A Day in Philadelphia

I was in Philadelphia this week speaking at a conference on wikis. I had Tuesday in town to site see.

I went to the Rodin Museum it has the largest collection of Rodin’s works outside of Paris. Some interesting large pieces and many more smaller ones. He had a fixation for hands and feet. They look a bit oversized. The Thinker was outside, just off the street, it's pretty impressive. I had no idea it was in the US.

I then went to the Franklin Institute which is a science museum. It has a lot of hands on exhibits that are pretty cool but it makes it very geared toward kids.

I went to the National Constitution Center expecting not to like it very much, having read a lot about the constitution recently. But I was very surprised that it was great. There was a Lincoln exhibit that you walked through and had panels and sounds describing the constitutional aspects of his presidency: emancipation, states rights, suspending habeus corpus, etc. Good stuff. And things like the actual pen he used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. The permanent exhibit begins with a 17 minute show in a round theater where one (live) man describes the reasons the colonists were upset, the declaration of independence, why the articles of confederation failed and how the constitution brought a democratic experiment to the world in a bold new way. He also talked about slavery and civil rights. The fact that it was live vs just a movie made it very effective. You exited this round theater at the top and the main exhibit hall was a round room around the theater. The outside wall had displays and the space was wide enough that there were displays in the middle of this donut as well. They were text, artifacts, movies, recordings, models, multimedia displays with touch screens, etc. Very modern stuff and very in depth. You could skim it all and get a sense of the various issues that changed our government over years or you could dive into just about any of them in a good deal of depth. Unfortunately I got there late in the day and didn't have much time before they closed, but I very much want to go back there and wander through it. On the way out you go through a room with life sized bronze statues of the signers of the Constitution. It was ok, but next to it was an alcove with an original copy (one of 20) of the Constitution and that's pretty impressive to see. This is a really great modern museum.