Light touch to glow of intellect

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 is unlikely that you know his name but the chances are good that if you have been to a museum in the past two decades, you have 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 world's best and most engaging science museums.

In Philadelphia, he created the National Constitution Centre, a newfangled edutainment centre featuring life-size statues of the country's founders, interactive kiosks and a high-tech theatre in the round, with a live actor dramatising the creation of America's founding document.

And in Little Rock, Arkansas, he took on the prestigious commission of designing exhibitions for Bill Clinton's presidential library.

In the United Kingdom, Appelbaum 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 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the early 1990s.

In April last year, the Newseum opened 70,000 square feet of exhibition space designed by Appelbaum's firm.

In December, another 16,500 square feet of Appelbaum-designed exhibition space opened at the US Capitol Visitor Centre. If plans go forward for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial visitors' centre — an underground facility planned near the Wall — Appelbaum is slated to design that as well.

Appelbaum is the biggest player in what is often called “interpretive design'', which involves everything from the look of showcases, signage, interpretive films, website design and the placement of objects to the overall concept for a museum.

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.

Appelbaum's influence is enormous in part because he has capitalised on a time when the lines between entertainment and education have blurred, as museums feel competition from an ever wider array of distractions.

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.

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

“They are about the fabric and texture of our creativity ...''

“They cure social amnesia ... ''

“They teach from the inside out ...''

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.

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 is 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 is talking about a bar-code ticket that will allow museum visitors to download information from exhibitions and send it to their inboxes.

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,'' 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.''

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. “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.

And he likes to organise space such that visitors see each other interacting with the exhibits. For an emotional effect, he often resorts to overbearing repetition, as in a huge display of newspaper front pages announcing the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks hung outside a Newseum gallery.

The claustrophobic feel of some places in the Holocaust Museum is meant to emphasise the dehumanisation of Nazi victims but it is also part of an architectural control that extends to the subliminal level.

This control can 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.

All this enforces Appelbaum's idea of “noncognitive'' education. 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, who imagined teaching through carefully planned “epiphanies'', moments of enlightenment prepared with all the rigorous dramatisation of an opera aria.

It is unclear that this sort of educational philosophy actually works. Or that it is any less elitist than the old-fashioned museum. Or that it is appropriate for the wide array of institutions to which Appelbaum applies it.

Everything Appelbaum says makes him sound like the anti-Appelbaum. He insists that technology shouldn't drive design. He emphasises 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.

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. Then he pursues it tenaciously.