National Constitution Center/President's House

Representation, Space and Race: Some thoughts on the National Constitution Center and the President’s House in Historic Philadelphia.

The National Constitution Center is at once an attempt to aggrandize the story of the writing of the Constitution of the United States of America, and an edifice of not so subtle understatement.  The outer façade of the building is the history of the Constitution is confined to one floor, in an extremely small part of the building. The representation of the historic importance of the Document is in general, aggrandized. The specific story of the Constitution and subjects of interest to it are served by a surprisingly mediocre display. It is history homogenized, in an attempt to be inclusive of the greatest possible audience, it loses the vitality of the conflicting ideas that in reality surround it

The introductory theater piece that is presented to visitors upon arrival evokes the atmosphere of a theme-park attraction. The live presenter performs an unvarying, scripted explanation of the significance of the Constitution’s creation to an audience that is passive, and sometimes even non-existent. Perhaps unwittingly, the message being conveyed is the inevitability of how the U.S. Constitution shapes our national identity. Upon first approaching the area around Independence Hall, I was somewhat baffled by the amount of open space that leads to the entrance to the National Constitution Center. The space makes the Museum fairly easy to identify, as it stands on a slight rise in the distance, but the building’s nondescript façade is in curious contrast to the isolation of the site.

The consideration given to people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds within Constitutional history seems disingenuous in the extreme. The projected images that we are given belong more to the history of Ellis Island or to Disney’s “It’s a Small World” than they do the History of the U.S. Constitution. All of the Founding Fathers have already been introduced to us as representation (To mention Martin Luther King and Elvis as products of the same context are particularly troubling in the face of the sheer volume of problematic discourse that it ignores by contrast.)

The President’s House is one of the most baffling exhibit spaces that I have visited yet. An open-air pavilion, built to give the suggestion of the house that once stood upon it. It imparts no symbolic meaning to the history that it represents, unless the attempt was to at once recall the enslavement of the household in contrast to not having a roof over your head as a free person of color. It seems a remarkably clumsy gesture on the part of planners who never moved from abstractions of thought to the physical realities of design. (It rains inside this museum.) The audio-visual component of the exhibit being exposed to the elements, and/or the vagaries of vandalism had ceased to function as expected. The effort to bring a modern element of interpretation, and the use of electronic media in the presentation of the site’s history was badly applied. Many museums have erroneously added the elements of digital or interactive display to their exhibits, the detriment being that they in no way enhance the quality of the information provided by the experience.