Smithsonian Am History Museum: America’s Attic, Ready for a Second Act (Review/NYT)
When the National Museum of American History reopens on Friday after two years and $85 million of renovation, it may begin to shed its reputation as one of the more cramped and confounding corners of the Smithsonian Institution. The nickname “America’s Attic” may still come in handy now and then for describing the Smithsonian’s network of museums, with their squirreled-away treasures, but at the history museum a central five-story atrium now streams with daylight, promising other forms of illumination as the visitor heads off to the new or refreshed displays, with others to open in the next few months.
This doesn’t mean that the museum has solved its considerable problems — some loom larger now, simply because expectations are higher and more renovations are to follow in coming years. But the sense of change is dramatic. When you enter the atrium from the National Mall, you face a 40-foot-by-19-foot “waving flag” made of 960 reflective panels whose colors subtly shift as you move past — an abstract American flag that seems to affirm an interest in innovation while declaring the museum’s national role.
After all, this is the only national museum of American history as well as the largest history museum of any kind in the United States. Three million visitors a year were coming before the renovation. Its collection, with more than three million objects, ranges most famously from Jefferson’s writing desk, on which the Declaration of Independence was drafted, to Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz.”
Read entire article at Edward Rothstein in the NYT
This doesn’t mean that the museum has solved its considerable problems — some loom larger now, simply because expectations are higher and more renovations are to follow in coming years. But the sense of change is dramatic. When you enter the atrium from the National Mall, you face a 40-foot-by-19-foot “waving flag” made of 960 reflective panels whose colors subtly shift as you move past — an abstract American flag that seems to affirm an interest in innovation while declaring the museum’s national role.
After all, this is the only national museum of American history as well as the largest history museum of any kind in the United States. Three million visitors a year were coming before the renovation. Its collection, with more than three million objects, ranges most famously from Jefferson’s writing desk, on which the Declaration of Independence was drafted, to Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz.”