From the New York Times: Design Shown for Museum of American Revolution
NC3D
A rendering of the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia as envisioned by Robert A. M. Stern.
By ROBIN POGREBIN
George Washington’s tent. His camp cups. The gun used by the minuteman commander who faced the British on the North Bridge in Concord. These are a few of the artifacts that will be on display when the American Revolution Center, a nonprofit educational organization, builds and moves into its new home, the Museum of the American Revolution, steps from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.
The design for the $150 million building, by Robert A. M. Stern,
is to be unveiled on Tuesday at the site where it is expected to open
in 2015, at South Third and Chestnut Streets. The center also announced a
$40 million challenge grant from its chairman, H. F. Lenfest, a media
entrepreneur and philanthropist in suburban Philadelphia.
“It’s a real milepost for us,” said Michael C. Quinn, the president and
chief executive of the center, which was founded in 2000 to expand
public knowledge of the American Revolution.
The museum has had something of a bumpy road. Mr. Stern was first
selected to design a building for it in 2002, when it was to be in
Valley Forge, Pa., where Washington’s soldiers endured the winter of
1777-78. Carved into a hillside in the Valley Forge National Historical
Park, the building would have had views of the historic encampment, 22
miles northwest of Philadelphia.
But a dispute with the National Park Service over the terms by which the
museum could occupy park land led to a change of plans, and the center
bought a 78-acre parcel of privately owned land that was nearly
surrounded by the historical park, intending to build Mr. Stern’s design
there. Then critics, including the National Parks Conservation Association,
an independent advocacy group, argued that any development would
diminish the site’s history. In September 2010, after more than a year
of negotiations, the center reached an agreement with the Park Service
to move the museum to its current location, the site of a former
visitors’ center in Independence National Historical Park in
Philadelphia. In exchange the center turned over its 78 acres at Valley
Forge to the Park Service.
Now Mr. Stern has produced a new design intended to fit into
Philadelphia’s historic district. The museum will face the First Bank of
the United States, completed in 1795, and sit near William Strickland’s
Merchants’ Exchange Building from 1834 and the United States Custom House from a century later. Anchoring the eastern end of Independence National Historical Park,
the brick building will announce itself with a tower that will be
topped by a cylindrical cupola with a bell-shaped roof. A wall running
along South Third Street will have brick cornerstones and recessed
arches accented with stone.
“What we’re going for is a building that fits in and reflects the
general character of the historic district, that expresses the period of
the American Revolution but in a fresh new way for the 21st century,”
Mr. Stern said. “We want to make a building that is inviting to the
public, but dignified, in which the architecture supports the
intellectual and cultural mission of the institution.”
The design is organized around a skylighted central interior court
featuring an elliptical staircase that will lead up to 18,000 square
feet of galleries and a multimedia theater and exhibition space
dedicated to George Washington’s tent. A museum shop and a cafe will
open onto the sidewalk front on South Third Street; a large ground-floor
window on Chestnut Street will offer views into the museum’s
cross-vaulted ticketing lobby.
“I think he’s come up with a landmark for Philadelphia,” Mr. Quinn said
of Mr. Stern. “His work demonstrates a real understanding of historic
architecture.” The American Revolution Center is the successor to the
Valley Forge Historical Society, which started collecting objects from
the Revolution more than a century ago.
While many existing institutions recount aspects of the Revolution, the
center argues that it will be one of the first to recount the full
history.
“It’s the last big subject in our history without a museum or a center,”
said the historian David McCullough, who helped found the museum’s
board of scholars. “The birth of the country is not sufficiently
understood by far too many of us.”
Thomas Fleming, a novelist and historian of the American Revolution who
has served on the scholars board, echoed Mr. McCullough. “So often
people have little fragments of the story in their heads — the Battle of
Bunker Hill, or something that happened in their vicinity,” he said,
but don’t “get a look at the complete story.”
Mr. Quinn said the themes of the Revolution remain relevant. “That generation was our country’s original greatest generation,” he said. “They
had the courage to take on Britain, and they were motivated largely by
the ideal of charting their own path of self-governance — of individual
liberty.”
