National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photo by André Chung.
You donât even need to go inside the new National Museum of African American History and Culture to get the point. Imagine the alphabet soup of agencies that govern the National Mall gave you a site, just to the right of the Washington Monument. When you came to them with your first idea, they cut it down. Too tall. So you draw a box next to the monument, a dotted square against the green lawn and the blue sky. Into that square you could fit a concrete donut like SOMâs Hirshhorn Museum, or a stone prism like I.M. Peiâs East Wing, or another box with columns like most of the other museums.
But you decide you didnât have to fill that square or make a solid. Instead, youâll make a gem. Your museum will be smaller, lacier, more mutable. Gold in the morning and glowing at night. The NMAAHC works like a power player who only speaks in a whisper. You have to lean in.
The $540 million museum, which officially opens on Saturday, September 24, couldnât have arrived at a more opportune moment. The twin missions embodied in its clunky name seem to speak directly to the events of this year. #Blacklivesmatter has foregrounded African-Americansâ continuous struggle for equality, making the museumâs history section painfully current, while African-American excellence in popular culture has never been more obviousâeven as the push for representation on screen continues.
âWe were all cursing when it didnât open last year, but I think it has special power now,â says architect David Adjaye, the projectâs lead designer. âEvery generation thinks we know the story, weâve grown past it, weâre integrated, weâre done, and then a decade later there is memory loss. We go back to stigmatizing and dividing. In the 18th and 19th century, museums were about understanding the world. Now [that] we understand the world, we have to understand each other.â
Latest Tweet
đ± https://t.co/wQcNl3Vn2s
about 11 hours ago
Latest Instagram
Featured articles
CityLab
Curbed
New York Times
99 Percent Invisible