I’m late in reading it, but Martin Filler published a steaming essay in Architectural Record on the dark art of the outsized visitor center at popular historic sites. “I have come to realize,” he writes, “that visitor centers subvert credibility through the extra degree of separation they impose between viewer and artifact.” His first target is the new subterranean tourist tank at the U.S. Capitol, which does look appalling in the photos.
This 580,000-square-foot finished basement — three fourths the size of the Capitol itself—supersedes its principal functions as tourist-processing machine and exhibition hall in several unstated ways. It is also an embodiment of the profligate but ineffectual regime that commissioned it; a reductio ad absurdum of prevalent notions that historic sites require a panoply of “amenities” to entice, engage, entertain, enlighten, and enlarge its audience; and a manifestation of the “grow-or-die” corporate philosophy increasingly embraced by cultural, educational, and philanthropic institutions in thrall to their plutocratic backers.
All true, perhaps, but there was another motivation. Filler explains that the behemoth was occasioned by security concerns, not the 9/11 variety but “the shooting deaths of two Capitol policemen in 1998.”
Forget their being memorialized by stricter gun controls enacted by a Congress in the pocket of the NRA. The obvious solution to that tragedy was to dig deep and create an insanely expensive, oppressively scaled, marble-armored bunker to keep lawmakers and lobbyists out of firearm range.
Politics aside, this perspective seems painfully apt. Filler goes on to discuss the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia and the largely underground facility at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s former home in rural Virginia. I’m intrigued by the latter because I visited Mount Vernon for the first time last fall, and I remember the visitor center well — not because it marred the tranquility of the site, as Filler legitimately argues, but because it was so clearly aimed at keeping young boys awake. The windowless Disneylike sequence of five-sense displays, fish smells and all, were designed to show what life was like in Washington’s time; but they emitted such a cacophony of electronically amplified, cinema-level sounds that our main sensation by the end was an urge to emerge outdoors, where we really could see, at least visually and sonically, what life was like in Washington’s time. Noting that Mount Vernon is one of the loveliest, best-preserved landmarks in the country, Filler writes:
I’m…skeptical of marketers’ insistence that the survival of our cultural institutions demands extreme museological means to beguile a cyber-addicted populace. Earlier generations found ways to enjoy historic sites without the aid of touch screens, surround sound, interactive simulations, holograms, costumed reenactors, cappuccino, T-shirts…. If such gimmicks are now deemed obligatory, how did unmediated landmarks sustain America’s collective imagination — what Abraham Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory” — for so long?
I fear the critic succumbs to nostalgia here. I’m not sure it’s a safe assumption that “unmediated” monuments have until now “sustain[ed] America’s collective imagination.” Some children will always be bored by sites of this kind, not because they need bells and whistles but because they have little basis for understanding what it means to run a household as our forebears did. As for souvenirs, they’re the perfect way to raise funds for preservation, as they give people a tangible connection with the site for months or years afterward. But I couldn’t agree more that kids can and should be engaged in unobtrusive ways, if only so the moment isn’t ruined for adults.
Filler closes by warning us that an ungainly visitor center is planned for Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial; and I can chime in that a large center opened at Monticello shortly after our visit last year. (The Washington Post says it’s all about crowd control.) Hats off to Filler for spotlighting an architectural stream that too often escapes serious attention.
