Among the snapshots my mother sent of her recent visit to Washington DC was one of the National Museum of the American Indian, which was under construction the last time I was at the Mall in 2001, for an anti-war rally, and that opened in 2004. My first thought when I saw the photo was, Surely Native Americans deserve a better building than this. It’s an ungainly mass with a banded facade that undulates, as the museum’s website explains, “evoking a wind-sculpted rock formation." In photographs the building looks less geological – like a form shaped molecule by molecule over eons – than Brutalism manque. It’s composed with the kind of kooky eccentric language that’s fine for a small house, like those by Bruce Goff, but not for a monument meant to celebrate Native American cultures built by a government that very nearly eradicated them. This bold, unsettled building just doesn’t feel right.
While the website text goes on to explain that the building and landscape were conceived with attention to Native American beliefs, the museum looks more like a testament to the formal willfulness of its designers, and entirely insensitive to any kind of belief. (There are eleven firms credited with collaboration in the building’s design, including Polshek Partnership, who built the elegant, modernist Pequot Museum near Foxwoods Casino in Mashantucket, Connecticut.) The next, and final, museum to be unveiled on the Mall will be the National Museum of African American Culture and History, which is rising now on the last available plot. This building, designed by London-based architect David Adjaye, uses a language that’s mercifully unreferential. Its flat planes and stark geometries confer dignity.