The Marines new museum to open on USMC's birthday

Washington Post:

They've turned on the air conditioning inside the new National Museum of the Marine Corps, and they've hung fighter planes from the massive girders that poke above the skyline as you drive along Interstate 95 past Quantico. Although it won't open to the public until Nov. 10, the shell of the building and the distinctive 210-foot mast and sail-like glass structure that tops it-- are already attracting notice from passersby. Inside, it's still very much a work zone.

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The sloping metal peak of the new Marine Corps Museum isn't just an eye-catcher from the roadway, however. It is, according to the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, which will run the site (a public-private venture with the Marines), an iconic shape inspired by the famous photograph of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi during the bloody World War II battle for Iwo Jima. And sure enough, you can see the inspiration clearly in a logo for the new museum, which shows the famous cluster of Marines with the new building's peaked top superimposed over them. Soaring above a round base, a bold "mast" parallels the line of the flagpole they struggled to raise on difficult terrain.

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Architecturally, the glass and metal structure rising above I-95 is a kind of "recruitment" for visitors, drawing them off the highway and into the museum (admission is free). Once in, the visitor is in the marble-clad "Leatherneck Gallery," a round, solemn space with some spicy quotations carved on the walls ("Come on you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?" is one, attributed to 1st Sgt. Dan Daly). It would be a stronger space if not quite so cluttered with particular details meant to ensure the visitor that this isn't just any old modernist space, but very particularly a "Marine" space. There are planes and a helicopter, and a ship's tower, made from military metal sheeting. Portholes ring the gallery, with low benches beneath them.

Museum leaders describe the building as a large, inspirational center ring, with gallery spaces that are meant to be "immersive" and filled with multimedia offerings (one exhibit will give visitors the sounds and sights of a beach landing). The visitor files through exhibitions devoted to different wars, and to what it's like to join and train with the Marines. The Holocaust Museum in Washington may have been an inspiration for some elements of the new museum's design (by Fentress Bradburn Architects, a Denver-based firm), though the Marine museum is even more starkly divided between its center, contemplative space and surrounding exhibition areas.

"Immersive" is the reigning buzzword for museums these days (think of the Spy Museum), and the trend away from objects and education and toward narratives and dramatization can clearly be seen in the shape of this new building. Once you leave the Leatherneck Gallery you really have no clear sense of the building's shape, dimensions or layout.

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This is a museum about volume, energy and speed, rather like the highway it overlooks. Some people look at superhighways and see excitement, mobility and freedom. Others see anxiety, restlessness and urgency. It is the last of these, urgency, that one feels most strongly in the architecture of the Marine museum. This is an expanding country, a diversifying country, and a country that is essentially failing in the project of teaching its citizens fundamental lessons of history, democracy and the vulnerabilities of democracy. This building is put together to bring people out of their private space, in huge numbers, to teach them a little, very quickly, about the cost of liberty (and maybe the dangers of empire).

This is a story more about architecture than a museum, but enough of the flavor of the place slipped intot he article to get you interested. It did not say whether it will replace the current Marine Corps museum at Eighth and I Street Headquarters Marine Corps in DC. I would like to see the place. I have some interesting memories of watching the sun rise over the Potomac in the fall of 1966 while going through Marine Corps OCS in Quantico. At least the start of the days was pretty.