Post by LHR02 on Feb 9, 2005 7:53:47 GMT -5
From today's Wall Street Journal, a nice piece about the ready to open new Churchill Museum:
Winston Churchill, Cigar and All
A new London museum honors the great wartime leader.
BY JEREMY HILDRETH
Wednesday, February 9, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
LONDON--You've just been roaming the dimly lit subterranean corridors of the Cabinet War Rooms--the very space beneath Her Majesty's Treasury from which Winston Churchill directed Britain's war effort, spoke to Franklin Roosevelt by telephone and broadcast some his greatest orations--when you reach the threshold of the magnificent new Churchill Museum. There's a quote on the wall: "We are all worms," says Churchill from the grave, "but I do believe I am a glow worm."
Welcome to the first permanent national exhibition dedicated to the life and achievements of the man voted by the British public in 2002 as the Greatest Briton ever. Housed in a long-abandoned storage area, the museum took £6 million ($11.1 million), and more than two years, to realize. Approximately 25% of the funding came from U.S. donors, along with several of the artifacts, including Sir Winston's polo pants, which were given by an unnamed American collector who "flew to London in his private jet," relates museum director Phil Reed, "and handed them to me over breakfast at the Ritz."
On display here are numerous bits of classic Churchilliana: among them, the well-chomped, half-consumed cigars (the image-conscious Churchill, understand, would never smoke a stogie to an unflattering nub) and the polka-dot bowtie famous from the 1941 portrait by photographer Yosuf Karsh (which, somehow disappointingly, turns out to have been a clip-on). There are also more obscure but equally charming items, such as his own oil paintings, done in his later years, and the punishment book from Harrow (his elite boarding school), which lies open to the page upon which the young Winston is cited for "breaking into premises and doing damage," an infraction for which he received seven strokes of the cane.
The modest aim of the museum's backers was to create "the benchmark for personality museums in the 21st century," and I'd say they've pulled it off. It was once said of Churchill in a quote made famous by Ed Murrow that "he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle." In much the same vein, "with more than 20 digital interactive exhibits and 14 noninteractive moving graphic projections," the Churchill Museum mobilizes design and technology and sends them into history. There are screens to touch, evolving maps to study, and even an electronic pond (à la the one at the Churchill's family estate, Chartwell) that you can fish in.
Paradoxically, the effect of all this cutting-edge gimcrackery--and this is intentional--is a visitor experience that is "tactile and pre-digital," to use the words of graphic designer Nick Bell, whose team collaborated on the project. "We tried to reflect a mid-century, analog, paper-driven world using [current] technology," Mr. Bell says, and to "retain [for people] a sense of opening dusty files in an archive."
The "dusty files" refer particularly to the Lifeline, a 3-foot-wide, 40-foot-long digital display table that cost more than half a million dollars and has to be seen to be believed. By riffling electronic tabs, you can find out what was happening in Churchill's world on seemingly any day during his 90-year life, in the process revealing facsimile documents, letters and photographs, or activating relevant animations (e.g., finger the page for Aug. 6, 1945, the day of the Hiroshima bomb drop, and the entire 120-square-foot screen gets obliterated in a white bloom).
The exhibition begins in 1940 with Churchill as prime minister facing the threat of a German invasion, and reaches its midpoint at his death in 1965. We learn that Churchill planned his own funeral (an exercise he dubbed "Operation Hope Not") and we see a video of the state funeral, inventively depicted on three screens. Most of the videos in the museum have been cropped, edited or repackaged in some way to impart novelty to what might otherwise appear as stock historical footage. In this instance, says Roger Mann, whose company Casson Mann led the exhibition design, "a religious-triptych format was appropriate because this is the moment Churchill became an icon."
Mr. Mann is quick to point out, though, that the museum "is not a hagiography, not a theme park and not Madame Tussaud's." Indeed, curators are at pains to show that Churchill could be a difficult character, and that his policies and positions (his opposition to independence for India, for example) were not universally applauded.
The exhibition ends with a news ticker--aglow with genuine tungsten bulbs, not LEDs--streaming headlines about Churchill's election to prime minister and the rise of Adolf Hitler. One of the final panels proffers Der Führer's personal opinion of his adversary: "He is an utterly amoral, repulsive creature."
I expect most visitors to the Churchill Museum will take a rather different view, including Queen Elizabeth, who will honor Churchill at the official opening of the museum this Thursday (the day before the public opening). Churchill, who was in office when Elizabeth acceded to the throne in 1952, is thought to be the queen's favorite prime minister.
Mr. Hildreth is an associate at Saffron, a branding and design consultancy based in London and Madrid.
Winston Churchill, Cigar and All
A new London museum honors the great wartime leader.
BY JEREMY HILDRETH
Wednesday, February 9, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
LONDON--You've just been roaming the dimly lit subterranean corridors of the Cabinet War Rooms--the very space beneath Her Majesty's Treasury from which Winston Churchill directed Britain's war effort, spoke to Franklin Roosevelt by telephone and broadcast some his greatest orations--when you reach the threshold of the magnificent new Churchill Museum. There's a quote on the wall: "We are all worms," says Churchill from the grave, "but I do believe I am a glow worm."
Welcome to the first permanent national exhibition dedicated to the life and achievements of the man voted by the British public in 2002 as the Greatest Briton ever. Housed in a long-abandoned storage area, the museum took £6 million ($11.1 million), and more than two years, to realize. Approximately 25% of the funding came from U.S. donors, along with several of the artifacts, including Sir Winston's polo pants, which were given by an unnamed American collector who "flew to London in his private jet," relates museum director Phil Reed, "and handed them to me over breakfast at the Ritz."
On display here are numerous bits of classic Churchilliana: among them, the well-chomped, half-consumed cigars (the image-conscious Churchill, understand, would never smoke a stogie to an unflattering nub) and the polka-dot bowtie famous from the 1941 portrait by photographer Yosuf Karsh (which, somehow disappointingly, turns out to have been a clip-on). There are also more obscure but equally charming items, such as his own oil paintings, done in his later years, and the punishment book from Harrow (his elite boarding school), which lies open to the page upon which the young Winston is cited for "breaking into premises and doing damage," an infraction for which he received seven strokes of the cane.
The modest aim of the museum's backers was to create "the benchmark for personality museums in the 21st century," and I'd say they've pulled it off. It was once said of Churchill in a quote made famous by Ed Murrow that "he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle." In much the same vein, "with more than 20 digital interactive exhibits and 14 noninteractive moving graphic projections," the Churchill Museum mobilizes design and technology and sends them into history. There are screens to touch, evolving maps to study, and even an electronic pond (à la the one at the Churchill's family estate, Chartwell) that you can fish in.
Paradoxically, the effect of all this cutting-edge gimcrackery--and this is intentional--is a visitor experience that is "tactile and pre-digital," to use the words of graphic designer Nick Bell, whose team collaborated on the project. "We tried to reflect a mid-century, analog, paper-driven world using [current] technology," Mr. Bell says, and to "retain [for people] a sense of opening dusty files in an archive."
The "dusty files" refer particularly to the Lifeline, a 3-foot-wide, 40-foot-long digital display table that cost more than half a million dollars and has to be seen to be believed. By riffling electronic tabs, you can find out what was happening in Churchill's world on seemingly any day during his 90-year life, in the process revealing facsimile documents, letters and photographs, or activating relevant animations (e.g., finger the page for Aug. 6, 1945, the day of the Hiroshima bomb drop, and the entire 120-square-foot screen gets obliterated in a white bloom).
The exhibition begins in 1940 with Churchill as prime minister facing the threat of a German invasion, and reaches its midpoint at his death in 1965. We learn that Churchill planned his own funeral (an exercise he dubbed "Operation Hope Not") and we see a video of the state funeral, inventively depicted on three screens. Most of the videos in the museum have been cropped, edited or repackaged in some way to impart novelty to what might otherwise appear as stock historical footage. In this instance, says Roger Mann, whose company Casson Mann led the exhibition design, "a religious-triptych format was appropriate because this is the moment Churchill became an icon."
Mr. Mann is quick to point out, though, that the museum "is not a hagiography, not a theme park and not Madame Tussaud's." Indeed, curators are at pains to show that Churchill could be a difficult character, and that his policies and positions (his opposition to independence for India, for example) were not universally applauded.
The exhibition ends with a news ticker--aglow with genuine tungsten bulbs, not LEDs--streaming headlines about Churchill's election to prime minister and the rise of Adolf Hitler. One of the final panels proffers Der Führer's personal opinion of his adversary: "He is an utterly amoral, repulsive creature."
I expect most visitors to the Churchill Museum will take a rather different view, including Queen Elizabeth, who will honor Churchill at the official opening of the museum this Thursday (the day before the public opening). Churchill, who was in office when Elizabeth acceded to the throne in 1952, is thought to be the queen's favorite prime minister.
Mr. Hildreth is an associate at Saffron, a branding and design consultancy based in London and Madrid.