Museums with a Mission

Not long ago, museums were temples for the dead, mausoleums where you'd walk past walls of paintings, or stroll on a sea of linoleum to peer into glass cases filled with artifacts from ancient times and distant places, or endure a slight odor of formaldehyde to look at wall-size displays of scientific factoids and dead plants and animals.

Then came a spate of museums that were similar to playpens for the young. Recognizing that kids want to touch things, to do things, designers of children's museums worldwide began including hands-on displays and interactive exhibits.

Today, there are the museums of Ralph Appelbaum. Appelbaum and his team of 70 designers at Ralph Appelbaum Associates (RAA) have created more than 100 public spaces in more than 50 cities during the past 20 years, fashioning innovative environments that make stories real, that create total-immersion experiences, that spur the imagination, that awaken the emotions, and -- most important -- that expand the mind. These public spaces have a public purpose: Their design reflects their mission.

Appelbaum's firm, which is best known for the starkly moving U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, DC, has created a diverse, award-winning collection of museums, including the Intel Museum, in Santa Clara, California; the Museum of African-American History, in Detroit; the Hall of Biodiversity and the Hall of the Universe, which are part of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City; and the Corning Museum of Glass, in Corning, New York.

Appelbaum, 57, who is bearded, gray-haired, and exceptionally intense, views his firm's work as a synthesis of art and mission. He uses the tools of technology, design, film, architecture, and storytelling to accomplish what he describes as the "social good" of sharing meaningful information: He means to use the power of design to display the potential of human society. "What we do isn't just about exhibit design," he says. "It's about helping institutions create a sense of mission. Ultimately, we are agents provocateurs. Museums are really an ethical system; they present to society the things and the ideas that we believe are worth valuing."

First the Story, Then the Design

Appelbaum believes that design should begin with words -- the ideas and impressions that the museum wants to convey to its audience. For that reason, all RAA exhibits tell a story. "The old style of exhibit making was to place a series of black boxes around a formal great hall, with no rhyme or reason or connection between one box and the next," he says. "We try to control the sequence of experiences that visitors have. We design the spaces in between the exhibits. That does not mean that we control people. It means that we construct a strong linear experience, one that tells a clear story and that lets visitors break away to explore various aspects of an exhibit in more depth."

At the Corning Museum, displays tell the stories of various inventors' discoveries: the development of safety glass, the automated bottle maker, fiberglass, fiber-optic cable. The Holocaust Museum issues identity cards that let visitors follow the fate of a survivor or a victim of the Holocaust. Throughout that exhibit, the experiences of individuals are told with everyday objects: a rusted milk can in which Jewish resistance fighters hid issues of underground newspapers and other materials that documented the horror of the Holocaust; piles of scissors, kitchen utensils, and other necessities that Jews brought with them to the death camps, believing that they were on their way to a new home.

RAA's obsession with content and story is contagious, argues Rob Cassetti, 42, creative director of the Corning Museum. "We spent nearly a year trying to acquire an authentic replica of the mirror that's on the Hubble Space Telescope just because RAA insisted on it," Cassetti says. "Making a plastic model would have been easier and cheaper, but we were already infected with the idea of authenticity. We got the real thing because we knew it would tell the story better."

Appelbaum's passion for having the story inform the design is reflected in RAA's staff -- an eclectic collection of both designers and content experts. Among them are historians, artists, and even a paleontologist. "We have people from a broad range of disciplines because our front-end process is very intense," Appelbaum explains. "No one here has a degree in 'exhibit design.' All of us have come from other fields and want to apply our skills in a socially relevant way."