Model of Senate chamber, interactive exhibits highlight Kennedy Institute plan

The institute will offer history lessons on each of the 1,918 people who served in the chamber, from Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania, the first elected to the body, to Senator Carte Goodwin of West Virginia, who took office just over a week ago. The idea is to create an interactive research center on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Boston that will tell the Senate's story.

The project, which will break ground this fall with the hope of opening in 2013, has been criticized because its financial support includes $38.6 million from the federal government, with requests for more federal tax dollars pending. Private companies, organizations, unions, and others have already donated $50 million, Meade said, with a fund-raising goal of $125 million to finance construction and create an endowment.

"It will not be, as some have cynically suggested, a static library or a shrine, either to my husband or even to the United States Senate," said the senator's widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, when she spoke at UMass Boston's commencement in the spring. "Rather, it will be a dynamic center of learning and engagement that takes advantage of 21st-century technology to provide each visitor with a unique and information-rich, personalized experience that literally will bring history alive."

More educational center than museum, the building will include five classrooms with the technological capacity for distance learning. A broad exhibit hall will wrap around the Senate floor with displays tracing issues and great debates. A digital library and oral history archives will house electronic copies of the papers of Senator Kennedy and other members of the Senate. In the back right-hand corner, there will be an exact replica of Kennedy's Washington office. That will be different than the model of the Senate floor, which will only be a rough copy of the real chamber, with changes made to facilitate its function as a teaching tool.

Umass Boston Chancellor J. Keith Motley described the institute as a "jewel on our campus" that will help elevate the school's stature as a research center.

"But more importantly it will be an opportunity for young people from middle school and beyond to learn in an environment when you can look at this history of this country and the Senate in a real interdisciplinary kind of way," Motley said. "It didn't start out as the Edward M. Kennedy Institute. The idea was to study the Senate historically."

The building was designed by Rafael Viñoly, an architect from Uruguay whose other works include Tokyo International Forum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Abu Dhabi campus for New York University. In this project, Viñoly faced a particular challenge because his plans had to mesh with I.M. Pei's innovative 125-foot-high John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, which would be next door.

By design, the institute will have a lower profile than the nine-floor presidential library. The institute will be largely a single-story square structure, with a black or dark-blue glass-like second floor rising from the center, adding height and stateliness to the model of the Senate floor.

"I think what he saw as the mission of this building was to complement and not compete with I.M. Pei's design of the presidential library," Meade said.

The design for the Senate institute echoes some elements from the presidential library. The institute will be predominantly white, like the library, and it has some of the same boxy and triangular shapes found on the lower floor of the presidential museum. The black or dark-blue glass material on the second floor of the institute will be a modest reflection of a much grander feature of the library, the 115-foot-high glass-and-steel pavilion that faces Dorchester Bay.

At the dedication of the presidential library in 1979, Senator Kennedy described his brother's museum as, "a lighthouse bearing witness to Jack's truth that America at its best can truly light the world."

"He and I had a special bond, despite the 14 years between us," Senator Kennedy said. "When I was born, he asked to be my godfather. He was the best man at my wedding. He taught me to ride a bicycle, to throw a forward pass, to sail against the wind."