|
By INGA SAFFRON
Inquirer Architecture Critic
One of the first things you
notice about the National Constitution Center is that it is blessedly free of the requisite Philadelphia red brick, in contrast to the other new structures on Independence Mall. Instead, the center is clad in a skim-milk-pale Indiana limestone, a material that calls to mind the imposing government buildings along that other mall, in Washington.
This unabashed reference to a signature feature of American officialdom might have sunk the design into a different sort of cliche, but the
center that opens today avoids that sandpit, too. It is neither a puffed-up federal edifice nor a modern building in colonial drag, but a thoughtful work of architecture that distills our core national values into easy-to-read physical form.
From its two-story glass entrance, dubbed the "front porch" by its architect, Henry N. Cobb, to the embracing triangular wing that houses the only eatery within the mall, this is a building that proclaims accessibility and urbanity as
loudly as civic dignity. Though it aims to be a national center for constitutional scholarship, the museum's architecture is a willing and eager participant in Philadelphia's gritty cityscape and the city's ongoing struggle for survival.
Cobb and his New York firm of Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners have managed to make a gargantuan civic building feel, if not quite intimate, at least manageable. Their $140 million modernist building suffers no lack of assertiveness, yet it does not
steal the limelight from tiny, colonial Independence Hall, which it faces across the three-block length of the mall.
Even Ralph Appelbaum's exhibition design, which some feared might anesthetize visitors with text and earnestness, manages to turn America's greatest legal document into visual entertainment, although it does slip at times into a "Small World After All" sentimentality.
Philadelphians, who seem to have given up hope that anyone can design a decent building
here, have snickered from the start that Cobb's center was the latest example of out-of-date architecture being dumped on the city. It's easy to understand where the griping comes from. The center has been described as a retread of the National Gallery's East Wing, designed 30 years ago by Cobb's partner I.M. Pei. Their firm has developed a modernism so classical that it has become the establishment style.
But while there is a family resemblance to the East Wing, especially around the
Constitution Center's main entrance, the visual similarities don't diminish its virtues. Nor do the likenesses convey the whole story. Although clearly well-mannered, the museum has a subversive streak that is especially welcome in these times.
Cobb, a Boston Brahman who talks passionately about both American democracy and American cities - and who understands the connection between the two - has taken a lousy site next to the ramp for the Ben Franklin Bridge and gone to some effort to
forge links to the surrounding city.
He started by including windows in places that other architects would have written off. Then he established a diagonal sight line that runs from the mall, through the building, to forlorn Franklin Square. The gesture is the first step in rescuing this forgotten, historic public space. It also ensures that museum visitors cannot ignore demonstrations there, including an antiwar event scheduled to mark the museum's opening.
If you want to
appreciate how radical this is, just look at the hermetic government buildings elsewhere around Independence Mall: the federal courthouse, the Federal Reserve Bank, the U.S. Mint. Fortress America, every one.
Cobb's museum understands that democracy can't exist in a vacuum. By bringing Franklin Square back into the mix, he raises the possibility that it could someday serve as the Rittenhouse Square for the neighborhoods of Old City, Northern Liberties and Chinatown. Of the three new
buildings on the mall - which include the Visitor Center and Liberty Bell Center - only the museum takes its obligation to the city seriously, and that alone would make it the best of the additions.
What's more, Cobb won a battle to keep the museum from imprisoning itself behind a ring of security bollards. The center agreed to spend an additional $1 million to install less obtrusive landscape barriers that double as benches.
Cobb's sensitivity to cities and democracy comes
through in other ways. Because the building's forms have clear symbolic meanings, the museum speaks a familiar language that can be read by Americans in the way that Europeans read their churches.
These forms include a theater shaped like a star, the symbol for the states that compose the whole of our nation. The front entrance is an indented rectangle that has the same dimensions as the central part of Independence Hall.
Then there is the triangular restaurant that reaches out
and visibly embraces the rest of the mall. Since it will cater to museum visitors, office workers and city residents alike, I predict that it will do more to salvage Edmund Bacon's ill-conceived mall than any of the other renovation projects.
The other purpose of Cobb's geometric forms is to break up the museum's bulk, keeping the immense building from overwhelming little Independence Hall.
At 160,000 square feet, the Constitution Center is as big as some 10-story office
buildings. But before you start getting museum fatigue, it's important to know that less than half of it is devoted to exhibits. The rest of the center houses administrative offices, scholars' cubicles, two museum shops, an archive, a conference center, and lots of flexible, open space, with which the museum hopes to capture the lucrative banquet trade. How pragmatically American can you get?
For all his seriousness, Cobb is not above a little drama. He has carefully stage-managed the
act of arrival at the center, which includes a new bus depot for Philadelphia's historic district. Previously, buses dumped tourists wherever they could, but now they will glide into a dedicated drop-off area behind the museum's main facade.
A large, triangular wall keeps tourists from seeing the mall until the last moment, when they walk through a high portal, inscribed appropriately with the words We the People. Then they are rewarded with a panorama of the mall and the city beyond.
A word needs to be said about the museum's real antecedent: the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, also designed by Appelbaum and Cobb's firm. The team reprises in the Constitution Center some of the successful devices used there.
On arrival, visitors are given a delegate's card, as if they were participants in the 1787 constitutional convention; in Washington, they get a card bearing the name and bio of a Holocaust victim. There, visitors are shunted into a claustrophobic
corridor to simulate the Nazi roundup of Jews; here, tourists are gathered into the star theater for an introductory program, so that individuals can be turned into citizens. Hence the museum's slogan: "Enter as a visitor. Leave as a citizen."
There's much more. Perhaps the most kitschy moment comes at the end of the tour, when visitors emerge into Signers' Hall, where figures of the 42 original delegates have been faithfully rendered in bronze, according to known information
about height and appearance. Unfortunately, most people in 1787 were much shorter than people today, so you feel a little like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.
Whether this static virtual-reality schmaltz works in these days of electronic virtual reality remains to be seen. Visitors can ponder this when they exit onto a terrace cafe that offers splendid views of the city and an electronic ticker with the latest constitutional-law news.
Some days, the news is better than others,
both for our democracy and our city. But whatever the day's events, we can still take comfort in the simple forms, noble aims, and essential verities of this admirable National Constitution Center.
© 2003 Knight Ridder Inc. Reprinted by Permission.
|
