An ordinary sales slip consigning a young woman to slavery is among the chilling items that will be displayed at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. The $500 million branch of the Smithsonian in Washington breaks ground tomorrow for an opening in the autumn of 2015 that will add an ambiguous exclamation to the imposing line of culture palaces along the Mall. A rendering of the museum’s design reveals it to be too polite to capture the tragic and redemptive African-American experience. Yet I can feel an exuberant Africanness struggling to escape the civic blandness imposed by fundraising, watchdog groups and design review that are part of building on America’s most sacred ground.
Athletically sloping columns hoist tiers of bronze metalwork above the National Mall. David Adjaye, the project’s chief designer, says those sprouting bronze metal bands derive from Yoruba motifs. The building captures a sensibility found in textiles and art throughout West Africa, where the chief slave- trading ports were. London-based Adjaye is working with the insightful architect Philip Freelon, of Durham, North Carolina. (The team includes architecture firms Davis Brody Bond and SmithGroup.) As you approach the museum, the apparently solid bronze surface is revealed as a delicate screen made from a high-tech composite of concrete and bronze that softens the building’s bulk. Its patterns energetically update the ornamental ironwork screens that veiled porches in 19th-century New Orleans, where many of the artisans were African-American.

This is wonderful