Lab Museum Design & Interpretation

You asked for candid....

From the looks of it, people are going for simplicity.  The pages I found may have a bit more razzle-dazzle (certainly more than we can duplicate in one week), but I think there might be elements we can use.

I know I've dragged it up before, but it hasn't been posted anywhere on the website...BMW has a cool online exhibit through their Mobile Tradition website that uses an interactive timeline to highlight the company's history. I think the link given is auf Deutsch but the text isn't particularly important.

            One of the primary attractions of Mary Washington, back when I was a high school senior in California with no idea what “historic preservation” really meant, was its proximity to Washington, D.C., with its great free museums.  So it was with pleasure that I greeted the opportunity to visit the newest addition to the Mall, the National Museum of the American Indian with Trillian and Betsy on a chilly Saturday morning.

            After discovering that the parking meters directly across the street from the museum were not enforced on weekends, our next delightful surprise was the architecture of the museum itself.  I had been contemplating the “mystification” concept as it applies to cultures different from our own—the concept of “the other.”  The architecture of the National Museum of the American Indian definitely reinforces this idea.  There is nothing else like it on the Mall.  Within plain view of the rectilinear forms of the Capitol and the Gothic flight of fancy that is the Smithsonian Castle, the new museum stands in stark contrast, its rough-hewn walls waving in and out, almost like it had been formed by wind.  According to the museum’s own literature, “The building is aligned to the cardinal directions and to the center point of the Capitol dome.”

            Inside, the eye is drawn upward to the museum’s ceiling, four stories up, and domed in perhaps another nod to its orientation to the Capitol.  This upward openness is in direct contrast to the view forward from the entrance.  The majority of the open central space is obscured from the entrance by an approximately six-foot high copper wall.  Beyond the wall, all that is visible is the prominent but aesthetically uninspiring staircase to the exhibits on the third and fourth floors.  The overall effect is to almost push, rather than draw, the eye up to the dome and the opening in its center, creating a cathedral-like atmosphere in which the visitor feels very small, definitely in keeping with Berger’s assessment of how many people view museums.

            The exhibits themselves struck an odd balance between promoting and refuting the concept of “the other,” where I had expected them to go one way or the other.  Several of the displays of Indian arts and artifacts, notably representations of animals and hunting tools, created a peculiar separation between the viewer and the objects.  Rather than provide any explanatory text adjacent to the physical objects, visitors must approach a video touch screen set back a few feet from the display cases (too far for someone with my lousy eyesight to be able to appreciate the objects in the cases and the computerized explanations of them at the same time).  I tried to examine the objects in the cases first, then use the screens to learn more about those objects that interested me the most, but it seemed that the standard practice among visitors was to simply use the screen to navigate the cases.

            Several of the exhibits stressed the differences not only between the viewer and the native cultures, but also between the different cultures themselves.  Others attempted to integrate these cultures as they have evolved into (what the viewer might assume to be) the broader American scene.  Still others reflected the uneasy history between the time of “the other” and today’s presumed integration, when the cultures overlapped but didn’t quite mesh; displays of Bibles, guns and treaties (all broken, stressed the Native American tour guide) drove home the point.  The idea seemed to be that these familiar objects had somehow been made foreign by their association with the Native peoples.

            None of this objectification and mystification as I interpreted it was overt or particularly offensive to anyone; I think, if anything, we’re all desensitized to the point that it might be easy to miss.  It was also apparent that people of many different Native cultures had been deeply involved in the preparation and presentation of the various exhibits, so I don’t think that the mystification stemmed from some nonnative curator’s interpretation, but rather from how modern Native Americans perceive themselves as outsiders.

Collier 2yo