Fourth-estate fallacy

Seen from the front, the large stone tablet affixed to the Newseum building on Pennsylvania Avenue looks like a piece of newsprint.

It is 74 feet high and emblazoned with the 45 words of the First Amendment. Its rectangular shape suggests the dimensions of a conventional broadsheet newspaper. But seen from the side, the marble panel looks thicker, with a bevelled edge that suggests the lines of a television or computer screen.

The folks at the Newseum, which opens on April 11, are covering all the media angles.

It is easy to be of different minds about this most distinctive feature of the Newseum, the biggest architectural change on the Pennsylvania Avenue parade route since the Ronald Reagan Building opened a decade ago.

It clearly distinguishes the building from those around it and suggests its purpose. The Newseum, run by the Freedom Forum, is devoted to celebrating the history of journalism and, by extension, the First Amendment freedoms upon which journalism is predicated.

A reminder of the Bill of Rights, writ large, is good, too. Washington has seen presidents come and go and basic freedoms ebb from time to time.

Every future president will now have to pass this blunt reminder of American civics on the way to the White House, come Inauguration Day.

But aesthetically, it doesn't work. The Newseum, a $450-million project designed by Polshek Partnership Architects, has too much going on.

The First Amendment panel is to the left of what appears to be a giant glass aperture through which one can see into the very busy central atrium, where a 40-by-22-foot video screen is suspended from the ceiling.

To the side, a staircase in a glass box forms its own geometrical element and a canopy extends over much of the front. With a 135-unit apartment building built into the back forming its own blocky feature, the building suffers from too much jazz, too much angularity, too much discordant massing.

The Freedom Forum, a non-profit journalism foundation, wanted the building to be an “icon'', CEO Charles Overby says. It wanted a building that would express the virtue of transparency, emblazoned with the First Amendment.
Other architects might have baulked at the challenge.

Not Polshek, the same firm that is building the unfortunate and unnecessary addition to Maya Lin's utterly self-sufficient Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

The building does everything it is supposed to do, but it is hard to find an angle from which the building is beautiful.
Had the architects openly embraced the overwrought plan, the multiple functions, the strange angles of the plot, they might have responded with something more aggressive, daring and legitimate within the fading postmodern tradition. Instead, they wrapped it all up in corporate-looking skin.

With the First Amendment panel, however, the metaphorical reading of the building takes an unfortunate turn. It isn't just corporate, it is a corporate building hiding behind the First Amendment.

Cynics might note the danger facing journalism today: media consolidation, which diminishes First Amendment vigour not through censorship but loss of divergent opinion. And opinion that falls outside the comfortable parameters of a suit-and-tie worldview.

Putting words on buildings is also dangerous. Chiselling timeless truths into stone has a strange effect on them, often inviting us to think of them ironically, as if they are slogans, not truths.

The interior has been sliced and diced into multiple small galleries and theatres. Large open spaces have been set aside for a Journalists Memorial and a section of the Berlin Wall with a guard tower.

To do justice to the ability to shoehorn functionality into this big glass box, you would need a long list: three huge, glass-walled passenger elevators, 14 gallery spaces, interactive multimedia rooms, two television studios, and so on. The building feels a bit like a machine: It educates, it entertains, but wait, there is more ... it is also a party venue and a conference centre.

For all its failings, it may not be a failed building. It is an active, open building on a block that often feels empty and buttoned up. Its row of display cases with newspaper front pages in them is interactive in all the right ways.

Even the apartment units are a worthy, if odd, addition. Pennsylvania Avenue desperately needs life, and there is nothing like living bodies going in and out to add life to a block.

All of which leads to the somewhat ridiculous conclusion: It is not a bad building so long as you don't have to look at it.

Facts by the numbers
n 11: Date of April opening
n 74: Height in feet of the First Amendment panel
n 35,000: Historic newspapers and magazines in the collection
n 64: Daily front pages posted on the sidewalk
n 100: Number of video productions
n 130: Number of interactive displays
n 40: Width in feet of the high-resolution media screen in the main lobby
n 250,000: Square feet in the museum
n 2: Broadcast studios
n 14: Major galleries
n 15: Theatres
n 7: Levels in the building
n 450: Cost in millions of dollars
n 20: Dollars for standard admission