Ralph Appelbaum's Transformation of The Museum World Is Clearly Evident

The Washington Post's Phil Kennicott takes a look at three museums in the Washington DC area and the experience that each creates for their visitors.

By Philip Kennicott | Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 29, 2009; Page E01


According to Ralph Appelbaum, last year more than 30 million people passed through a museum or exhibition created by his New York-based firm. If that number is true, then Appelbaum isn't just the head of the world's largest museum and exhibit design firm, he is one of the most influential educators of our time. It's unlikely that you know his name, but the chances are good that if you've been to a museum in the past two decades, you've seen his work, or the work of other designers trying to imitate his work.

In New York, he transformed the American Museum of Natural History into what is deemed one of the best and most engaging science museums in the world. In Philadelphia, he created the National Constitution Center, a newfangled edutainment center, featuring life-size statues of the country's founders, interactive kiosks and a high-tech theater in the round, with a live actor dramatizing the creation of the nation's founding document. And in Little Rock, he took on the prestigious commission of designing exhibitions for Bill Clinton's presidential library.

In the United Kingdom, he has worked for the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and the Royal Museum in Scotland. He maintains offices in London and Beijing.

Appelbaum's firm, incorporated in 1978 and now with about 140 employees, rose to prominence after he designed the displays for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in the early 1990s. Last April, the Newseum opened 70,000 square feet of exhibition space designed by Appelbaum and Associates, and in December, another 16,500 square feet of Appelbaum-designed exhibition space opened at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. If plans go forward for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial visitors center -- an underground facility planned near the Wall -- Appelbaum is slated to design that as well.

Appelbaum is the biggest player in what's often called "interpretive design," which involves everything from the look of showcases, signage, interpretive films, Web site design and the placement of objects to the overall concept for a museum. Over the years, as his influence has grown, he has gone from thinking about exhibitions to branding whole institutions. But more than anything else, he has become an expert at finding "the big idea" that helps museum directors and boards feel good about what they do.

When he took on the task of designing a presidential library for former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, for example, he proposed focusing the displays on the question, "What does it take to make a Nigerian child?" It's an unanswerable question, but it provided the necessary aha moment that made it all come together, a positive theme that finesses some of the philosophical problems of a presidential library in a country riven by corruption, violence, and religious, ethnic, linguistic and economic divisions. Every Appelbaum project is driven by a similar, organizing leitmotif.

Appelbaum's influence is enormous in part because he has capitalized on a time in the museum world when the lines between entertainment and education have blurred, as museums feel competition from an ever wider array of distractions. There's a trend toward museums wanting to be all things to all people, technologically seductive but educational; a place for scholarship and conservation, but also a family entertainment destination. Museum directors worry about having a reputation for being old-fashioned, yet they don't want to surrender their status as authoritative, even elite places. Appelbaum is happy to help them sort things out.

The 'Content Aggregator'
In the course of a five-hour conversation in his office on the 29th floor of a downtown New York high-rise, Appelbaum, 66, throws out perhaps a dozen different definitions of what museums should do.

"Museums are essentially ethical constructs."
"They are about the fabric and texture of our creativity . . ."
"They cure social amnesia . . . "
"They teach from the inside out . . ."

The list goes on, but the ideas all stress the opening up of museums as social and learning spaces, community centers, places of collective engagement. He borrows the progressive language of a century ago, the ideals of John Dewey and John Cotton Dana, who sought to incorporate hands-on experience into education, and rescue cultural institutions from elitist and exclusionary leadership. It is a progressive vision updated for the Internet age and, not surprisingly, Appelbaum's projects are saturated with interactive technology. Touch screens, mini-theaters and video monitors are set within large walls of photographs, all emphasizing the abundance of knowledge, the multiplicity of voices, the layeredness of our media-saturated society.

He calls himself a "content aggregator," who is interested in game theory and stresses the outreach potential of social networking sites. For a language museum in Brazil, he has designed an interactive "language table," which encourages groups of people to play around with the basic elements of Portuguese. He's enthusiastic about technology from the legendary MIT Media Lab that enables people to hear complex inner lines of music while moving around in a high-tech sound space.

And he's talking about a bar-code ticket that will allow museum visitors to download information from exhibitions and send it straight to their e-mail inboxes.

He has also shifted the emphasis of many museums decidedly toward the family, places where parents and children can have fun together.

"Most of our strategies involve keeping intergenerational groups together," he says.

But more than anything, Appelbaum likes the hubbub of the museum.

"I like to hear what the people are saying, their sense of aesthetic awe, like at the Grand Canyon," he says. "I love to hear people say, that is just beautiful."

All of this has led Appelbaum to a rather extraordinary view of what museums do.

"The goal of a museum isn't so much about creating cognitive understanding," he says. "Children leave with the non-cognitive aspects: that science is done with a sense of selflessness and integrity, that they do it with a sense of duty -- that there's more to know."

A Question of Philosophy
Another way of putting this, however, is that Appelbaum is more interested in museums that make us feel than museums that make us think. Left out of his ideal museum -- though he denies this -- is the solitary visitor deeply interested in objects, the small changes in pots or machines or paintings that happen over years, the quirks and eccentricities of material objects brought out of the old, overstuffed, chaotic display cases that are increasingly being banished from public view in the new museum world.

"Museums need to see themselves not as open portals, but in a relationship with the visitor," he says. "Ah, you're back, and you're 18 now, not 14."

That comment can stand for a number of ways in which the Appelbaum museum often feels smothering -- emotionally, intellectually and even architecturally -- especially to an older generation of visitors. He likes walls of photographs, punctuated by large, emotionally resonant objects, such as the Lincoln Catafalque that functions as a kind of mini-shrine amid the more prosaic displays at the Capitol Visitor Center.

And he likes to organize space such that visitors see each other interacting with the exhibits. When he is after an emotional effect, he often resorts to overbearing repetition, as in a huge display of newspaper front pages announcing the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks hung outside a Newseum gallery where visitors can watch footage of reporters at work on that day.

The same display also features the antenna from the top of the World Trade Center, a huge twisted piece of metal that also confines people in the exhibition space, in an effort to intensify the social and emotional power of the event. For a while, there was a box of tissues nearby so that visitors could wipe their tears.

The claustrophobic feel of some places in the Holocaust Museum is meant to emphasize the dehumanization of Nazi victims, but it's also part of an architectural control that extends to the subliminal level. In 1995, explaining the layout of doors and floors in the Holocaust Museum, Appelbaum wrote, "Visitors needn't notice these details to benefit emotionally from their resonance." But this control can also feel manipulative, as when, at the Newseum, you pass from a gallery devoted to freedom of the press into a shrine for journalists who have died on the job (with another wall of pictures).

All of this enforces Appelbaum's idea of "noncognitive" education. But what does that mean? If you listen to Appelbaum closely, his educational philosophy sounds curiously old-fashioned. He speaks about museums in the reverential tones of Matthew Arnold, whose 19th-century notion of culture as "the best that has been thought and said" made his name synonymous with elitism for generations. And Appelbaum's insistence on the primacy of a big, emotional, ray-of-light moment in museum-going is curiously reminiscent of an even older educational philosophy, spelled out by Jean Jacques Rousseau in his novel "Emile." Rousseau imagined teaching through carefully planned "epiphanies," moments of enlightenment prepared with all the rigorous dramatization of a torch-song aria in an opera.

It's not clear that this sort of educational philosophy actually works. Or that it's any less elitist than the old-fashioned museum that hardly exists anymore. Or that it's appropriate for the wide array of institutions to which Appelbaum applies it. It was odd, when the Capitol Visitor Center opened, to see how ineffective his approach was for this quintessential icon of American democracy. The Capitol now looks and feels a lot like the more commercially focused Newseum, while it might have been better served by something more dignified, even, perhaps, stuffier.

The layout of Appelbaum's office, which overlooks the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, reflects the basics of his design philosophy. There is a small table with busts of great men. Against one wall there is a table of objects -- toys, rocks, photographs -- each representing one of his major projects. And in the middle, serving as a huge desk, another table groans with books, relevant to projects as far afield as a rug museum in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Books and objects, stories and things, are the raw material of his business. Appelbaum is immensely well read and his command of detail, and his capacity for good talk, are calling cards in this business.

Just as he structures his museums around epiphanies, he remembers his life that way as well. One of the big ones came while he was in the Peace Corps in Peru.

"Between growing seasons, they would make things," he remembers of the native people. But it struck him that there was a gap, a missing link, between the objects they made and what the world understood about those objects.

"What they said about what they made rarely accompanied the object to the store shelf, or the museum," he says. And it became Appelbaum's passion to fill in that missing narrative, the human side to the seemingly lifeless object. In the late 1980s, the Holocaust Museum would offer him the chance to do that on a level beyond anything he had accomplished.

He called it "a film in three acts," according to Raye Farr, director of film and video at the Holocaust Museum. And that was, perhaps, the Big Idea that helped it all come together.

After the Holocaust Museum opened, Appelbaum became the go-to man for reinventing old museums, rebranding, redesigning and, given that most museums operate in the nonprofit world, fundraising. Appelbaum says he logs 250,000 miles per year, visiting various projects. And many of those visits are about persuading wealthy and powerful people to pay for them.

It hasn't always been a smooth ride. Lee Langston-Harrison, now the head of the Museum of Culpeper History, worked with Appelbaum's firm when it was brought on to do design work for James Madison's home, Montpelier, in the late 1990s.

"Appelbaum had just come off the high of doing the Holocaust Museum," she remembers. "They chose Appelbaum because it had such cachet, and that was going to put Montpelier on the map."

But Montpelier, at the time, had a small budget (about a half-million dollars), and Langston-Harrison says they got "the B and C team," kids "right out of design school.

"They were all in black and all down here with their cellphones, and we'd say, 'Guys, we need content, we need to make sure that people can read those panels, the edges can't be sharp so kids won't bang their heads into them.' " That tension, between basic content and aesthetic appeal, dogs the work of every museum designer, and it's been a recurring issue for Appelbaum. And one he's still sensitive to.
But he has a long list of happy clients.

"He is a wonderful human being," says Peter Pritchard, former president of the Newseum. Pritchard worked with Appelbaum on the designs for both Newseums, the old one in Rosslyn and the new, $450 million one that opened on Pennsylvania Avenue.

"He is very flexible, he listens, he always has the latest avant-garde gadget -- the Kindle, or whatever," says Pritchard. Even Langston-Harrison says that despite the "back-burner" treatment at Montpelier, the experience encouraged her to "think outside of the box" with future exhibitions.

Everything Appelbaum says makes him sound like the anti-Appelbaum. He insists that technology shouldn't drive design, and he laments the degree to which young people often cocoon with their earbuds and iPods. He emphasizes the importance of objects and scholarship. And he says that museums are in a "life and death struggle with the fictive," which is why he doesn't like theme-park-like reconstructions of places.

Suddenly, it becomes apparent that Appelbaum's mind works a bit like a fortune teller's. He tosses out a barrage of ideas until he finds one that resonates, and then he pursues it tenaciously. You never doubt that he believes what he's saying.

In his office, he shows a picture of a meeting in Nigeria for the project for Obasanjo, the man who perked up when Appelbaum suggested they focus his presidential library on "how to make a Nigerian child." It's moments like these that have propelled him into the first rank of designers.

One can almost hear the new presidential library coming together, the laughter of children, running from display to display, the mild cacophony of music competing with the burble of videos, showing smiling Nigerians making and doing traditional things. It will be a wonderful, happy place to visit, and no one, once it's finished, will ever fret much about whether it answers the question: How do you make a Nigerian child? Because it was a silly question to begin with, but immensely useful for the people behind the scenes, who didn't know how to get started.