Architecture: Airborne Museum

There are museums for just about everything these days, from insects to reconstructed New England whaling ports. For pure magnitude, nothing matches the problems of a museum for the aerospace age. When the private Air Force Museum Foundation approached Kevin Roche, 42, a partner in Eero Saarinen & Associates, to build a new museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, they wanted a structure in which the ten-engine B-36 jet and pusher-prop driven bomber, largest plane ever used operationally, would look right at home.

The solution, revealed last week, was space itself. Architect Roche designed a soaring, wedge-shaped shed (estimated cost: $10 million) that will shelter eight acres of exhibits. The roof is made of an interlace of cables covered with a steel deck, and hangs off steel pylons at the four corners. Says Roche: “It’s as if you roofed over three-and-a-half city blocks at the 12-story level.”

Visitors will enter the low, narrow end of the museum after walking down a quarter-mile ramp. Up to that point, the museum’s massiveness is masked by giant earthen embankments. Then, beginning with the Wright Brothers’ flyer, visitors progress historically past World War I Jennys to more than 80 types of aircraft famed in military aviation. The winged exhibits, designed by Herb Rosenthal & Associates, sit on various levels more like discoveries than displays. The sparrowlike Spads of the Lafayette Escadrille will be shaded under Roche’s giant hangar along with the B-52, B58 and the advanced Lockheed A11.

Like flying itself, the ceiling soars and spreads steadily upward until it terminates in one giant span, 130 feet high and more than two football fields in length. Beyond is a gigantic, 12-acre forecourt filled with the newest rockets and aircraft opening directly onto Wright-Patterson’s runways. Said one awed spectator, as he looked at the model last week: “It’ll never get off the ground.” In tribute to the architect, the museum looks as if it could.