O Say Can You See

Jonathan Alger designs exhibitions. But you won't find him fretting about how to hang paintings. A founder of C&G Partners, a successor firm to the renowned graphics studio Chermayeff & Geismar, Alger works in a more interpretive and interactive mode. And his clients range from the Museum of American Finance in New York and the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.—expect his reinstallation of the original Star-Spangled Banner to open at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History later this year. Here, Alger discusses why objects can't be separated from ideas, how exhibitions are like filmmaking, and what museums have in common with Starbucks coffee.

What's the appeal of the kinds of exhibitions you design?

It's partly the zeitgeist. At a certain point, I think, any culture starts wanting to document itself in the most durable medium it knows, which is architecture in the form of permanent exhibits at museums, science centers, zoos, gardens. Any cultural destination is a form of intergenerational communication.

Describe today's museum.

There's been a change in perception of what a museum is—away from the old idea of the cabinet of curiosities, toward the experience economy: thinking about a place as an experiential medium.

You make it sound exactly like a business.

Take the Griffith Observatory or the Museum of American Finance. These are places where the exhibit is in large part what people are coming to see, so it is the business. If a museum is Starbucks, then the exhibition is the coffee. It's not decor. It's the product. That's really true for this new generation of museums, where it's less about a collection than an idea.

How do you go about conveying these ideas?

If you think of a theme park as a Hollywood blockbuster, a rich experience of sights and sounds, then you can think of an exhibit as a documentary film. With a documentary, you sit down, and all kinds of facts and images pass before you. An exhibit is the same thing, only it's sitting there, and you go by it. Of course, it's also three-dimensional—you're presenting artifacts—with the further dimension of infinite time.

Have you ever tackled a subject that seemed too dull to make interesting?

At the Museum of American Finance, there's an exhibit about banking. If you're a banker, it's gripping, and you know how important it is. But for the general public, we added this whole interactive thing about bank robbers: Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, safe cracking. Another interactive component decodes the fine print in your credit-card agreement, which could actually help you save money. There's always a way to make something interesting.

You're also designing an installation for the Star-Spangled Banner. That's a pretty resonant object.

It's essentially an interior design project, built around the actual flag that Francis Scott Key was looking at when he composed his poem. It's an enormous, fragile textile that has to lie flat under incredibly dim light, for conservation purposes, and we have to make that exciting, to make this object talk. So we'll get people to really work to see it. First they'll go down a long, dark corridor, and their eyes will adjust. Then they'll go around the corner to the gallery, where they'll immediately see the poem glowing on the back wall. "O say can you see, by the dawn's early light. . . ." If the answer is yes, like Francis Scott Key, you'll know you're still American. He didn't realize it, but he was writing our design brief. There's no difference. Ideas, objects, images, and spaces are all the same to us.

For the AIA's 150th anniversary, you've designed a "green" traveling exhibition, which sounds a bit oxymoronic.

There are projects that claim to be green, and you're not so sure. Green is relative. But the AIA's exhibit is very, very light on the land. It's meant to be as easy as possible to cannibalize—the exoskeletons for the display mounts are cardboard mailing tubes, so you can take all the photographs and paper banners in the show, put them in a tube, and mail them to the next AIA venue. We also used clippable compact fluorescents like the ones in architects' offices. Whichever AIA chapter has the show at the end of the run can reuse all the material.

What's the future of exhibition design?

If you think about it, libraries, museums, theme parks, and Starbucks are all learning from one another, becoming similar. Theme parks have museum-quality installations, while museums are talking more about "visitor experience." They're competing with each other for audiences and seeing that design is a competitive tool—just as it is everywhere else.

From top: The C&G Partners cofounder with a model for the Museum of American Finance in New York. The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank's visitor center in Birmingham, Alabama. The Museum of American Finance, New York. TIAA-CREF's construction-site signage in New York. A display for NASDAQ's Times Square office in New York.