And Now a Word From The Critics

As long as I'm on a ALPLM roll, check out this review of the museum from an architectural critic in the Chicago Tribune. In short, he doesn't like it. OK, maybe he even hates it.

Yet a few isolated successes do not add up to a powerful whole, particularly
when the Lincoln museum is compared with another history museum of recent
vintage, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. There, unadorned materials such as rough brick walls and industrial forms such as steel
footbridges suggest the sense of foreboding in the concentration camps. Shoes,
eyeglasses and other pieces of personal property that the Nazis stripped from
victims provide an intense -- and palpably real -- connection between the
visitor and historic events. The building and its contents form a searingly
powerful whole.

At the Lincoln museum, what we get instead is clever artifice, as
in a mock TV newscast about the election of 1860 (anchored by NBC's Tim
Russert), or meticulously detailed but emotionally overdriven stage sets, such
as the one where Lincoln and his wife, Mary, watch over their deathly ill son,
Willie, in his White House bed. Lacking authenticity, the scenes are as
synthetic as the mannequins, which Simon, the Southern Illinois University
professor, has hilariously dubbed "rubber Lincolns."

For all the hype about the museum offering "immersive" exhibits that transport visitors to the era of gas lamps and hoopskirts, many of its are actually old-fashioned dioramas or conventionally arranged theaters equipped with the latest bells and whistles. There is, for example, the quill pen in the "Ghosts of the Library" program that flies through the air, Harry Potter-style.

Such thrills, the theory goes, will prep visitors for the museum's version of the crown jewels -- its "Treasures Gallery," which features a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address and other rare artifacts. But the reverse seems equally likely: The real will be a letdown, upstaged by the fake.The flash of new exhibitry will obscure Lincoln's ringing phrase about "a new birth of freedom." When visitors go home, what are they going to tell their friends about, seeing an old piece of paper or seeing Lincoln's ghost?

There's much more. And it isn't any kinder.