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Exhibition Review
National Museum of the Marine Corps, Triangle, Va. http://www.usmcmuseum.com.
Permanent exhibition, opened Nov. 2006. 118,000 sq. ft. Fentress Bradburn Architects; Christopher Chadbourne and Associates, exhibition planners and designers; Chuck Girbovan, National Museum of the Marine Corps museum chief of exhibit services.
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| "Soldiers are not as other men," John Keegan observes in A History of Warfare (1993). Not one himself, indeed physically unqualified for military service, Keegan has devoted a lifetime to military history. The military is a "world apart," one that "exists in parallel with the everyday world but does not belong to it." Military organizations such as the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC), he suggests, are best understood as tribes with their own unique skills, values, culture, and history. While Keegan and other historians have sought to expand the public's understanding of the military, museums devoted to the military have chosen far more often to emphasize the technical and memorial than to interpret the military to the general public. |
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The National Museum of the Marine Corps, which opened in November 2006, seeks to honor the tribe, the men and women who serve and have served. But coupled to this purpose is the desire for the museum to be a place "where the American public [can] learn about the Marine Corps' unique culture and contributions." A private-public partnership, the new National Museum of the Marine Corps is adjacent to the Marine Corps Base Quantico. The bold new building is visible from I-95, the principal north-south corridor on the East Coast. About 450,000 people visit the museum each year. |
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The corps asked members of the architectural and exhibit planning teams to sample marine tribal history and culture. They endured several days of boot camp and traveled to sites of battles that shaped marine traditions, such as Belleau Wood of World War I and Iwo Jima of World War II. (One of the exhibit designers was knocked unconscious on the boot camp obstacle course.) Though not fully initiated, team members gained close-up knowledge of what they would represent to the public. |
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The museum, situated in acres of parking lots, is approached across a wide paved space suitable for parades and other ceremonial occasions. This space funnels visitors between stark walls up to a bank of entry doors. The museum is circular, its walls, except for the entry, bermed with sod. From a distance it suggests a large bunker. Atop is a huge asymmetrical cone of glass and steel, bold and very striking. It is gathered around a "spear"—a stainless steel mast 210 feet long, angled at sixty degrees, that thrusts up from the floor of the atrium gallery, pierces the cone of glass and steel, and extends dramatically forty feet beyond. The angle of the mast references the flag raised at Iwo Jima. The architecture suggests strength, bold assertion, and originality; it captures in concrete, stainless steel, and glass the spirit of the Marine Corps. |
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In the bright, spacious atrium, the "Leatherneck Gallery" features two tableaus. In one, an amphibious tractor crashes over a coconut-log seawall at Tarawa in 1943. A marine fires a machine gun from the vehicle, another bounds over the side, another climbs over the seawall, and a fourth is down on the beach bleeding from a leg wound. The second tableau shows us a Korean War helicopter offloading a marine machine-gun team of three in 1951. A label explains that these tableaus represent major advances in Marine Corps fighting doctrine: amphibious assaults against a fortified enemy at Tarawa and vertical assaults with helicopters in Korea. The scenes are factually based, of course, authentically executed, and the figures are dynamic, modeled on marine volunteers serving at Quantico, their grimacing faces and physiques appropriate to combat situations. While the artistry of the tableaus (and others in the installation) is fascinating, there is nevertheless an inevitable staged quality about them. My quarrel is with tableaus as a genre of museum display, not with this painstaking execution. I doubt the public (or marines for that matter) pick up on the larger theme about Marine Corps fighting doctrine. |
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