* “A century in the making” …. and that’s all they could come up with?
* I guarantee that in a couple of years, there will be various articles wondering why blacks aren’t interested in going to this museum.
* Since blacks have no architectural history of their own, this building steals from Asia. I wonder if the lack of even a scintilla of blacking engineering achievement came up when the building was being designed.
* Well Golly, maybe if we cucked harder it would make the People of Color like us?
* It looks like one of those terraced Afros on Boondocks (which BTW is a very funny and self-aware cartoon about AA’s). It needs to be picked out so it will look like one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. Where’s Colin Kaepernick when you need him?
* How long before it becomes a run-down, crime-ridden hellhole full of pickpockets, muggers and knockout-gamers preying on clueless European tourists. Every big, black city has their version of Underround Atlanta. I don’t know what took DC so long.
* I used to like the idea that there was a big lawn in the middle of our nation’s capital. But there have been so many monuments erected in the last 30 years, I’m wonder if there’s any lawn left. It all started with a desire to commemorate Vietnam, but once that memorial was built, a tremendous “me too” thing took hold. I’m surprised they haven’t built a monument/museum to women and/or LGBTQIA’s yet. That conjures some amusing images.
The problem is that all of these memorials are meant to rectify some historical oversight or injustice and those things spring from transient and particularist emotion, so that, once they are built, no one really cares. I’m sure in 30 years this museum/monument, like most of the ones built in the past 30 years, will just be another place marked up with a graffiti and a good place to rendezvous to buy drugs.
On the other hand, it may become another one of those museums/monuments that will become an obligatory school field trip stop, which means there will be fast food restaurants and a large cafeteria worked in (if it hasn’t been done already.)
It’s strange because when I was younger I felt that some kind of recognition of what black people and native Americans had contributed to our unique culture would be a good thing. But since that time, all such grateful recognition has been completely submerged into grievance and insolence, you versus me, and so on.
The reason the Alt-right has wheels is because it knows that most of the alleged intersectional grievance mongering in our society is completely phony. It’s just an old script that is being used to leverage political power.
* There has been an African-American museum in Los Angeles for quite a while and it is basically deserted except for the occasional school group being dragged through it. And I’m not sure how long even that will go on. The schools in Los Angeles are now overwhelmingly Latin or Asian. Your typical Guatamalen immigrant kid is going to be asking why the hell he is being dragged through this museum dedicated to people he hates and fears. Even Black people are not interested in visiting the thing.
What is particularly cruel is that the museum is right next to an enormous and spectacular museum of science and flight that is, whether anyone wants to admit it or not, a shining monument to the achievements of straight White men, and is always packed to capacity. They could at least have had the decency to locate the AA museum somewhere at the other end of Exposition Park like on the other side of the football stadium where it wouldn’t have looked so forlorn in comparison.
* Frankly, describing anything having to do with Black Americans as “gleeful” or “gleaming” is racist. What do they think this is? The Stepin Fetchit Memorial Museum? Next thing you know, they’ll be describing the museum as “clean” and “articulate.”
* This building is a monument to everything that’s wrong with liberalism.
Firstly, it’s just UGLY. You really have to be there to see how ugly and out of place it is. It’s just an eye sore.
But more importantly, you’re NOT SUPPOSED TO NOTICE. Everybody is tripping over each other to say what a terrific building it is. Which brings us to my third point: the architect, David Adjaye, has NO TALENT, and he doesn’t know it. It’s obvious, the only reason he was picked to do this building is because he is black. I mean, he’s not American, he’s just black.
You should have heard NPR just embarrassing itself in its piece on David Adjaye. You would have thought he walked on water. But the thing is, Adjaye really believes all that crap these people feed him. Look at his apartment building is Harlem (yeah, he got that contract too). It’s a disgrace. And the locals in Harlem HATE the building, but the NYT et. al. keep saying what a wonder it is.
This building and its architect are the perfect example of the soft racism of liberalism. But worst of all, the building completely ruins the aesthetic of the mall. It really looks like someone took a giant crap on the National Mall . . . which may really have been the point.
* Notice how it’s not just a “welcome addition” to the collection of monuments in D.C., it’s a “rebuke,” and a welcome one, to what must be very bad people. I mean, how often does one “rebuke” good people? And if the people who founded this place were bad, it’s no great leap to conclude this place is bad, and anyone who shares their ancestry is at best highly suspect.
* Interesting description of the architects from the museum web site:
“The son of a Ghanaian diplomat, Adjaye grew up as a citizen of the world; he has lived in Egypt, England, Lebanon, and Tanzania; and has visited all 54 independent nations of Africa. Freelon is the leading designer for African American museums today.”
I like that last bit. Did you know that “designer for African American museums” was a thing in itself? Just how many of these are there, anyway?
* A few months ago, I saw this building for the first time.
I had no idea what it was, but my initial reaction was horror. It stands out like a sore thumb on the National Mall.
* The megaphone no longer seems to help in selling books:
http://www.dangerandplay.com/2016/06/22/media-hoaxer-michelle-fields-ruined-her-life-cant-sell-books/
https://heatst.com/world/abysmal-sales-for-new-book-by-new-york-times-ceo-mark-thompson/?mod=sm_tw_post
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/295970-clintons-new-book-sold-fewer-than-3000-copies-in-first
* The ideas of a giant tar paper shack or an enormous wattle & daub hut were considered and rejected.
* Regardless of the alleged cultural appropriation of Asian themes in this architecture, it is designed to be a political statement, and therefore draws most of its inspiration from the brutalist designs of the communist utopians of the prior century.
It is not meant to inspire. It is meant to oppress. It achieves this using dark materials with prickly texture, hostile repetitive geometry that has sharp angles. The structure itself has a repetitive cantilevered structure that is meant to cause a sense of unease that it might collapse. It plays into normal human instincts to recoil much like when seeing a snake.
A proper piece of civic architecture is friendly in form and texture to human sensibilities, and pays homage to its heritage for the culture for which it came. It wants people to marvel at how we manaaged to create such a lovely, spectacular thing.
This museum is not a celebration of anything. It is one big Fuck You.
One can only hope that like many such designs, the structural work was poor and the materials were exotic enough that it rapidly decays and is leveled before it falls down in fifty years.
