Inside the New $56 Million Immersive White House Experience

Doll house miniature replicas and room-spanning digital projections compete for tourists’ attention at the People’s House, an immersive White House visitors center.

By Kriston Capps

22 tháng 9, 2024 at 19:53 GMT+7

Hello and welcome to Bloomberg’s weekly design digest. I’m Kriston Capps, staff writer for Bloomberg CityLab, and your guide to the world of architecture and the people who build things.

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Every year millions of tourists come to Washington, DC, to see its marble monuments and federal memorials. No visit to the nation’s capital is complete without a stop at the White House, but only a handful of tourists ever get past the gate. Scheduling a tour takes luck, so most visitors have to settle for a selfie from behind the fence across Lafayette Square.

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That’s about to change — sort of — with the the People’s House: A White House Experience. Located just a block away from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this new visitors center promises the next best thing to an official West Wing tour. The three-floor interactive space from the nonprofit White House Historical Association approximates a visit to the seat of the executive branch, minus the protesters, humidity and tangible history.

No doubt, this immersive project will find an appreciative audience of would-be White House visitors. But it points to a disappointing screen-centric trend in exhibition spaces throughout Washington.

Call it the Not Quite House: The $56 million visitors center, which opens on Sept. 23, features both physical and virtual re-creations of rooms from the nearby executive mansion. Combining the action of a Cabinet meeting with the ambience of an Apple Store, the exhibits are history lite, edu-tainment heavy. The People’s House relies on an enormous array of interactive video screens to tell the story of the White House and the people who make it run.

The People’s House, which is free with timed admissions, begins with a 1:5 scale replica of the south facade. Animated videos fixed within this faux White House’s windows tell the story of the building’s history. (Martin Sheen narrates, delivering an immersive West Wing experience for fans.) The tour continues through the West Colonnade, replicating the president’s path to his office by way of the Rose Garden (depicted through more video screens).

There is an almost perfect reproduction of the Oval Office, of course, complete with accurate (fake) paintings, sofas and other furnishings. The verisimilitude is marred only by a structural column, an unavoidable necessity. (Architecture firm Gensler completed a renovation of the building in 2022.) The column won’t obstruct a family’s photo behind the Resolute Desk, which is what matters.

While there aren’t any White House artifacts on view, facsimiles of objects lend some tactility to the 33,000-square-foot space. In the Oval Office room, for example, there’s a replica of President Joe Biden’s 19th-century family Bible, recreated page by page. The White House Historical Association plans to rotate objects to reflect rooms as they change over time, reflecting a devotion to detail that will keep craft artists busy.

The most impressive display in the People’s House, in fact, is a feat of craft: a doll house replica of the White House that shows the building in cross section. That exhibit helps to illustrate how the building’s famous rooms are arranged, but more than that, it’s just a fun, interesting object, a real physical thing in the world. Among the tiny working cabinets and other miniatures, though, there are still more video screens.

Other exhibits depend wholly on screens and projectors. One gallery provides a 360-degree immersive installation, with interactive displays projected along the walls. This update on the immersive van Gogh phenomenon puts visitors inside various state rooms. Press a glowing dot near a pedestal in the Green Room and the table flies into the air, providing details about the 19th-century cabinetmaker Duncan Phyfe. It’s a little odd to read museum wall text about an object that isn’t actually there.

The immersive state dinner experience, on the other hand, is just bonkers. Projectors serve up the pomp of a formal White House reception. Visitors can join tables with virtual diplomats and bureaucrats, and listen through the din for official chit-chat. The Obamas make an appearance. For the visitor who is desperate to hear a deputy secretary expound on domestic agriculture policy over small plates, lean all the way in. Only in Washington!

Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the exhibition design firm responsible for the People’s House, surely knows its intended audience. Its other DC projects include the National Museum of African American History and Culture, US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Capitol Visitors Center. RAA can coax incredible results out of Panasonic displays. Video portraits of White House staff explaining their jobs are crystal clear and accessible.

Maybe this screen-forward presentation is a must to get iPad kids to stand still. But this many videos don’t make sense together in a museum-like setting. Sometimes the sound projections overlap, generating a buzz that competes with the natural noise of a busy room. It’s hard to know upfront how long a video is going to take, but it’s usually longer than a glance at the tombstone text hanging next to a painting. And in a gallery with only screens, you either commit to watching or you miss out entirely. It’s liberating to have the option to do a museum halfway.

Sometimes the RAA approach reads like an allergy to text. One exhibit asks viewers to pick an object shaped like a leather-bound book from a bookcase and place it on a scanner, which opens the book on a video touchscreen. The most off-putting gallery features a series of all-white remakes of musical instruments and other odds and ends from different administration. Touch them for sound; touch them all together for noise.

Other interactives at the People’s House, though, may actually challenge visitors to think about how history played out across the street. One exhibit lets viewers sit down in the Cabinet Room with actors (on screens, natch) who play President Abraham Lincoln’s war cabinet. Visitors can observe the debate, then vote on how to respond to the attack on Fort Sumter — or in other scenarios, the Great Depression and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Immersive crisis management is perhaps asking too much of middle schoolers on a field trip to DC. But that ambition sets the People’s House apart from the gift shops that often pass for visitors centers. Better that than asking for too little.