frozenman on 27/8/2006 at 06:49
Inline Image:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/09/photogalleries/american_indian_museum/images/primary/Museum_East_Face.jpgI'm guessing that only a small fraction of the people in this forum live in the Washington, DC area, so for the most part this may be completely irrelevant. In either case, if you've ever visited Washington D.C., which a) certainly is not everyone, and b) was marred by the field trip experience, you're probably familiar with the Smithsonian Museums. The National Museum of the American Indian opened up relatively recently, and I have to say it's one of the most amazing buildings i've ever been in.
Approaching the entrance is no easy task. A single long meandering pathway is paved in solid Washington D.C. granite, and to your right is a fountain. What's amazing about the fountain is that the water flows anti-parallel to the pathway entering the museum, but the grade is so insanely small that it still appears to be a flat plane. The source of the flow spirals around and around finally reaching a bizarre HOLE in the water. Furthermore, somewhere along the flow, kind of near this hole, the flow of the water seems to have reversed, and now its flowing towards the black hole. Okay this makes sense in terms of science and such, but the visual effect is bewildering.
Upon entering, the first thing room you enter is a massive domed hall. Images cannot possibly capture just how big this room is. At the top of the dome is an
oculus which projects a perfect ellipse onto the sides of the cylinder that form the room. Conic sections. At the base there are a few exhibits, kayaks and things, a couple amazing cylclical wood carvings, but on one edge of the wall is a rather small slit to the outside world, and across this slit are place several VERY LARGE PRISMS. The result being, at just about every time of the day, at some point in this hall, there is a massive cycle of ROYGBIV, where a whole human can fit between blue and violet. It was a very lucky coincidence that at the time I entered, the spectrum was projected plainly on the floor, and so I joined in with all the many 5 year olds and strollers in standing in color.
Furthermore, the building appears to be constructed entirely of CIRCLES of varying diameters. Benches were constructed by taking a hallway circle, duplicating it, shortening the radius by a few feet, and finally moving the center to the left another few feet. This makes the entire building insanely maze-like and enjoyable to navigate. (In the smaller exhibits I actually DID get lost a few times).
The exhibits themselves weren't that amazing, kind of standard "IF WE PUT THIS ON A PLACARD IT WILL BECOME IMPORTANT" stuff, though it was interesting to hear Natives of a certain tribe describe themselves as members of a certain species of a tree that grows. However the carvings of axes and tobacco pipes where fucking great, particularly because each item is housed in a spring-loaded stainless-steel drawer, so the examiner probably feels a bit like Newman when he's stealing the dinosaur embryos in Jurassic Park.
Afterwards, walking around the capitol was just as satisfying. Sitting on the capitol steps, it's amazing to think that i'm sitting right on the throbbing pinprick of a heart, this angst-ridden-teenager called America. Also sitting in some beautiful Cherry Blossoms given to us by JAPAN. Yeah these trees? They're Japan's...oh we go way back. They're like a birthday present. I sat in the trees of Japan. There's something about the enormous size of the buildings in D.C. I live near DC. If you climb to the top of my University's football stadium at night, you can see clear to the capitol. This is like 20 miles away.
But in a strange way this almost contributes to my enjoyment- I'm not here on a shitty forced tourism retreat. Tour lines, tickets, bus rides. No actually it took me like 25 minutes to drive here, yeah i gotta be back to work at 4.
Anyways, if you ever have the chance to visit the city, get stoned and wallow in the overwhelming harmony of geometry that circumscribes the city. (purely architechturely u see?)
More stolen pictures:
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http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/Issues/2004/0411/images/NMAI2.jpg)
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http://www.flickr.com/images/spaceball.gif)
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http://static.flickr.com/61/184951602_d6ba703506.jpg?v=0)
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http://static.flickr.com/84/224242687_0077c20f2b.jpg?v=0)
aguywhoplaysthief on 27/8/2006 at 17:30
First thing first: it's a very nice building.
But...I went to this thing almost right after it opened, and both me and my friend (an architect with another Smithsonian museum) were rather disappointed with the actual "museum" parts.
The first thing that we didn't like was what we were presented with when we walked in: there is this big section where some Native-American presenter does what amounted, in my eyes, to a minstrel show for white children. Maybe I'm just more sensitive to this sort of thing than most people, but I get the same feeling when I go through the reservations in Arizona/New Mexico and it's all about trinkets for tourists, and gambling. It's sad and depressing.
Additionally, a couple of the exhibits came away as rather unfocused, and they had poor flow. My general impression was that they had this large building, and some stuff, but they didn't really know how or where to put it in a way that makes sense and had clear purpose. Although, this could very well be a way to cater to the kids of today with two-second attention spans.
Finally, both of us came away with the impression that the lovable American-Indians didn't do anything other than make pottery and get killed by Whites. Most of the top-level (maybe all of it - I don't remember) was pretty much one big continuous White-guilt session.
I will say that when we went some of the things weren't done, so hopefully it's improved a little since then. For example, the steel drawers that frozenman mentioned didn't have anything in them. It's a new museum, and it will mature over time like the rest of them.
