wrapped in three levels of bronze-coated
aluminum panels atop an all-glass ground floor. The panels (which the
architects originally hoped would be entirely bronze) are decorated with
a lattice pattern inspired by ironwork made by slaves. They tilt
outward at an angle designed to match the capstone on the Washington
Monument.
According to architect David Adjaye, the museum’s
Ghana-born, London-based lead designer, the inspiration for the
building’s unusual silhouette is in part a carved wooden sculpture by
the Yoruba artist Olowe of Ise. On display inside the museum, it shows a
figure of a king wearing a headdress with the same three-level,
inverted-pyramid silhouette.
The building has two entrances. An
expected 70% of visitors will come in from the Mall side, where they’ll
walk under a giant long-span shade structure, inspired by the front
porches of Southern houses, that is almost entirely detached from the
rest of the building. The rest will come in from Constitution Avenue.
This
double-sidedness is fundamental to the museum’s civic role and
architectural personality. The NMAAHC occupies what Adjaye (whose
best-known work until now has been Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art)
calls a “knuckle” or “joint,” with a dense collection of neo-classical
federal office buildings on one side and the open space of the Mall on
the other.
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