10/9/06
6:09 PM
Page 188
THE MUSEUM
A NEW ICON by Craig Collins
F
rom its modest materials to its spectacular central skylight, the National Museum of the Marine Corps is designed to evoke the uniqueness of the Corps. On a bright summer afternoon, Brian Chaffee, principal and project architect of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, leads a pair of visitors to the middle deck of the observation tower that rises beneath the soaring glass ceiling of the museum’s dramatic centerpiece, the Leatherneck Gallery. He wants them to understand something: The view is different up here. Below and to the right, suspended in midair, is a Curtiss JN-4HG “Jenny” biplane, casting its shadow over the circular globe-patterned terrazzo floor, on which an abstract water-and-earth pattern is gridded by concentric latitudes. The sky is almost perfectly clear overhead, but even so, a few wispy cloud shadows drift lazily over the floor. “With the movement of the clouds, you really get the sense of these aircraft in flight,” says Chaffee. “When you get to the top of the observation deck and you’re looking down on that aircraft, the Curtiss Jenny, you can imagine being a pilot in an aircraft just above it.”
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Photo courtesy of Fentress Bradburn Architects
Architecture
