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Exhibition Reviews
National Constitution Center, 525 Arch St., Philadelphia, PA 19106.
Permanent exhibition, opened July 4, 2003. Su-F 9:30–5, Sa 9:30–6, closed Thanksgiving and Christmas. Adults $6, children 4–12 $5, under 4 free, seniors, students, active military $5. Exhibition area 67,785 sq. ft. Ralph Appelbaum Associates and Janet Kamien, exhibition development and design; Freedom Rising (live dramatic performance), Donna Lawrence Productions; Hock Films and the History Channel, additional media; Hill International, Inc., project management; Joseph M. Torsella and Rand and Associates, exhibition labels; Electrosonics, Inc., and Malbie Associates, fabrication and installation; StudioEIS, Signers' Hall statutes.
Internet: general information, virtual tour, interactive Constitution, educational resources, "Viewpoints" (brief pieces by legal scholars and other site visitors), "Citizen Action" (guide to all elected officials, daily schedule of Congress) <http://www.constitutioncenter.org> (Sept. 15, 2004).
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| The National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, opened its doors to the public on July 4, 2003. That homage to the Declaration of Independence is the only intellectually incoherent—or superpatriotic—note that the center has struck yet. In the teeth of what must have been sore temptation to cave in to corporate funders, the center has disdained to mount a mindless celebration and clung instead to a more capacious vision. It is, already at its birth, one of the nation's greatest museums, and perhaps the most challenging of them all. |
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The National Constitution Center is housed in a handsome new building conceived by two of the country's finest designers, Henry Cobb and Ralph Appelbaum. It commands a vista over a great green lawn and a brick serpentine toward Independence Hall. It exhibits an astonishing array of artifacts, from the eighteenth-century items unearthed by archaeologists on the site to the inkwell with which Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to the tool bag with which a little band of burglars broke into Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate. But, unlike other great museums, the center is not really about objects at all. |
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The longtime president of the center calls it "a museum of ideas." But it is not quite about ideas, either. It is about something more subtle: the understandings we hold of ourselves and our society, which condition the civic activity that shapes the Constitution more than Congress or the courts do. It is about our public life and about the public and private choices we make, and about their impact on the Constitution as a continuing cumulation of our lives and choices, in the past and in the present for the future. It is about how we, today, are making the Constitution our children will inherit. And it is about how we define "we." If the center has any message at all, beyond the myriad of messages that it offers at every turn, it is one that goes deeper than Mr. Dooley's dictum that "th' supreme coort follows th' iliction returns." It is one that sees citizenship in the streets and at the malls as well as in the voting booth, in a child's letter to the president as well as in a stump speech, in a Sears catalog or a post office mailbag as well as in a party convention. |
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All of this is, of course, easier said than done. I know by hard-bought experience, because I served on more committees than I can count in the center's fitful efforts to get off the ground and become the "nonpartisan, nonprofit organization" that Congress created seventeen years ago, in the bicentennial of the Constitution, "to increase awareness and understanding" of our frame of government. |
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