A very disappointing Presidential Libary is set to open in Springfield Il on 19 April. Kamin chimes in on the HOK project by founder Obata....


By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published April 10, 2005

SPRINGFIELD -- I'm not sure what to call the new and very Disneyfied Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum here. "Lincolnland" might work. Maybe "Abe World." The Southern Illinois University historian John Y. Simon, a frequently quoted critic of the place, has acidly suggested "Six Flags Over Lincoln."

The specific names are less important than the general idea: The museum, which opens to the public April 16 a few blocks from the state capitol, is an architectural flop that turns Lincoln's life into the storyline for a mawkish indoor theme park. It puts us on a slippery historical slope, where the unreal blurs with the real and ultimately upstages it.

The outside of the museum, a block-filling structure with vaguely classical details and vast stretches of blank stone, could easily be mistaken for a convention center, a mausoleum or a fortress designed to repel an attack by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

The inside, which relies heavily on stage-set versions of historical scenes and such special effects as a ghostly hologram of Lincoln and theater seats that vibrate during Civil War battle scenes, is, like all theme parks, better at provoking emotion than provoking thought.

Compared with the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and its superb integration of classical art and architecture, the museum is dysfunctionally disconnected: Its astonishingly banal shell is simply a warehouse for exhibits rather than an integral part of telling Lincoln's story.

There was, at least, the kernel of a good idea behind this $90 million enterprise, which was funded by the federal, state and local governments and is flanked by a $25 million presidential library that opened last October.

The museum was to be different from the Lincoln Memorial, not glorifying Lincoln, but immersing us in his controversial and often-conflicted life. It would mix showmanship and scholarship, daringly using state-of-the-art technology to bring ancient Abe alive for the generation that grew up on Game Boys and PlayStations.

But something went very wrong: With the blessing of state officials, Hollywood took over and turned the museum into a stage set shut off from its surroundings. It is the latest example of a broader trend, evident in the fantasy environments of theme parks, shopping malls and Las Vegas entertainment attractions, where the genuine artifact is supplanted by the "authentic reproduction," the simulated, sanitized, spurious version of reality.

A bizarre venture

It is bizarre to venture through the museum, which sits across the street from the repository of authentic papers in the Lincoln library, and see so much that is unauthentic. Surrounded by real buildings where the real Lincoln did real things, from Lincoln's law offices to the Old State Capitol where the assassinated president's body lay in state and was viewed by 75,000 people over two days, the museum instead offers modern-day facsimiles of these and other historic sites.

One example: a not-entirely authentic reproduction of the funereal scene from Representatives Hall in the Old State Capitol, complete with a casket, black drapery and a domed ceiling whose seemingly recessed squares, or coffers, are actually flush with the curved ceiling and are painted with simulated shadows. There's more fudging: Lincoln's casket was open, not closed, as it's shown in the display. (Historians felt that an open casket would disturb schoolchildren.)

Nit-picking aside, the scene is supposed to let us relive the intense national grief that followed Lincoln's assassination. But it comes off as a mawkish stage set, leaving nothing to the imagination.

This is the art of illusion, not the art of creatively displaying and interpreting real things. The museum seems destined to succeed as a tourist attraction, yet whirring turnstiles will not make it an aesthetic triumph. If other presidential museums are going to take this route, then get ready for mannequin versions of Washington crossing the Delaware.

Naturally, the path down this road began with the best of intentions.

In the late 1990s, representatives of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, which holds the state's 47,000-piece Lincoln collection, visited existing presidential museums and asked their directors what they would do differently. Their answer: Design the exhibits first, and wrap the building around them. That would avoid flashy but unfunctional "signature buildings."

Following that illogical logic, which ignores the way architects and interiors routinely cooperate to resolve form with function, the IHPA first chose the exhibit designer, BRC Imagination Arts of Burbank, Calif., whose chairman, Bob Rogers, once worked for Walt Disney Imagineering. It then selected the architect, Gyo Obata of St. Louis-based Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum.

Obata, 82, is a rare gentleman in a field of arrogant divas, and he has turned out some fine buildings in his distinguished career, such as the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., which is essentially a handsome airplane hangar. But the Lincoln museum is not one of his better moments.

Tough act to follow

Designing a building that told Lincoln's story would have been difficult under any circumstances, especially because the Lincoln Memorial already looms large in the national memory bank.

The memorial's aesthetic oomph resides equally in the power and clarity of its temple form and the journey the visitor makes to it, walking up its steep flight of steps and encountering the monumental statue of the seated Lincoln. Raised above the ground and physically isolated, the temple promotes the idea of a mythic Lincoln -- a heroic figure, a man above petty politics, a leader who seems more demigod than real.

In Springfield, we are supposed to meet another Lincoln -- not the idealized Exceptional Man of the memorial, but the warts-and-all Everyman who grew up in a log cabin, suffered numerous personal and political setbacks, yet still possessed the fortitude and vision to win the Civil War and issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

All that called for a different sort of architecture from the memorial. And, to a degree, that is what Obata delivers.

His museum and the library, which he also designed, are not bombastic, showoff structures that overwhelm everything around them. Instead, the buildings hug the sidewalk, pick up on the scale of nearby commercial buildings and are entered at street level, not by monumental staircases. But if their urban design is neighborly, their architecture is conspicuously subpar, largely because Obata did not creatively confront the challenge posed by the museum's windowless "black box" exhibits and theaters.

Their most glaring impact comes at the back of the building -- an enormous, uninterrupted mass of buff-colored Egyptian limestone. The stone, at least, has a warm tone. Yet it goes on endlessly, brutally, like a squashed Pyramid. It deadens everything around it.

Obata could only draw light into this stone fortress by inserting a tall, glassy rotunda at its center and another, smaller rotunda at its main entrance. The rotundas cleverly transform what is typically a solid into a void and play off against the flanking masses of limestone. But they are not enough to rescue a composition that does not persuasively draw together classicism (rounded columns), modernism (ribbon windows) and the Prairie Style (broad overhanging eaves).

Interior worse

Disappointingly unadventurous, the design fails to carve out a new architectural expression of Lincoln. It is, in the end, a pallid echo of the Lincoln Memorial's mighty classicism. But at least it has a semblance of dignity, unlike the museum's theme park interior. The troubles there begin in the main rotunda, a tall, light-filled space that makes a stab at symbolizing Lincoln's stature.

Obata planned to line the rotunda with a graceful colonnade, but he had to switch to three pairs of severely stretched-out columns to make room for a mock log cabin (which stands for the one where Lincoln grew up) and a mock White House. The fake buildings poke into the rotunda like visitors from Disney World. Mannequins of the Lincoln family, made of sculptured foam covered in fiberglass, stand near the center, awaiting Kodak moments.

Visitors walk through the ersatz cabin and White House to get to the museum's two so-called "journey" exhibits -- the first extending from Lincoln's boyhood to his election to the presidency in 1860, the second covering his life in the White House through his assassination. The entrances to special-effects programs called "Lincoln's Eyes" (it has the vibrating seats) and the "Ghosts of the Library" (it has the hologram ghost) ring the rotunda like theaters in a multiplex. They add to the oddly commercial flavor of what is supposed to be a grand civic space.

The "journey" exhibits are at times imaginative, reflecting the input of the scholars BRC consulted. An electronic map called "The Civil War in Four Minutes" displays the shifting areas controlled by Northern and Southern troops and reveals how the death toll mounted with stunning swiftness. A display of life-size human figures at a slave auction shows the psychological, as well as the physical, harm wrought by slavery as an African-American family is torn apart.

No comparison

Yet a few isolated successes do not add up to a powerful whole, particularly when the Lincoln museum is compared with another history museum of recent vintage, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. There, unadorned materials such as rough brick walls and industrial forms such as steel footbridges suggest the sense of foreboding in the concentration camps. Shoes, eyeglasses and other pieces of personal property that the Nazis stripped from victims provide an intense -- and palpably real -- connection between the visitor and historic events. The building and its contents form a searingly powerful whole.

At the Lincoln museum, what we get instead is clever artifice, as in a mock TV newscast about the election of 1860 (anchored by NBC's Tim Russert), or meticulously detailed but emotionally overdriven stage sets, such as the one where Lincoln and his wife, Mary, watch over their deathly ill son, Willie, in his White House bed. Lacking authenticity, the scenes are as synthetic as the mannequins, which Simon, the Southern Illinois University professor, has hilariously dubbed "rubber Lincolns."

For all the hype about the museum offering "immersive" exhibits that transport visitors to the era of gas lamps and hoopskirts, many of its are actually old-fashioned dioramas or conventionally arranged theaters equipped with the latest bells and whistles. There is, for example, the quill pen in the "Ghosts of the Library" program that flies through the air, Harry Potter-style.

Such thrills, the theory goes, will prep visitors for the museum's version of the crown jewels -- its "Treasures Gallery," which features a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address and other rare artifacts. But the reverse seems equally likely: The real will be a letdown, upstaged by the fake.

The flash of new exhibitry will obscure Lincoln's ringing phrase about "a new birth of freedom." When visitors go home, what are they going to tell their friends about, seeing an old piece of paper or seeing Lincoln's ghost?

Here, in one of the nation's pre-eminent centers of Lincoln historic sites and in a state whose largest city, Chicago, is known for its pathbreaking architecture, the Lincoln museum had a precious opportunity to charge the landscape -- and a great historical figure -- with fresh energy and meaning. Yet state officials and the designers frittered away that chance.

This is a deeply flawed model for bringing the past into the present and future. At a time when talents such as Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava and Renzo Piano are raising the art of architecture to new heights, the museum hits a disappointing low, shackling rather than liberating creativity. Lincoln -- and all of us here in the Land of Lincoln -- deserved far better.