Newseum's an attic packed with storied stuff

James Polshek was the architect of the Pennsylvania Avenue project. Ralph Appelbaum was the exhibit designer. (Maria bryk/newseum)

WASHINGTON - The new Newseum here stands on Pennsylvania Avenue, right opposite the National Gallery of Art. I don't think the architect had the metaphor in mind, but you can imagine the Newseum as an enormous camera - lots of shiny metal and glass, like the big boxy Speed Graphics of old-time newspapers - that is shooting a picture of the Gallery across the street.

As the name implies, the Newseum is a museum of news. It offers displays of everything from the earliest newspapers, like the one started by Benjamin Franklin's brother, right up to the latest in digital journalism. It's mostly media, as you'd expect, a vast sea of electronic words and images. But it also contains some actual objects plucked from the headlines of the past: a chunk of the Berlin Wall, for instance, or the broadcasting antenna that once topped the World Trade Center.

The architect is James Polshek of the Polshek Partnership, the firm that recently completed WGBH headquarters in Brighton. The exhibit designer is Ralph Appelbaum. Polshek and Appelbaum collaborated previously on the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock, Ark., and the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York.

I count myself an admirer of the work of both designers. But the exhibits this time are better than the architecture. The building can be thought of as a forgettable set of metal frames and scaffolds that house the fascinating exhibits.

The Newseum does work as urban design. It boldly fills what used to be an ugly gap in Pennsylvania Avenue, the street that's billed as "America's Main Street." The facade, though, is disconcerting. An oddly angled projecting roof looks at first like a construction flaw, until you realize that it's playing the trendy game of relating the building to the Washington street grid, which is a few degrees off the diagonal of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The dominant feature of the facade, though, is a vertical panel made of 50 tons of Tennessee marble. On it are engraved the words of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the one that guarantees freedom of the press. This slab reads either as a tombstone for the amendment or a celebration of it, depending, I guess, on your mood. But as architecture, it's a bore.

What makes this facade look like a camera is an enormous multistory glass window, framed by the building as a camera frames a lens. The window doesn't have much reason to exist, which may be why one tends to read it as metaphor.

The Newseum folks read it that way too. They say it symbolizes the "transparency" of the newsmaking process. Get it? The public can see right in. This is an architectural metaphor that is much too literal to matter. And in daylight, of course, glass isn't transparent but reflects the world around it - which, I guess, could be another metaphor for journalism.

When you step inside, you discover that behind all that glass is an atrium 90 feet high. This is the absurdly named "New York Times - Ochs-Sulzberger Family Great Hall of News." It's a vast empty space shaped by metal and glass, with huge steel trusses spanning far above your head. There's nothing in it except a 40-foot-wide high-def media screen. That's it: just you, the vacant space, and the screen. You feel you're a midget in a high-tech factory of some kind.

A few things do float in all that air: a weather helicopter, a chunk of spacecraft. But these come across as desperate efforts to install something, anything, to animate the volume. The objects are a cliche anyway: The old Museum of Modern Art in New York showed a suspended helicopter for decades. Polshek's office describes the atrium as "the spiritual heart of the Newseum." If that were so, the institution would be spiritually overblown and empty.

But the real heart of the Newseum isn't the atrium. It's the exhibits, which, being mostly electronic, want to be not in a bright atrium but in darker spaces. An endless network of corridors and theaters contains a wealth of news materials that are, at least to someone of my generation, a wonderful and moving evocation of the past. Forget the pompous atrium, forget the forgettable facade. The Newseum is an attic simply packed with fascinating stuff.

One gallery talks about the Newseum's collection of 30,000 historic newspapers. Another, more didactic, spells out the five freedoms in the First Amendment - freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly, plus the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. A "Journalists Memorial" displays a wall on which are placed the names of 1,800 journalists who have died while reporting - a list that is planned to be, sadly, updated every year. A gallery shows photos that won the Pulitzer Prize, with interviews of many of the photographers. A video exhibits the career of broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, including fragments of his famed confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy. Old-timers like Huntley and Brinkley are here too.

There are two live broadcast studios and 15 theaters. There's a Wolfgang Puck restaurant at sidewalk level. There's an upper floor outdoor terrace, with views across the city to the Capitol. There's a playful gallery where you can "Be a TV Reporter" and get a print to take home of yourself standing, with a mike, in front of an image of any of a number of famous DC buildings. And there are a zillion - 125, to be exact - interactive games stations, at which you or your child can pretend to be a journalist and test your knowledge of news.

That's just a tiny sample. There's even, as part of the project, a new apartment building at the Newseum's rear.

I think the problem for the architect was that unlike an art museum, a museum of news isn't about beautiful things. It doesn't want or need wonderful light. It wants dim spaces with electronic screens. Hence the division into bright but useless atrium and dim but wonderful attic. The atrium is like the big stairs in front of a museum like the Met in New York: not particularly functional, but impressively dramatic.

I've always held the theory that when a culture is truly alive, it doesn't build architectural monuments to itself. It's too busy doing more vital things. More often, it's the cultures that are on their way out that build the monuments - often great architecture - in a hopeless effort to stave off an impending collapse. Think of the imperial architecture of New Delhi, just as the British Raj was fading. Or the magnificent Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, just before the Spanish drove out the Moors who built it.

The Freedom Forum, the foundation that supports the Newseum, spent $450 million on this building, mostly from its own endowment. The land alone cost $100 million. Is this another monument to a dying culture, as traditional journalism fades before the onset of the Internet? Is it merely a feast of nostalgia for people my age? Who else knows who Huntley and Brinkley were, anyway? Does it matter?

I don't know. If you come to Washington, be sure to see the Newseum, and allow plenty of time to wallow in its almost limitless riches. The older you are, the more you'll love it. Just don't expect great architecture.

The Newseum opens to the public on Friday, with free admission. Tickets for later dates can be purchased online at www.newseum.org or by phone at 888-639-7386.

Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.