by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design a museum dedicated to the press based around a contextually oppositional motif of glass that symbolizes media transparency?

Summary: Polshek Partnership’s Newseum, which opened April 11, uses a material and formal language of Modernist industrial glass and steel to communicate the concept of media transparency and the professionalization of the decentralized field of journalism. Its site and materials further distinguish it as a symbol of the institutional watchdog function of journalism.

The Newseum sitting on Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C., tries very hard not to emulate its neighbors. It’s a glass and steel box in a neighborhood of stone institutional and governmental monuments, from the Neo-Classical Capitol to the Modernist East Building of the National Gallery. This seems an appropriate pose for the Freedom Forum’s museum to the First Amendment and the press. It’s not unlike the teetotaling reporter who refuses to socialize with the officials he or she covers, comp a meal, or cut anyone a break, ever. The message: “I’m not like you. I’m held to a different standard.”

This contextual disruption is only one of the ways Polshek Partnership’s museum embodies the final professionalization and standardization of the media; a journey that changed journalists, or at least the perception of them, from grubby, hard-boiled craftspeople to independent and white-collared professionals. The glass façade and multi-planed design makes the Newseum stand alone in stolid, stone-clad Washington, which arguably can be counted as a step forward for progressive Modernism in the city and an embodiment of the presses’ changing role in contemporary society.

Steel and glass
The Newseum is located on the ultimate media watchdog site between the White House and the Capitol. A smaller Newseum opened across the Potomac River in Arlington in 1997 and closed in 2002 in anticipation of the new building. The top floor terrace of the expanded 643,000-square-foot Newseum looks over the vast majority of the National Mall and federal Washington. The rear of the Newseum site contains 146,000 square feet of condos that share the museum’s material language, but don’t assert their own identity.

The Newseum’s exterior is composed of interlocking horizontal and vertical rectilinear masses, organized in a framework of three layers that its designers liken to the layers of a newspaper. From the layer closest to the Pennsylvania Avenue back, each section offers more and more solar shielding for sensitive exhibits. The front-most volume contains a massive glass atrium window set back within the structure by 30 feet. A translucent white glass proscenium frames this window in the museum, and continues onto the building’s tip of the hat to stone Washington monumentality: a 74-foot-tall tablet made of two-toned Tennessee marble with the words of the First Amendment engraved on it. Horizontal and vertical striations abound, giving the museum’s façade a Mondrian-like geometric complexity.

The news machine
From behind the atrium window into the museum’s Great Hall of News, a massive 40-foot by 22-foot media screen shines outward, resembling a giant television pointed at Pennsylvania Ave. This is the museum’s entrance lobby, and its central reference point. Firm principal James Polshek, FAIA, says the Great Hall of News’s purpose is to create a “community of users”—for people to see other visitors and be seen.

From here, the museum reveals its formal allusions to the media and journalistic transparency. Polshek says that early in the design process, he realized that glass has had a long tradition of mediating how people receive the news, via computer screens, television, or the bulbous glass domes of a ticker-tape machines. As Polshek’s firm has explored in other projects, glass is a direct metaphor for external and internal media transparency and independence. The notion of internal transparency is reinforced by the interior views the museum offers. Elevated walkways, floating stairs and bridges, and glass partitions allow for surprising sightlines into various exhibits and spaces across the museum’s six public floors. One glass-walled room allows visitors to observe the museum’s engineers as they program the video and computer exhibits.

The Newseum’s formal and material language is Modern, industrial, and irregular. Wood is used sparingly. The primary interior materials are white painted metal panels and perforated aluminum. Exposed trusses frame the front atrium window. Three large glass-walled elevators leave supports and hydraulic mechanisms out in the open. A ride in these elevators offers views of three cantilevered theaters that hang above the atrium, backgrounded by three diagonal floating pathways. True to its industrial and technological aesthetic, this is the only view that could be called truly sculptural. The 27 hours of video presentations running in 15 theaters and the multitude of interactive exhibits are what Newseum CEO Charles Overby refers to when he calls it the most technologically advanced museum in the world.

All of this demonstrates that the Newseum is heavily invested in the idea of journalism as a professionalized field populated by transparently non-biased technocrats who are inherently wired to information technology news cycles, not a clubby, rabble-rousing mob of word-machinists with calloused hands. The Newseum is probably the last signpost on the road of this transition: a precision, monumental machine for the professional codification of journalism and press freedom. The back-slapping warmth of the cigar smoke-filled room isn’t to be found in this cool, politely curious museum. Some in the media (including old-school denizens of such places) are disturbed by this monumentality. Storied New York columnist Jimmy Breslin called the idea of the original museum “sickening ... You’re supposed to be scruffy and despised. You’re not supposed to be honored.”

Physical narrative
Not that the Newseum stamps out all traces of the decentralized, fractious nature of the media. Exhibits are arranged irregularly and a bit unpredictably, partly as a function of the astounding diversity of objects on display. In a museum that calls together a Noah’s Ark collection of things that are only connected through a vaguely defined aura of “newsworthiness,” expect all shapes and sizes to come through the door. They range from the huge and historic (24 tons of graffiti-marked Berlin Wall and an accompanying watch tower), to the small and mundane, like the laptop and passport of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter killed by Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan. Without this gruesome but newsworthy narrative, this object loses meaning, like many in the museum. “Our artifacts are really secondary to the stories,” says Ralph Appelbaum, the museum’s exhibition designer. “They’re really the entry point to the stories.”

Polshek says he sees narrative content as vital to this building, and to all of his work as well. “I believe that every building has to have a narrative, every building has to have a story, and those stories have to be woven in such a way that they’re given to multiple interpretations,” he says.

In the ether
All of these formal metaphors of journalism resisted being converted into a physical building. Polshek says that the Newseum asked explicitly for an iconic building, but, “it didn’t take long for me to figure out that the press wasn’t iconic. It’s almost like ether. It’s in the air, or in the ‘Inter-net,’ so to speak.”

Polshek’s museum isn’t ethereal, but it is mutable and timely. Some exhibits are designed to change every day. The giant media screen in the Great Hall of News shows breaking news, while tickers run headlines constantly. It contains two television studios, and the glass atrium windows always show a procession of humanity learning about their First Amendment rights.

This contextually daring use of glass isn’t about dematerialization or mystic ambiguity. It’s about commenting as directly as possible on the fundamental need for an honest gatekeeper to the information that fuels a modern and diverse democracy.