Welcome back to Critical Eye, Alexandra Lange's incisive, observant, curious, human- and street-friendly architecture column for Curbed. In this edition, Lange visits the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., to examine its place on the National Mall and the ways the institution's architecture helps tell a complex, still-unfolding story. You don?t 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 SOM?s Hirshhorn Museum, or a stone prism like I.M. Pei?s East Wing, or another box with columns like most of the other museums.
But you decide you didn?t have to fill that square or make a solid. Instead, you?ll 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, couldn?t 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. #Blackl...