WASHINGTON, D.C. _ The biggest of the bonanza of major museum openings over the last 18 months has to be next month's debut of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C.
Designed by David Adjaye, the British Ghanian architect who also designed the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver and is designing a new structure for the Studio Museum in Harlem, the 400,000-square-foot museum, covering the breadth of African American history and culture, occupies a prominent corner on the National Mall.
The building, Adjaye executed in collaboration with the North Carolina-based Freelon Group, as well as Davis Brody Bond, of New York and D.C, is a stark departure from the neoclassicism for which Washington's architecture is known. And while it is not yet complete (scaffolding still covers the building's broad entrance), the museum nonetheless cuts a daring profile on the National Mall, where its stacked trapezoidal forms appear to erupt from a grassy plain between the obelisk of the Washington Monument and the columnar facades of the Herbert Hoover Commerce Department Building. (The museum literally emerges from underground: Roughly 60 percent of its 400,000 square feet is below grade.)
If the insides are as good the outside, there is reason to be excited about this unusual building.
The museum is veiled in a bronze-colored cast-aluminum lattice (evocative of iron work once done by enslaved craftsmen) that looks moody in cloudy weather and shimmers in sunlight. It's a building whose demeanor is constantly shifting.
The structure is solemn, respectful of the difficult history it must commemorate. (The Mall itself once contained so-called slave pens, where individuals were held before auction.) But its triumphant silhouette also nods to African American achievement in politics, society and culture. Among the 34,000 objects in the permanent collection will be personal items belonging to abolitionist Harriet Tubman, a Jim Crow-era railroad car and the Parliament Funkadelic mothership. Groovy.
As Adjaye told Smithsonian Magazine in 2012, "It's not a story of a people that were taken down but actually a people that overcame and transformed an entire superpower into what it is today."
