Making Modernity: A Gallery Preview

A similarly organic aesthetic governs the presentation of the exhibits themselves. Appelbaum recommended the use of so-called glow panels along the exhibit’s perimeter that become the floor-to-ceiling finish of the room. Saylor explains, “Instead of having a drywall enclosure with exhibit cases hanging from it, the exhibit cases are our walls.” The exhibit design and the architecture “have been married since very early on in the project,” he says, “and this seamless union has really helped us all realize the best way to get the most drama out of this space.”

Bringing Light to Gray Boxes

The very nature of CHF’s collection presents its own museum-making challenges, says Anderson, who has curated numerous chemistry exhibits. “There are difficulties in displaying our science heritage,” he comments. “First, it is often difficult to understand; second, not all that much survives from beyond the recent past; and third, while recent material can be highly significant, it can be visually dull.” Erin McLeary, a curator at CHF, seconds those thoughts. “A lot of the artifacts in the instrument collection are variations on a gray box.” Throughout the planning process CHF curators insisted that such equipment be presented on its own terms. “We didn’t want the solution to be one that relies on people racing around pounding buttons,” says McLeary. “There’s got to be a happy medium between that and displaying technical charts that detail the lineage of spectrometers.”

Enter Ralph Appelbaum Associates. The firm, whose most notable projects include the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, has a reputation for being unafraid of tackling epic subjects. Appelbaum has become adept at extracting stories from objects, at examining specialized subjects through the artifacts that illuminate them. At the Corning Museum of Glass, for example, Appelbaum turned one of the world’s best assemblages of historical and art glass into a sparkling look at a material that has fascinated humankind for more than 3,000 years. And in Santa Clara, California, Appelbaum outfitted a 10,000-square-foot learning lab and gallery dedicated to the short but rapidly evolving history of the semiconductor for Intel’s headquarters.

Serious Entertainment

The high education level of the typical CHF visitor has allowed Appelbaum to keep the bar high. “The project is very focused,” project director Tim Ventimiglia says, “and we’re excited about the serious level of the scholarship.” Still, the curatorial team at CHF sent Appelbaum back to the drawing board a few times. “One initial concept featured a series of display cases that started at the exterior of the space and gradually moved into the center, with the largest area dedicated to ‘people,’ then merged into a smaller one to examine ‘tools,’ and culminated with the most interior, tightest space for ‘impact,’” says McLeary. “Our historians said, ‘No, that isn’t how science works. It’s not unidirectional, it goes back and forth continually.’” Another design draft for the gallery’s organization used the periodic table as a central motif. “The chemists said, ‘The elements are such a tiny bit of what goes on,’” says McLeary. “They felt that energy —what happens when you mix the elements —was missing, both literally and figuratively. The concept didn’t capture the underlying truth of what makes chemistry so exciting.”

Exhibits are broken down into 24 sections, each with its own story, to illustrate eight thematic arcs that range from alchemy and the roots of chemistry to the role chemistry has come to play in the modern world. All told, the cases bring to life a compelling mix of early dyes and Bakelite rings, thermometers and Bunsen burners, fuel cells and Beckman pH meters, toy chemistry sets and Geiger counters.

Such “things,” however, are merely tools with which to explore the narrative thread of the history of chemistry. Every story is based on a person or group of people, with each story’s case backed by a glowing 12’ × 12’ glass wall that incorporates a large photograph. A system of stainless steel rods attached to the glass provides display space for several dozen artifacts. Each case will highlight objects and documents that, taken together, convey the story of a given innovation or idea. The “Chemistry and the Public Good” case, for example, focuses on chemists who assumed the role of public advocates in the 19th and 20th centuries, creating change on the local, national, and global levels. It includes an 1865 letter from Louis Pasteur attacking French winemakers for not adopting pasteurization and Charles Chandler’s “Notebook on Seven Food Colors,” as well as photographs, journals, and popular magazines of the era.

As this case illustrates, some of the earliest things on display are not instruments at all. “The galleries will allow us to showcase some of our favorite treasures from the collection —like a portrait of the 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle —in a much more contextualized fashion,” says Mary Ellen Bowden, senior research fellow at CHF. “For example, near the painting we’ll display some early bound journals of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, of which Boyle was a founder.”