The magnitude of the 20 millennia story of the making of the American People will require significant space and an accessible location near the heart of our nation's capital.
We reviewed available spaces designated by the National Capital Planning Commission, National Park Service and the US Committee on Fine Arts. A few of those sites would meet the needs of the National Museum of the American People and its essential components.
The NMAP will need space for a story-telling museum that can accommodate three million visitors a year to its permanent exhibition and memorial. It will also require sufficient space for special exhibitions, education and public programs, a scholarly research institute, a library and archive, a restaurant, book store and gift shop, a national ancestry center, as well as space for administration and security.
The central museum structure would be an architecturally world-class building. Office space could be incorporated into it or built or leased separately. Offsite warehouse space may be necessary to house the museum's collections.
Final choices on a site will be made by the NMAP's governing body with approval from government agencies designated with that responsibility and, finally, by Congress.
Soon after the National Museum of the American People is established by Congress and its governing body is formed, we will ask Congress to approve the site for the museum. The next steps will be to hire a museum exhibition designer and team them with one of the nation's best historians and story-tellers. As they get to work on the permanent exhibition design, the NMAP will engage a world-class architect to design the museum building.
We anticipate that the museum director, architect, and exhibition director will collaborate closely so that the architecture reflects and accentuates the museum's story, and that it is incorporated into the architecture. In the case of the US Holocaust Museum, for example, the story-teller and exhibition designer worked so closely that they completed each other's sentences at presentations. Similarly, the architect and exhibition designer worked collaboratively so that accommodations in the architecture design were made to fit in special features requested by the permanent exhibition designer.
The architects of both the Holocaust and the African American museums accommodated a request by the museum designer to fit a train car into their permanent exhibitions. In both cases, the train cars were installed during construction and the rest of the museum was built around them. Collaboration on that level would be expected at the NMAP.
The museum's final design would have to go through an extensive review process, as do all proposed buildings in Washington's central core area on or near the National Mall. Legislation will be required to create an entity that would be charged with building the museum and raising all of the money to build it. It is estimated that it could cost approximately $1 billion to plan and build the museum and establish its components. Costs, fundraising and budgets for the museum will be discussed in Chapter 5 of this report.
This section of Bringing All Americans Together features the facility requirements for the museum, possible sites, the preferred sites and architectural considerations.
A museum depicting the chronological history as vast as the making of the American People will require a very large space to accommodate more than three million visitors a year to its permanent exhibition. It will be one of the most visited museums in the nation.
Based on the size of other history and story-telling museums, the NMAP's permanent exhibition could require 250,000 square feet, and the whole building could be up to 800,000 square feet.
By comparison, the National Museum of African American History and Culture with two million visitors annually has 665,000 square feet including 105,000 square feet of exhibition space.
The National Museum of American History, with 2.8 million visitors annually, has 750,000 square feet, including 300,000 square feet of exhibition and public space. The National Museum of the American Indian has 441,000 square feet to serve its 1.8 million visitors annually.
The NMAP permanent exhibition, The Making of the American People, told in the four gallaries outlined in Chapter 1 of this report, could cover 250,000 square feet as mentioned above. Each gallery would average about 30,000 square feet and the museum's memorial hall, in remembrance of all of those who were the first in every American's family to come to this land and nation, could be another 20,000 square feet.
Public elements of the building could include a grand entrance, a hall depicting American accomplishments, temporary exhibition space, classrooms and other education spaces, both a large and a small auditorium for a variety of public programs, a restaurant and general dining area, a museum store, visitor service spaces, building services including security and janitorial, exhibit support, and space set aside for volunteers, docents and the senior museum leadership team.
Other elements, including a library, archives and offices for other components of the museum, could be incorporated into the museum building or accommodated in nearby office space. That space could be leased for staff engaged in work for various components of the museum, including the Institute for the Advanced Study of the American People and different elements of administration and curatorial work. We would speak with the Smithsonian about using its Suitland, MD warehouse facility for the NMAP's collections.
Outside of the museum, a park and sculpture garden, with dramatic art work along with water features reflecting themes of the museum, could be incorporated into the project. The proximity to the waterfront could also be used to extend the museum's exhibition reach to a pier where boats used for migration and immigration to the US, as well as boats used by natives to ply these waters, could be moored for visitors to explore. Elements of this outdoor museum space could remain open in the evening to stimulate street life in the area.
The precise details of space requirements will be worked out when the museum exhibition designers, the museum administration and the architect are assembled under the NMAP Board of Regents. It could take two years or more for the exhibition and architectural designs to come together after the museum is established. Then, upon all required approvals, construction would begin.