At the Newseum, Bob Woodruff's vest, Murrow's microphone, Wonkette's slippers

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: A Museum for Artifacts of the News Media’s Hunters and Gatherers
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: May 8, 2007


(Newseum)
At the Newseum: Edward R. Murrow’s microphone.

Washington -- Time magazine’s armored truck from the Balkans, pockmarked with bullet holes, has been hoisted into place. The laptop used by Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered in Pakistan in 2002, has arrived. So has the vest that Bob Woodruff of ABC was wearing last year when he was wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

These stark reminders of the hazards of newsgathering will be displayed at the new Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, scheduled to open on Oct. 15. Cranes still hover over its steel-and-glass structure, but workers have now installed the facade’s showstopper — a 50-ton, 74-foot-high marble engraved with the First Amendment — and are preparing the exhibitions.

Slowly, the Newseum — a bigger, more dramatic, higher-tech reinvention of of the former Newseum in Arlington, Va. — is taking shape. More than six years in the making and costing $435 million, it may be one of the world’s most expensive museums now under construction. It is certainly among the most prominent, perched on the last buildable site on the presidential inaugural parade route between the Capitol and the White House.

And it is one of the most ambitious, both in design and aspiration. Polshek Partnership Architects designed the museum, and Ralph Appelbaum Associates created its exhibits. (Their earlier collaborations include the Clinton Library in Little Rock, Ark., and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.)

The building’s transparent exterior is meant to convey the idea of a free press and an open society. A mammoth rectangle frames the facade, suggesting a television or computer screen that provides what the museum calls a “window on the world.” Visitors enter through a Great Hall of News, where they can see breaking stories on a giant digital “zipper” before setting out on a 1.5-mile path of displays and interactive kiosks. The building, which has seven floors, also contains 135 upscale apartments, Newseum shops and Wolfgang Puck’s three-story restaurant, the Source.

The Appelbaum firm, specializing in interpretive exhibits, is known for infusing ordinary objects with meaning. Its past projects include the Holocaust Museum here and the original Newseum. The Newseum will have 600 artifacts on display, one-tenth of its collection. There’s a pencil, but it was used by Mark H. Kellogg, a reporter killed at Little Bighorn with Custer in 1876, and since blogging is best done in pajamas, Newseum also showcases the turquoise slippers worn by Ana Marie Cox when she wrote as Wonkette, the sassy Washington blogger. (She now writes for Time.com.)...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/arts/design/08muse.html