They’ve turned on the air conditioning inside the new National Museum of the Marine Corps, and they’ve hung fighter planes from the massive girders that poke above the skyline as you drive along Interstate 95 past Quantico, Va. Although it won’t open to the public until Nov. 10, the shell of the building, and the distinctive 210-foot mast and sail-like glass structure that tops it, are already attracting notice from passersby. Inside, it’s still a work zone.
If you build a house near an interstate, you usually do everything you can to deny the presence of the roaring asphalt monster in your back yard. But build a church or a corporate headquarters or a museum, and there’s a risky though understandable impulse to be seen, to tease a little curiosity out of the car-encased audience speeding by. Buildings in view of interstates often feel steroidal. They must be big to be seen over the trees and traffic, and they’re often flashy so that the basic idea can be absorbed quickly.
The sloping metal peak of the new Marine Corps Museum isn’t just an eye-catcher from the roadway, however. It is, according to the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, which will run the site (a public-private venture with the Marines), an iconic shape inspired by the famous photograph of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi during the bloody World War II battle for Iwo Jima. And sure enough, you can see the inspiration clearly in a logo for the new museum, which shows the famous cluster of Marines with the new building’s peaked top superimposed. Soaring above a round base, a bold “mast” parallels the line of the flagpole they struggled to raise on difficult terrain.
Architecturally, the glass and metal structure rising above I-95 is a kind of “recruitment” for visitors, drawing them off the highway and into the museum (admission is free). Once in, the visitor is in the marble-clad “Leatherneck Gallery,” a round, solemn space with some spicy quotations carved on the walls (“Come on you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” is one, attributed to 1st Sgt. Dan Daly). It would be a stronger space if not quite so cluttered with particular details meant to ensure the visitor that this isn’t just any old modernist space, but very particularly a “Marine” space. There are planes and a helicopter, and a ship’s tower, made from military metal sheeting.
Museum leaders describe the building as a large, inspirational center ring, with gallery spaces that are meant to be “immersive” and filled with multimedia offerings (one exhibit will give visitors the sounds and sights of a beach landing). The visitor files through exhibitions devoted to different wars, and to what it’s like to join and train with the Marines. The Holocaust Museum in Washington may have been an inspiration for some elements of the new museum’s design (by Fentress Bradburn Architects, a Denver-based firm), though the Marine museum is even more starkly divided between its center, contemplative space and surrounding exhibition areas.
The problem is that immersion space isn’t inspiring architecturally, hence the need for that soaring vaulted, sloping domelike thing, sitting like a cap on what is otherwise essentially a warehouse built into a hill.
An even larger question is whether the trend toward immersive museums is a lasting one. They can be a great deal of fun, especially with children in tow, but the sense, after going through them, is that you’ve seen the show. Perhaps you’ll see it two or three more times, but ultimately having seen a show is a very different experience from that of most traditional museums, which is more like going to a library. You’ll always have a reason to go back to the library, because its resources are only as exhaustible as your curiosity. But how many times will you rent “Full Metal Jacket” or “The Sands of Iwo Jima”?
One last detail, worth noting: The entrance to the museum is framed by two long concrete walls, opening like radiating spokes from the round central gallery.
Seen from above, they look like jaws, an open maw, ready to greet and process and disgorge visitors. The building, when it opens, will have 118,000 square feet, with an expandable design that will bring it, at some point, to 181,000, including an Imax theater. They expect 200,000 to 600,000 visitors a year.
This is a museum about volume, energy and speed, rather like the highway it overlooks. This building is put together to bring people out of their private space, in huge numbers, to teach them a little, very quickly, about the cost of liberty (and maybe the dangers of empire).
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