A New Icon

by Craig Collins

From its modest materials to its spectacular central skylight, the National Museum of the Marine Corps is designed to evoke the uniqueness of the Corps.

On a bright summer afternoon, Brian Chaffee, principal and project architect of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, leads a pair of visitors to the middle deck of the observation tower that rises beneath the soaring glass ceiling of the museum’s dramatic centerpiece, the Leatherneck Gallery. He wants them to understand something: The view is different up here. Below and to the right, suspended in midair, is a Curtiss JN-4HG “Jenny” biplane, casting its shadow over the circular globe-patterned terrazzo floor, on which an abstract water-and-earth pattern is gridded by concentric latitudes. The sky is almost perfectly clear overhead, but even so, a few wispy cloud shadows drift lazily over the floor. “With the movement of the clouds, you really get the sense of these aircraft in flight,” says Chaffee. “When you get to the top of the observation deck and you’re looking down on that aircraft, the Curtiss Jenny, you can imagine being a pilot in an aircraft just above it.”

To the left, at eye level, is the downward-angled nose of an AV-8B Harrier II jet; the viewer can’t help but trace its trajectory up along the nose, to the cast figure of a Marine aviator seated in the cockpit, bearing down intently. “Look at the Harrier,” Chaffee says, smiling. “It’s almost as if ... it could be the last thing you ever saw.”

Moments earlier, Chaffee and his visitors had stood on the floor of the gallery, gazing upward at the bellies of four suspended Marine Corps aircraft and beyond, through a ceiling composed of 35,000 square feet – that’s two-thirds of an acre – of glass into the open sky. From the middle observation deck, they climb to the third and uppermost platform, a rugged slab of steel checkerplate that places the viewer on a level with the highest-hanging airplane in the Leatherneck Gallery, an FG-1 Corsair, cable-rigged some 70 feet in the air and tipped on its axis just enough to flash the upper surfaces of its signature inverted gull wings.

No doubt, the different vantage points on the tri-level tower in the Leatherneck Gallery are meant to surprise and delight the half-million or so people who it’s estimated will visit the National Museum of the Marine Corps each year. But for Chaffee and his colleagues at Fentress Bradburn, the Denver-based architectural firm that

designed the museum, they’re part of a thorough and painstaking design process that began six years ago, took some of them to distant corners of the globe, and now, in the summer of 2006, was beginning at last to blossom forth on a hill next to Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va.

For Fentress Bradburn – a firm already well-known for its distinctive, innovative designs of the Denver International Airport, the Denver Broncos’ stadium (now known as Invesco Field), South Korea’s Incheon International Airport, and many other museums and buildings around the world – the journey began on Nov. 30, 2000, the date when the Marine Corps Heritage Center National Design Competition was announced. The first phase of the competition attracted nearly 30 architects, a pool that was eventually thinned to four. Each finalist was invited, before making its final design submission, to tour the 135-acre site in Prince William County, Va., where the Heritage Center would be built.

The Fentress Bradburn team, led by Curt Fentress, the firm’s founding partner and principal-in-charge of design, had only six weeks to prepare its design. The team promptly embarked on what is known in the industry as a “patient search”: a process of inquiry aimed at discovering, in addition to the general questions about the purpose of the Heritage Center site, the key to capturing the distinctive aura of the Marine Corps in the material media of building construction. Before making its first sketch, the team immersed itself in Marine Corps culture, reading books, watching films and other videos, interviewing Marines both past and present. The walls at the Denver office of the firm were plastered with still photographs of Marines in every situation imaginable – in battle, at sea, in flight, and often simply gathered together in quiet moments. “What we were striving for,” says Fentress, “was a building that would be a new image, a new icon for the Marine Corps.”

In their sketches, Fentress says, the design team returned again and again to an image that has, to many Americans, become the iconic representation of the Marine Corps: Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on Feb. 23, 1945. Already memorialized in the Marine Corps War

Memorial at Arlington, Va., the image of those men had stuck with Fentress for decades. “When I was a child,” he recalls, “I remember my father looking at that picture and telling me about what happened at Iwo Jima. My father was not an educated man, and he was never in the military, but he knew exactly how many of those guys survived the war, and what happened to them later ... and how many Marines died at Iwo Jima ... It was amazing that somebody would know this much about this group of people. Even then, I knew there was something very special about that photograph.”

One of the most distinctive qualities of Rosenthal’s image is the angle at which the flagpole is inclined as the servicemen struggle to raise it. As the design team studied the other images in front of them, this raised angle seemed to be a common feature among many of them. They brought in a renowned Marine historian – retired Col. Joseph Alexander, who would later become an integral member of the museum’s exhibit design team – to explain the recurrence of this image. “We were looking at the howitzers in the photographs that were pointed up at the same angle, always,” says Fentress. “We didn’t know why. We looked at the way people stood ready with their rifles at about the same angle. We didn’t know why. We had a photograph of the wedding ceremony, with the sabers held at angles similar to this. We could see something there, but we didn’t exactly know why. And so Col. Alexander explained it to us.”

The angle Fentress, Chaffee, and other members of the team kept encountering, says Alexander, was coincidental to a number of circumstances unique to the Marines. It is similar to where Marine officers would, at the command to draw swords, extend a sword in front of them before snapping it back to their shoulders. “And if you’re getting married in a military wedding, by the way, that’s the angle of the arch that you and your bride come through,” Alexander says. “It’s also the angle of a Marine artillery piece, particularly a howitzer, that would be fired that steeply because the range would be so short. You’re just lobbing it almost vertically, and that means that the enemy is very close. There’s an image of a number of our jet planes taking off at that extreme angle, trying to get to altitude as quickly as they could, because of an incoming air raid.”

Alexander also saw, in the team’s preliminary designs, some links to the Marine Corps that they seemed to have stumbled on almost intuitively. “For example, if you look at the glasswork in the atrium, you’ll see a pattern of panes or reinforcements. Whatever the structural reason for it is, it gives the impression of a net. And we don’t do this anymore, but for much of at least the first half of the 20th century, that’s how we went from ship to shore. It started by going off the steep side of a transport down a cargo net that was in a grid exactly like that, to get into the small boats, the landing craft alongside it. It was a hairy thing, but that was always the start of a ship-toshore movement, the Marines heavily laden with their rifles and packs going over the side four at a time, hands on the vertical, feet on the horizontal. If you get them backwards, you get stepped on, and then the leap for life as you get down on the bottom craft in the chop below. If you mistime, you step off of the net and then you’re hanging by your feet.”

Fentress says that after Alexander arrived to discuss the design with them, they felt much better about the direction in which their design was moving. “The design that you see today kind of grew out of all of those things,” says Fentress. “And when we overlaid some Marine Corps images, overlaid the photographs onto this design, then it just sort of made sense. And the one that’s the most striking, obviously, is the flag-raising [at Iwo Jima]. When you see that superimposed on the design, it looks as if was born from that.” On July 9, 2001, several weeks after their final jury presentation, Fentress Bradburn’s team received word that they had been selected to design the 135-acre Marine Corps Heritage Center.

The dominant design element of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, inspired by these early explorations of Corps imagery, is the 210-foot-tall stainless steel mast that tapers as it rises at a 60-degree angle through the conical skylight of the Leatherneck Gallery. But it is by no means the sole feature of the museum – or of the Heritage Center campus – that has been designed to be evocative of the Marine Corps’ unique culture and traditions.

After Fentress Bradburn had won the design competition, many decisions remained to be made. Over the next several months, details emerged and were refined, some of them after Chaffee and Fentress, along with other members of the architectural and exhibit design teams, underwent a brief “greening” tour, ordered by Commandant James L. Jones and conducted by Col. Joe Long (USMC-Ret.), who is now the museum’s deputy director. The object was to immerse the design team in some of the Corps’ history and traditions.

Chaffee attended boot camp at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, and spent three days aboard the USS Nassau, an amphibious assault ship, offshore from Camp Lejeune, N.C. Fentress visited the sites of some of the most historic Marine Corps battles, such as Iwo Jima and Belleau Wood, the World War I battle site in the forests of northeastern France. At Belleau Wood – considered to be a pivotal battle in Corps history, in which it transformed itself from a shipbound organization of sharpshooters to a lethal force-in-readiness – Fentress was surprised to discover many material remnants of the battle. “We walked across those fields that the Marines had to cross in the face of all those machine gun nests,” he says. “We saw the trenches. There’s still stuff in the woods, you know, toothbrushes and canteens, and bullets, all sorts of stuff. It must have been an incredible scene of carnage there.”

Both Chaffee and Fentress say that once they made these visits, many of the up-in-the-air details of the museum and the Heritage Center began to settle in their minds. One of the most obvious elements for Chaffee is the central observation tower, which bears a striking resemblance to the superstructure of a naval warship. “I can say that there was a very direct relationship between my visit aboard the USS Nassau and how the central stair and elevator observation tower evolved, and the development of that design,” Chaffee said. “It just took on a notably ship-like appearance, utilizing what I had observed on the ship as a very modular design esthetic, and portions could easily be fitted, be removed and replaced, and it really kind of adopted the utility of the Marine/Navy shipboard devices.” The final exterior color of the building – a naval shade of gray – was also partly inspired by the stay aboard the Nassau.

Some of the museum’s design elements are overtly metaphorical, such as the abstract terrazzo pattern on the circular floor of the Leatherneck Gallery, in which a wavy blue ribbon – symbolizing water – meanders through two brown-and-green segments of floor, which represent land. While the central tower, with its ship-like features, is situated in the “water” portion of the floor, Chaffee explains, the land-based tableaus – an LVT amphibious landing craft storming the coconut-log wall at Tarawa and a Sikorsky helicopter offloading Marine assault troops in Korea – are situated in the land-colored portions. “And of course,” says Chaffee, “the aircraft are suspended in the space above that. So that encapsulates land, sea, and air within that space.”

Other features are subtler and, while their link to Marine Corps history and principles is still resonant, have a more intuitive feel. The chapel that will be built, in a later construction phase, on the Heritage Center campus in Semper Fidelis Memorial Park, will be a single-room structure. Its roof, built simply of exposed wood planks and beams, will cap glass-paneled walls fitted to a stone foundation, in order to gracefully evoke the austerity of a Marine Corps field chapel. “Part of what we studied,” says Chaffee, “was what kind of chapels Marines have fashioned in the field, in the combat zone. And often they just used the mess tents, you know, stacked up panel boxes sideways to sit on, or vertically to make a lectern.”

At the rear of the chapel, the plan calls for a man-made stream to spring up from the ground and then trickle downhill, slowly gathering strength until it culminates in a large pool on the lower ground of the site. “The whole premise of the Semper Fidelis Memorial Park,” says Chaffee, “was a couple of ideas. One was to include a water feature that could help symbolize that Marines – most Marines – spend part of their career at service on the sea in conjunction with the Navy. And secondarily, to provide a more natural exterior experience and a place where units can memorialize their comrades, and unit designation can evolve over time in the infrastructure of this park.”

Fentress Bradburn’s team looked well beyond the designed elements and forms that would be installed on the Heritage Center campus. The ethos and traditions of the Marine Corps informed virtually every choice they made, from where the National Museum of the Marine Corps would be sited to the very materials that would be used in construction. The museum’s glass skylight is located on the highest ground visible from Interstate 95, which is, of course, no accident. “We did recognize that there’s a strategic advantage to being on the high ground and what the Marines do in combat situations,” Chaffee says. “And that strategic advantage extends to architecture here. That’s where the building has an advantage on being on the high ground, being in its horizontal location, very visible and commanding a very strong presence.”

One of the immediate things a visitor will notice upon first glance is the stark simplicity of the museum’s exterior: Its walls, made of cast-in-place concrete, are relatively unadorned, and the skylight is made of stainless steel and glass. In selecting materials, the Fentress Bradburn team focused on a theme inescapable to any student of the Marine Corps: doing extraordinary things with modest equipment. “I’m definitely proud of that,” Chaffee says, “finding the appropriate materials to represent the Marines. One of the things we learned from Col. Alexander, as we were awarded the competition and as we were then starting to develop the detail of the design, was the story of how the Marines worked with fairly modest means – and in some cases used material that had been discarded by other armed services in battle and sent to the Marine Corps for use. And he underlined the thought that the Marines are modest in means, but yet they’re expressive in power and force, and our material selections were based on those kinds of values – simple, economical, and utilitarian.”

The ability to use concrete, glass, and steel to narrate the history of an organization like the Marine Corps is one of the things that defines someone as an architect. “It’s a lot about storytelling,” says Chaffee. “Architecture should be able to tell a story on its own. Of course, if you’re a museum you also have the benefit of artifacts and exhibits to tell the story. It’s one of the nice things about a history museum, or any museum where the exhibits are going to be a little more permanent. The architect can afford to tell a story in conjunction with the exhibits.”

Fentress also views architecture as a form of narrative – one so complex and large in scale that it reminds him of producing a feature film, in this case an epic history of the Marine Corps: “Because you have to have the writing, the idea, the story, and then you mock it up, and you storyboard it. And then you change it and continue to refine it. And then when you go out to actually make the movie, when you’re ready to produce it, it takes millions of dollars and it takes a lot of people. ... It’s exciting stuff. And this building is truly an exciting, memorable building.”